The North Coast times-eagle., January 01, 2005, Page 6, Image 6

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MAKING SENSE OF THE 2004 ELECTION
BY DAVID A. HOROWITZ
It is possible to play with post-election figures and find
degrees of comfort for Democrats For example, John Kerry
won a majority of those whose annual family income was under
$50,000 and George Bush a majority of those with earnings over
that. Yet while Democrats might be comforted by the fact that
Republicans took nearly two/thirds of those whose family income
exceeded $200,000, Kerry scored only 1% higher in the crucial
Democratic $30,000-$50,000 working class constituency
Another cause for potential hope lies in the Electoral
College map If Kerry had taken three western states with rising
Latino voting populations — New Mexico (5 electoral votes),
Nevada (5 votes), and Colorado (9 votes), he would have won
the election with 271 electoral votes. In New Mexico, with a
42% Hispanic population, Bush squeezed out a narrow 51 %-
49% victory. In Nevada, the President also prevailed by two
points In Colorado, where Latinos comprise nearly one/fifth the
state’s people, Bush won by a slightly larger 52%-47% margin.
Unfortunately for Democrats, there are two drawbacks
to these figures. First, a change of a few percentage points in
three modestly populated western states might have given the
blues an Electoral College victory but would not have subtracted
much from the 3.5 million plurality Bush won in the popular vote,
thereby producing a major problem of legitimacy for a Kerry
Presidency. (Gore’s plurality in 2000 was only a half-million.)
Second, and more crucial to this discussion, Kerry lost these
states because he failed to score better among Latinos. In New
Mexico, the President increased his share of 2000 Hispanic vote
by 12%; nationwide, the Republican portion of the Hispanic vote
jumped from 35% to 44%.
Democrats conceivably could find reassuring trends
among centrists and youth. Fifty-four percent of those calling
themselves “moderates" voted for Kerry, who also did well
among independents. The senator won 54% of 18-29 year-olds,
6% better than Gore. In addition, 4.5 million young people were
new voters. In fact, the percentage of eligible young voters cast­
ing ballots jumped 9% from 2000 to 52%, although participation
for all age groups surpassed 60% in 2004.
The problem for Kerry supporters was that Republican
organizers matched them or better in their own get-out-the-vote
efforts. Accordingly, young voters were no greater a percentage
of the voting pool — 17% — than they had been in 2000. Demo­
crats must also be disappointed in their failure to take advantage
of discontent over the Iraq War. In battleground Ohio, exit polls
were split right down the middle on the advisability of going to
war. As pundits have suggested, Bush may have won re-election
despite the conflict in Iraq, not because of it.
As the White House claims a mandate to make tax cuts
permanent, to push domestic energy development and Alaska
oil drilling, to cap medical malpractice awards and curb class-
action litigation, to privatize portions of Social Security, to tie
senior prescription drug benefits to private insurance, and to
appoint social and fiscal conservatives to bench, Democrats
are on the defensive and are asking how they lost the country
amidst a controversial war and a sputtering economy. Was
the Bush victory a predictable result of a wartime President
who benefited from the lack of a terrorist attack after 9/11? Are
Democrats fatally perceived as being weak on national security?
Has the Party lost its popular base by conceding the South, rural
Midwest, and Southwest? Is the Democratic Party simply on the
wrong side of the cultural divide?
A good deal of recent speculation revolves around the
electoral significance of moral values — one/fifth of voters told
exit-pollsters that social morality was more important to them
than the war on terrorism, the Iraq conflict, or the economy, and
four/fifths of them went for Bush. Although little changed from
2000, over 60% of weekly churchgoers, 58% of Protestants, and
three/quarters of white Christian evangelicals voted red. The
press has concluded that many Americans liked the President’s
statements that his faith impacts public policy and saw his stand
on such issues as abortion, stem-cell research, and same-sex
marriage as the qualities of a strong leader, the personal quality
most often cited by voters in states like Michigan (28%) and
Ohio (27%) as the most important basis of their Presidential
choice.
Much of the speculation over social morality focuses on
the central role of Christian evangelicals, who are estimated to
be between 25% and 42% of the national population. Admittedly
10% or more of “born-again” believers may be African-American
and Democrats actually win at least a fifth of the vote of white
evangelicals. Because leaders of the Christian Right are so well-
organized and consistently on message, moreover, it is easy to
overestimate their influence. Yet there is no getting beyond the
fact that conservative issues of social morality seems to be
framing the political debate and drawing in swing voters. Both
Republican success with Hispanics and white, middle-class,
suburbanites (Bush won a healthy majority of the married vote)
point to the importance of these issues. If Democrats hope to
recapture the country, they must deal with the foundations of
these social attitudes and come up with responses that speak
to voters while expanding upon their own values.
As Tom Frank and other political commentators have
suggested, conservatives have fashioned an American culture
war that pictures a liberal overclass ignoring mainstream values
and traditions and imposing its own agenda on an amoral
education system, permissive courts, condescending media,
and debased public culture. Part of the problem, insists Frank,
is that the modern Democratic Party has tied its fate to the
cosmopolitan professional classes whose cultural influence often
seems elitist In my view, the salience of the wedge issues of
abortion and same-sex marriage lies in the perceived threats to
the besieged family represented by modern mass culture Frank
has argued that conservative backlash morality is essentially
rhetorical in that it offers little possibility of enacting actual policy
on issues such as abortion, prayer in the schools, or licentious
entertainment What seems evident, however, is that George
W. Bush’s symbolic defense of “family values" was extremely
reassuring to many middle-class parents concerned about the
upbringing of their children in an aggressive consumer culture.
Rather than concerns over the economy, health care, Social
Security, or foreign policy, these Americans seem to be thinking
of social morality when they tell pollsters that the country is
going in the “wrong" direction.
Tom Frank has insisted that Democrats must confront
the contradictions of a conservative populism that refuses to
see popular culture as a creature of corporate America and that
portrays business as separate from politics. Republicans can
use culture war to frame the issues of social class, says Frank,
lecause globalizing, free-market, culturally progressive Demo­
ats have stripped class of its economic content Accordingly,
he calls for a reassertion of economic populism in which the
party returns to its former base by addressing consequences of
economic conservatism such as lower wages, more dangerous
jobs, outsourcing, new overtime rules, poor health insurance,
coercive management, and environmental and workplace
pollution.
At the same time, critics like former Kerry speechwriter
Andrei Cherny have pointed out that Democrats must go beyond
policies and programs and attacks on Republican personalities
and failures and must articulate their own vision and view of the
world. What is the progressive approach globalization? What
long-range plan for national security can Democrats articulate
that deals realistically and effectively with the threat of terrorism?
How can the Party respond to the moral and spiritual yearnings
and desires for decision-making power among large numbers of
Americans?
Political consultant and linguist George Lakoff believes
that Democrats must frame their values into an appropriate
political message. In contrast to the “strict-father” metaphor of
conservatism, suggests Lakoff, the progressive frame is based
on a nurturing family of empathy and responsibility that shares
unconditional love. These preferences, he insists, coincide with
mainstream American values such as freedom, fairness, human
dignity, and equality under the law. Lakoff suggests that Demo-
crats learn to articulate their vision of the country as a caring,
responsible family whose common inheritance must be used for
the public good.
Observers like Cherny, Lakoff, Frank, and Paul Krug-
man insist that Democrats can keep their core values but learn
to articulate them within the national discourse. What of the
sensitive wedge issues? Hefty majorities actually support
Roe v Wade, stem-cell research, and civil unions for same-sex
couples. But Democrats can legitimize their position on these
matters by more clearly defining the “health of the mother”
limitation on partial-birth procedures, being more sensitive
to the demand for parental consent for juvenile abortions,
acknowledging the need for strict regulation of stem-cell use,
and demonstrating that the recognition of full legal equality for
gays and lesbians is not meant to ridicule the religious views
and traditions of a majority of the population.
Whether in politics or academia, I suggest that people
of reason learn to reach beyond themselves and come to terms
with an America that certainly needs their input.
David Horowitz teachs U S. history at Portland State
University. He is the author of numerous books, which includes
America's Political Class: The 20th Century's Great Culture War.
UNFIT FOR COMMAND
BY E. ROBERT NASSIKAS
The smoke has finally cleared and the dust has settled
from the sturm and drang of the elections. Some call the results
a mandate for the re-elected President Bush — a claim made by
at least many of the Republicans. On the other hand, the Demo­
crats and Kerry supporters scoff at that idea and point to the fact
that the vote percentage difference was just 51-49, representing
a mere three-and-a-half million votes. Democrats also point out
that a few thousand votes in certain key states, including the
main battleground of Ohio, could have made the difference and
put Kerry in the White House. Whatever, it's all over and Presi­
dent Bush stays put and the nation wonders what will happen
now.
A blanket of gloom and doom lies heavily on the
Democrats. Many psychiatrists have reported that they have
been contacted to form support groups to combat stress
syndrome. A tragic story comes from 9/11 Ground Zero where
one depressed Kerry voter committed suicide. As far as I can
perceive, the anti-Bush forces — Kerry supporters, Democrats
and the legion of Bush-haters — are fervently hoping for a
complete national disaster notwithstanding that would mean
disaster for the nation as a whole. Then they would be able to
stand back and smugly say: “Well, don’t blame it on me — I
voted for Kerry."
Newspapers and television programs have been flooded
with analyses of what happened. It appears that Bush and his
campaign strategists have several elements to thank for their
victory. A large helping of credit must certainly be awarded to
the Swift Boat Vets for Truth, comprised of over 250 military
veterans of the Vietnam War, who got together and told some
rather incriminating stories about Kerry’s four-month tour in
Vietnam. Coordinating this movement — actually spearheading
it — was a book, Unfit For Command authored by John O’Neill
and Jerome Cursi, both of whom were Vietnam War veterans
and they, as well as the above mentioned 250 vets were in a
position to have either seen or heard, firsthand, about Kerry's
combat exploits, which apparently were a far cry from how he
presented them. Kerry, himself, instigated this movement when
he came on to the Democratic National Convention, snapped a
military salute and announced: “My name is John Kerry, and
I’m reporting for duty.” In doing so, he alluded, of course, to his
Vietnam service.
Kerry and his brain trust apparently though, his combat
experiences would carry him to victory. But, as it turned out, he
opened a lid that, for his sake, should have been kept closed. It
actually backfired on him. There are still questions as to his full
military records which, amazingly, he has no, ye, allowed to be
revealed.
Also among the top honors for helping Bush win was
Michael Moore’s vicious propaganda movie, Fahrenheit 9/11.
That movie, said many Kerry supporters, was going to devastate
the President But even one of the nation’s most ardent Demo­
crats, former New York Mayor Ed Koch, called i, a collection of
lies and misleading half-,ruths. It appears as if ordinary, middle-
Americans had the good sense to consider the source — a
vicious, though admittedly talented, Bush-ha,emonger.
The so-called “Mainstream Media,” led by formerly
respected newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Oregon­
ian, and many others joined in with the heavy hitters among the
television networks — CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, National Public
Television, to name a few — to unremittingly criticize the Presi­
dent, frequently playing fast and loose with the truth. Which of
course brings us to Dan Rather, an avowed Bush-hater, who
pushed through a CBS documentary purporting to show that
Bush’s National Guard career left a lot to be desired. It was
quickly revealed by online “bloggers” that Rather’s expose was a
fraud and evidence shows quite clearly that he and his producer
were aware of that fact but, obviously in an effort to slime the
President, they aired it regardless. This, neither, was lost on the
average American who I’m sure became incensed at this unfair,
fraudulent attempt to besmirch Bush.
Bu, the fact of the matter is the number one failing of
the Democratic Party Presidential campaign was the candidate
himself — John F. Kerry.
Let’s face it, Kerry was the worst of a bad lot. Looking at
the lineup of Democratic Presidential hopefuls as the primaries
began, there was very little to choose from — John Edwards,
Howard Dean (he of the primal shriek), Joe Lieberman (arguably
the best of a bad lot), Al Sharpton(no explanation needed there),
Richard Gephardt (a better choice than Kerry), and a general
who came ou, of nowhere and returned there rather quickly.
Kerry tried to delude the nation that he could do every­
thing better than President Bush. He didn’t know what or how,
bu, it was just easy to say that. His best, or most notable state­
ment was: “I voted for it before I voted against it" — referring to
funding the military in Iraq. He was quickly labeled Senator Flip-
Flop. There was the unfortunate (for him and his team) remark
he made when he was being feted by many of the Hollywood
glitterati a, a New York City rally, following a string of lewd
jabber by Whoopie Goldberg who referred to President Bush
with crude and obscene gestures. Kerry stood up and referred
to this collection of show biz riffraff as — unbelievably — ‘ The
heart and soul o f America.'' I strongly believe the real heart and
soul of America, the average wage earner — those who work
eight hours a day, five days a week — heard this and stored
away a strong resentment, keeping it until the moment of truth,
November 4. Then they voted as the authentic “heart and soul
of America" — more than 60 million of them.
That number of votes were the most ever cast for any
President in U S. history. And I venture to say that most of those
who cast their votes for Kerry were actually voting against Bush,
disgruntled Democrats who were tired of being on the outside
and simply wanted to see a Democrat in the White House. The
previous Democrat there proved to be a shameless disgrace
who polluted that sacrosanct building and was impeached for
his troubles And the Democrat before him was a complete and
comical failure — a national disaster.
Maybe Kerry will try again in 2008 Hopefully, assuming
he stays a U S. Senator, he will accomplish something useful
or constructive unlike his firs, 20 years when he was a “ghost
senator," never heard from nor seen. For the good of the nation,
however, I hope he chooses to retire, go windsurfing and spend
some of his wife's billion dollars.
Robert Nassikas lives in Astoria and writes letters to the
Daily Astorian. He provides his assessment of the 2004 election
to balance the resolutely contrarian views presented in this issue
oftheNCTE.