Did no-one else spend this summer feeling déjà vu all over again? As I said once to Io, I saw the craggy jaw of John Kerry, windsurfing in his Hawaiian print shorts (for God’s sake, John!), but what I heard was the flabby rhetoric, the deadpan wooden delivery, the absolute robotic lack of charisma of Al Gore.

Kerry had people positively aching to rally behind him. We had, here in Texas:
- people saying the ugliest things imaginable about George II (hey, it wasn’t me who said the man was the Anti-Christ),
- founding members of the ABBA club (yes, that would be Anybody But Bush Again),
- ex-UT sorority sister former Young Republican baby-doll t-shirt-wearing lesbians handing me $500 checks to get out the vote for John Kerry and the Democrats
- an increase in Democratic voter turnout generally, to the point where we damn near took Dallas County (you mean the Dallas where the Bushies have their home congregation – no, they don’t bother with that low-church country bullshit down in Crawford, ‘cause after all those people might as well be Assemblies of God Trash – yes, the biggest, fanciest, wealthiest, liberalist Methodist church in the whole damn town, sitting right smack dab in the middle of a suburb founded pretty blatantly to exclude Jews, not to mention Blacks? That Dallas County? Yes, Virginia, that Dallas County).

In sum, people were streaming out of the woodwork willing to do anything to defeat BushCo. Or, to borrow a phrase from Bonnie Tyler, we needed a hero.

Hell, for awhile there, you could open up the Times pretty much any given day, or even that worthless fishwrap rag the Startlegram and you’d see even goddamn William Safire, not to mention that revaunchist bastion of fuck-everybody-but-the-rich the Wall Street Journal giving advice to Kerry. Jiminy Christmas, people, when William Safire and the Wall Street Journal are giving advice to the Democrats, you know there’s a problem with the current administration.

But what did Kerry do? He futzed around with bullshit about “values.” He bought into pollsters’ lines about how we needed an “upbeat” and “optimistic” message (“help is on the way”). He played nice, because pollsters say that “going negative” turns people off.

Can we pause for a moment? Sign A#1 that pollsters don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground is the idea that “going negative” turns people off. Riiiiiiight. Come down South and I’ll introduce you to some hatemongering motherfuckers who are able to really wow a crowd with a negative message. Willie Horton may not have been “nice” but that shit sure as hell worked. Orvil Faubus had crowds slathering for blood on the steps of Central High. Anita Bryant was the best goddamned thing to happen to the orange juice industry. Would anyone like to recall just why, precisely, John McCain lost the South Carolina primary, or Max Cleland his re-election campaign? “Going negative” turns people off my ass. Karl Rove understands this point. The DLC only sort of gets it, though having them play hardball would not, in my view, change the fundamental problem.

So Kerry played nice, and what was the result? What did the polls show, in the end?

No, it wasn’t that “moral values” swayed the election. Bad pundit! Go back to your data and try again. No martini for you! (more on this later).

What swayed the election, the reason why Bush won, was what we knew from the beginning – a whole lot of people were scared shitless by 9/11, and they were especially scared the further away they lived from ground zero. The only things you need to know – as Io and others have pointed out – is that people who thought the war on terror was issue #1 voted overwhelmingly for Bush, and that some eye-popping percentage of Bush voters systematically ignore, misunderstand, and misinterpret basic points of fact about the war on terror and the war in Iraq. They did so because they lacked the ability – nay, the opportunity – to rationally articulate their fears and to figure out what to do about them. And BushCo exploited this to the hilt, while Kerry fucked around with the “vision” thing.

So, fear – and specifically irrational fear – was what did it. That and maybe Diebold.

Next up: why “values” are simply about holding on to the base.

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Let me start with an anecdote. Because they’re fun, and you can twist them any way you please to make whatever point you want.

I live in a mixed neighborhood. Yeah, I know every liberal likes to say that. But really I do. Really. Almost as mixed as your average block in, say, Midtown, or Oak Park, before they were gentrified by yuppies like my parents. So mixed, in fact, that we had more Kerry/Edwards signs than BushCo. Probably a fifth of the families on my street are black, half are white (and our house is by far at the top of the income scale for the white folks), and the rest are Hispanic. The ratio of owned/rental is probably 60/40.

The folks next door are a very nice mixed-race couple (black wife, Hispanic husband). The wife runs her own business cleaning houses, mostly for local real estate agencies. If she’s incorporated as a legitimate small business I would be surprised. The husband does odd jobs, mostly of the landscaping variety. They rent their two-bedroom, one-bath house.

We have been on friendly, chit-chat terms with both of them since we moved in a few months ago. In fact, we’ve lent them some household stuff (a moving dolly, that kind of thing), and the husband and I have traded gardening tips. The usual suburban shit.

Oh, and for the rest of this story to make sense, keep in mind that I had a Kerry sign in my yard starting in July.

My partner and I threw a party this weekend. We invited all of our neighbors, including the couple from next door. The wife came over in the early afternoon and said a couple of things: (a) that she wouldn’t be able to attend the party because she’s not really a party person, (b) that she was worried about me being a “professor” type and she feels status conscious around me (she didn’t use the phrase “status conscious” but that was the gist – she appeared to be mostly concerned about the idea that all the fancy guests at our party would look out of our dining room window onto their oil-spattered driveway with the random bits of lumber leaning against their house), and (c) that she would like to offer to spiff up our house, or help chop some food for the party.

How thoughtful, right?

My partner and I continued to make small talk, even though (a) we had just cleaned, and (b) we hadn’t gone shopping yet. So part way through the conversation, I pull out a recent piece of mail I got from the local Democratic Party. I showed it to her with the intention of laughing with her about the fact that an “award” they gave me for volunteering had my name crossed out, instead of being underlined (unfortunately this is rather typical of the Keystone Kops operation we have running things around here).

Unfortunately, the conversation took a dire turn at this point.

She started by saying that we would “hate her” because she supported the other guy. Being dumb, I said simply “no worries – everyone is welcome in our home.” She then proceeded to compound the problem by explaining exactly why she supported “the other guy” – that it wasn’t that she didn’t like people who disagreed with her, it’s just that she grew up in the church and so can’t support gay marriage or abortion. She just wants “things to stop changing so fast!” But if “those people” win, well then they won, and she doesn’t hold any hard feelings against them. Because it’s just like if someone came into her home and told her that they didn’t support inter-racial marriage – she would disagree with them, but that was that. For reasons passing understanding, she felt compelled to go on at length (like five minutes) in this vein, touching on such tidbits as (a) her mother is a lesbian who lived with the same “auntie” for much of our neighbor’s childhood, (b) that I somehow understood where she was coming from, and would have to explain this to my partner, who was obviously incensed, and (c) “didn’t we see what she was trying to say?” (this last bit she repeated at least three times)

In sum, no. We did not see what she was trying to say.

Where, oh where, to begin trying to dissect this?

Let me leave aside the fact that I find it intolerably rude to be insulted in my own living room.

Let me focus instead on the simple fact that the whole conversation made no face-value sense. Apart from the status anxiety and the Freudian hang-ups about her childhood, her statements were a tangle of contradictions, to wit: I don’t hate people who think I’m less than they are – therefore you shouldn’t hate me because I think you’re less than I am; I just want things to stop changing, so I’m voting for Bush; opposing gay marriage is just like opposing inter-racial marriage, and so therefore it’s alright for me to be opposed to gay marriage. In attempting to justify her support for Bush, our neighbor couldn’t explain herself. She tried, mightily hard, but she simply could not provide a logical explanation for why she supported George II. And mind you, this is a college-educated woman (Indiana U. of PA, if I’m not mistaken).

This was instructive because it pointed out in a fabulously in-your-face way the utter fallacy of some of the central tenets of democracy. If it means nothing else, democracy requires that individuals know what they want (i.e., that they are rational actors), and that they then vote for what they want by casting their ballot for the candidate who espouses some set of policies that comes closest to what they, the voter, wants. But when what you want makes no sense, or when you cannot even articulate to yourself what you want, then the first premise of voting is absent.

And this is a big, big problem. Because when people don’t know what they want, and when they can’t articulate what they want, then it doesn’t matter what the candidates say. And if it doesn’t matter what the candidates say, then… what the hell is going on?

When people say there is a “cultural divide” between Red and Blue America, this is it. And while on the surface this divide is about “the culture wars” – abortion and gay marriage – that is window dressing – a distraction, really – for a much more basic problem in how people are processing information and then voting on the basis of their self-understood interests.

Next week: Fear and Loathing, or Farce and Tragedy in 2004.

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Caveat #1: I apologize the delay in our usual station programming.

Caveat #2: I usually try to keep my musings to one point, and one point only. But this time I need to work out a slightly more complicated issue in my head. So bear with me. This will have to be a multi-week post.

Caveat #3: In the past I have usually kept my musings to either (a) righteous indignation (In Roma Habitabes, Republicanism as Crack Addiction), or (b) rah, rah us (Pounding the Pavement, Happy to Pay for a Better America). I did this because it was an election year and I needed to rally my own spirits, if nothing else. This post will be neither. What I hope to do here is some back-of-the-coffee-napkin analysis of why our country is so fucked-up politically.

Caveat #4: You’ve probably heard it all before.

So, with those four things out of the way, onward James, and through the park, if you please…

Like nearly all Democrats (and certainly all decent people) for the past two weeks I have been nursing a bitter cocktail of bewilderment, rage, nausea, and depression. And purging this particular mickey may involve my spewing bile all over the place. So if you have a weak stomach, I suggest you avert your gaze. Cause this shit blows chunks.

There will be hours and hours of cogitation and dispute, and acres and acres of memos and blogs dedicated to analyzing this election. Here are my thoughts in sum:

a.) Values, shmalues. Not only do I not think that “values voters” swung this election, but I also think that injecting all political discourse with religious language – as the DLC will almost certainly now propose – is dangerous. Possibly useful, but dangerous.

b.) The election was about rationality and fear. And yes, that means that I as a Blue-state-land born and raised intellectual elite snob am telling a good chunk of the good people of Red-state-land that they are sheep. Not all, mind you, but a damned site good many of them. Awww, don’t like the implication that you’re dumb? Then wise up to fact that the George the shepard is preparing you for sacrifice and stop following his crooked crozier.

c.) What failed the Democrats in this election is that, over time, we have fewer and smaller networks to mobilize. This particular point is finally starting to get some airplay (David Shuster, for instance), but not nearly enough. There are many ways to cut this theoretical pie, but the Democrats’ failure to mobilize the grass-roots – or more specifically, the failure to fertilize and cultivate the grass-roots in preparation for harvest at election time – explains:
i. Why people seem to think this election was about values
ii. Why this election was in fact about fear (of terrorism, primarily, but maybe in a weird way about social change more generally)
iii. Why the Democrats were caught flat-footed on Election Day.
iv. Why we may not be winning any elections on the national level – or at least not for the right reasons – anytime soon. Nor recovering a majority in Congress. As in, certainly not by 2006, and probably not until at least 2016 (and that’s if we do what we should and start building now).
v. By the by, it also helps to explain the anomaly of Bill Clinton’s victories in 1992 and 1996.

d.) Because the problem is a lack of networks, we need to be about building them. I propose the following:
i. Liberal churches
ii. Affiliate memberships in the AFL-CIO
iii. The further institutionalization of a network of “Liberal Clubs,” possibly on the detritus of the Dean Campaign/MoveOn complex.

e.) Note for those paying attention (both of you): yes, I’m riding an Arendtian intellectual hobbyhorse here. But like the child in “Rocking Horse Winner,” I’m doing it only because Mummy Hilary and Daddy Johnny have been too busy entertaining their own shabby-gentile illusions to pay attention to the collapse of the House of Liberalism. Which leaves poor little old me frightened, confused, and whacking away (at the keyboard!) by my lonesome.

Next week: facing the irrational voter in my own living room.

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