No Surrender
No Surrender
By Paul Krugman
Published: November 5, 2004
President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.
Democrats are now, understandably, engaged in self-examination. But while it's O.K. to think things over, those who abhor the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country must maintain their intensity; they must not succumb to defeatism.
This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.
I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.
Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that's what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, "We've got to close the cultural gap." But that's a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn't be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats - who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents - need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.
In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.
We're not giving up the fight Mr. Krugman... we know what is at stake!
By Paul Krugman
Published: November 5, 2004
President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.
Democrats are now, understandably, engaged in self-examination. But while it's O.K. to think things over, those who abhor the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country must maintain their intensity; they must not succumb to defeatism.
This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.
I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.
Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that's what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, "We've got to close the cultural gap." But that's a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn't be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats - who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents - need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.
In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.
We're not giving up the fight Mr. Krugman... we know what is at stake!
posted by Pamela J. Leavey at 1:11 AM
3 Comments:
Why We Lost
By ANDREI CHERNY
Published: November 5, 2004
ashington
On Wednesday morning, Democrats across the country awoke to a situation they have not experienced since before the New Deal: We are now, without a doubt, America's minority party. We do not have the presidency. We are outnumbered in the Senate, the House, governorships and legislatures. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court seems likely to be locked in place for a generation. It is clearly a moment that calls for serious reflection.
I had the honor of working for both Al Gore and John Kerry. I believe America would have been fortunate to have had them in the Oval Office. That neither won is not primarily a commentary on them. Nor were their defeats really the result of the mistakes, attacks and tactics that pundits are so endlessly fascinated by: Al Gore's sighs in debates or John Kerry's slow response to the Swift boat veterans; Bill Clinton's campaigning (or lack thereof) in 2000 and 2004; the handling of the Elián González and Mary Cheney controversies. Any time Democrats spend in the coming weeks discussing the merits of our past candidates' personalities or their campaigns' personnel will be time wasted.
The overarching problem Democrats have today is the lack of a clear sense of what the party stands for. For years this has been a source of annoyance for bloggers and grass-roots activists. And in my time working for Al Gore and John Kerry, it certainly left me feeling hamstrung.
Democrats have a collection of policy positions that are sensible and right. John Kerry made this very clear. What we don't have, and what we sorely need, is what President George H. W. Bush so famously derided as "the vision thing" - a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats had a bold vision: we would use government programs to make Americans' lives more stable and secure. In 1996, President Clinton told us this age had passed, that "the era of big government is over." He was right - the world had changed. But the party has not answered the basic question: What comes next?
It's not the sort of question that gets answered in the heat of a national election. A presidential campaign feels like running full speed across a tightrope. If you're working on its message, you spend your days sitting around conference tables in poorly lighted rooms, surrounded by spent pizza boxes and buzzing Blackberries, with the clock ticking down on another day and another speech. This is not the place to devise a new thematic direction for the party. What you wind up offering are quips and quibbles, slogans and sound bites, and heaping portions of poll-tested pabulum.
The press also seems to overstate what staff changes can do within a campaign. Much was made of the "who's in, who's out" reports about the Kerry team, with reporters devising narratives about a supposed "shift to the middle" or a "lurch to the left." While new advisers can alter tactics and form new messages, efforts on their part to create a larger vision will fail. That has to happen long before the primaries - and it requires that the party knows where it is going.
Throughout the campaign, voters told reporters and pollsters that they wanted a change, but didn't "know what John Kerry stands for." Our response was to churn out more speeches outlining the details of policies that Senator Kerry would then deliver in front of a backdrop that said something like "Rx to Stronger Health Care." Of course, it turned out that Americans weren't very interested in Mr. Kerry's campaign promises - perhaps because they no longer believe politicians will follow through on their commitments. They wanted to know instead how he saw the world. And we never told them.
Misguided as they may be, the Republicans have a clear vision of America's future. Confronted with their ambitious agenda we have not chosen to match it. Instead, we have adopted Nancy Reagan's old antidrug motto, "Just Say No." As in "Stop George Bush's Assault on the Environment," "Repeal George Bush's Tax Cuts for the Wealthy" and "End George Bush's Policy of Unilateralism." These are good stands. But they are not enough. And the Republicans ended up defining John Kerry because we did not.
I don't pretend to know exactly what the party should do now. But I do know that we better start answering some important questions. What is our economic vision in a globalized world? How do we respond to the desire of many Americans to have choices and decision-making power of their own? How can we speak to Americans' moral and spiritual yearnings? How can our national security vision be broader than just a critique of the Republican's foreign policy? If we sweep this debate under the rug, four years from now another set of people around another conference table will be struggling with the same issues we did. And America cannot afford the same result.
Long after midnight in November 2000, I stood in the rain in Nashville and listened to the Gore campaign chairman, William Daley, tell us there would be no victory speech. On Wednesday, long after midnight, I stood in the rain in Boston listening to John Edwards tell us the same thing. I'm sick of standing in the rain.
Andrei Cherny, the author of "The Next Deal," was director of speechwriting and a special policy adviser to John Kerry from February 2003 to last April.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/opinion/05cherny.html
Pamela I agree with all you have said but I'm convinced that the dems will not be reelected until it is tragically evident to the american people how disatrous Bush's policies have been and the incredible damage he will do to our country in the next 4 yrs. Only then, will Bush and the repubs be exposed with no place to hide. They now have control of our government Executive,Legislative and judicial. They will have noone to blame. And America WILL hold them accountable.
Keep the faith
Bryan
http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/
Strategy Notes:
John Belisarius
The Democrats Didn’t Lose in this Election, They Won
That’s right, they won.
And they won big.
No, it’s not just that Dems came within 3% of winning a very tough election. That alone is a very real and important accomplishment, but it’s not the key.
The real point is that if the Democrats are serious about the long-tem goal of building a broad and enduring democratic majority then getting 51% of the vote is not always the right test of a particular campaign’s success. Sometimes you have to lose an election to build the foundation for later victory.
Just ask the Conservative Republicans. They can recite you this lesson by heart. In every glowing account they write of their gradual rise to power they always point to Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 campaign and Ronald Reagan’s 1976 bid for the Presidency (which did not get beyond the Republican primaries) as the pivotal campaigns that laid the foundations for all their subsequent victories.
And when you look at it from this point of view, the true scope, the genuinely impressive magnitude of the Democrats’ success this year can be expressed in a single sentence: In 2004 the Dems accomplished in 8 months what it took the Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement over a decade to achieve.
Last December, the Democratic party was internally divided, unsure about its message, uncertain how to talk about war and foreign affairs, financially dependent on donations from corporations and affluent donors and only beginning to build a grass-roots voter mobilization campaign. There was great anger and energy among the party’s core supporters, but it seemed extremely unlikely that the party as a whole would be able to agree upon a message, unite around a candidate and mount a serious challenge to a personally popular wartime president whose approval ratings hovered close to 60%.
Yet, by the time John Kerry addressed the Democratic convention in July, he was leading a political party that had become firmly united, was supported by new and powerful grass-roots mechanisms for fund raising and internet organizing (pioneered by Howard Dean and his supporters) and which was building a new voter mobilization network that was reconnecting the party with its political base.
Kerry and Edwards then provided the Democratic Party with a politically viable moderate-progressive message - one that had been eluding the party for years. In foreign affairs it combined basic patriotism and support for the troops with brutally sharp and honest criticism of the Administration’s disastrous foreign policy. In domestic affairs, it combined a cautious but sincere economic populism with greater fiscal responsibility then the Republican administration.
This political platform was sufficiently compelling to convince a large majority of those who watched the presidential debates that Kerry, not Bush, had been the victor of all three exchanges and to win him the support of a substantial majority of moderate and independent voters as well as his Democratic base.
Had the 2004 campaign halted at this point, the Kerry-Edwards campaign would have already accomplished more then the Goldwater-Reagan Republicans did from 1964 to 1976, but the campaign then pushed on to come within 3% of victory and a solid majority.
Sure, it was disappointing not to be able to snag those last few points, and the disappointment was compounded by the widespread feeling of optimism that lasted until the very last moments of election night.
But there is a vast difference between a vibrant and compelling campaign that doesn’t quite make it over the top and a campaign that is fundamentally a failure. The Dems have had more then a few of the latter kind, but 2004 wasn’t one of them.
“But we did worse then we did in 2000” people say, “We’re going backward, not forward”.
Nonsense. The truth is that in presidential elections the Democrats have basically been a minority party since 1968, when George Wallace cut deeply into the Dems blue-collar support in Michigan and the other industrial states as well as the South. In 1972, when the Republicans played the “Real Majority” vs. the “Elitists” game against the Dems for the first time, Nixon got 60% of the vote to McGovern’s 37%. Carter won a narrow victory in 1976 but look at the record since then.
1980 Jimmy Carter 41% vs. Reagan+Anderson 57%
1984 Walter Mondale 41% vs. Reagan 59%
1988 Michael Dukakis 46% vs. Bush Sr. 53%
1992 Bill Clinton 43% vs Bush+Perot 56%
Democrats never got anywhere even close to 50% of the vote until Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996 (Clinton 49%, Dole/Perot 49%) and Gore’s 2000 run (Gore 48%, Bush 48%).
But in both of these latter campaigns the Democrats were running as incumbents or former Vice-Presidents, not as challengers. 2004 was the first time a Democrat ran as a challenger in more then a decade and Kerry faced a President who had, at the outset, high approval ratings, the patriotic fervor of an apparently successful war behind him, the overt support of one of the major TV networks, and the most extensive grass-roots voter mobilization the Republican Party had ever fielded.
And yet Kerry and Edwards came closer to unseating their opponent and closer to winning 50% of the vote then had any Democratic challengers in the last three decades.
A campaign like this simply can’t be considered a failure even by narrow electoral standards and the intangible benefits make it even less so. This political campaign made rank and file Democrats from every section of the party feel proud to be Democrats in a way they have not felt in decades. It displayed Democratic candidates who were decent, thoughtful and honorable men and offered a set of policies and positions that a wide range of Americans could accept as a solid framework and point of departure for the future. It showcased a political party that was systematically building the foundations for its future victory.
So shake off the disappointment and feel the sense of pride and accomplishment you deserve to feel instead.
The Dems lost an election. OK, it happens.
But the Dems haven’t been defeated, not at all.
They’ve just been slowed down.
Posted by EDM Staff at 11:49 PM | link | Comments (17)
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