Four more long years

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Four more long years

So, it’s four more years – if we’re lucky – of the Smirking Chimp and puppeteer Doomsday Man. And Rove and Wolfowitz and Scalia forever as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And Iraq, of course, and maybe Iran and Syria or Cuba if we’re lucky. And Mt. Rushmorian deficits and debts.

And values. Oh, there will be values galore. In fact, we have one new senator, named De Mint, from South Carolina who thinks that unwed mothers and all gays should be sent to the tar pits – or at least that they should never darken the door of a schoolroom.

Another new senatorial loon, Coburn of Oklahoma (where else?), is allegedly a doctor who spent his whole campaign ferreting out Lesbians in the bathrooms of Oklahoma high schools. And not far behind him is loony-tunes Thune who dumped the wimpish Daschle of South Dakota by outquoting him when it came to biblical strictures.

So values there will be, as long as you realize that values are restricted to homophobia, anti-abortion tactics, sucking on the barrels of guns and offering up prayers all day in public school classrooms.

Values do not encumber lying presidents or involve the slaughter of innocents in Iraq. Nor do they prohibit the replacement of real science with biblicalism and religious twaddle. Or fancy deals for Halliburton or making the rich richer while the poor are working three jobs a day to keep their families afloat. Or offering amazingly clever health care coverage for senators and congresspeople while 45 million Americans have no coverage at all.

As the London Daily Mirror headlined on the day after the election: “How can 58 million people be so dumb?”

Perhaps a better question is: “How could the Democrats be so dumb?”

Turns out that for some reason Mr. Electable wasn’t so electable after all. That he and his cronies ran a lousy campaign is putting it mildly. But the problems go deeper than that.

The fact is that the Democrats have no persona. They have no focus, they have no strong beliefs about anything (that they’re willing to admit, anyway) and, as a result, they ran a campaign that was literally reactionary in every respect. Day after day Kerry found himself responding to charges made by Bush and the 527s bringing up his rear. Pinning his whole initial campaign on his service in Vietnam, Kerry and his team, with total lack of foresight, stupidly invited scrutiny of his albeit laudable anti-Vietnam protest days. As a result, negativity ruled the roost and put Kerry constantly on the defensive.

He was, in every respect, a flip-flopper.

The result is that now the Democratic pundits are mentally meandering all over the pasture in search of an answer to their dilemma. As usual, their first reaction is to counsel further movement to the center, if not the right. We’ve got to understand the “values” people, they say. Yet this is what got them in trouble in the first place, as they left their base in the lurch and drifted away from whatever core principles they had. Understanding the “values” people in this election is simply recognizing the fact that the Republicans and their far right outwitted the Democrats by getting anti-gay marriage amendments on the ballots of 11 states. This not only brought out their evangelical supporters in record numbers, but automatically associated Republicanism with “values” in the minds of voters in those states.

Furthermore, the Democrats, relying solely on blue state support in New England, the upper Midwest and the West coast, kissed the South and Plains states goodbye and offered not a campaign morsel to any one of them. Yet unemployment and job losses are just as rampant in these red states as they are anywhere else. As Howard Dean said early in his campaign, unless the Democrats can convince the NASCAR guys and trailer park moms that they have a better economic plan than the rich-get-richer Republicans, they simply won’t win the presidency. But the Democrats didn’t even make a stab at it.

In addition, people in the South are just as interested in keeping Social Security and Medicare afloat – as well as comprehensive health care – as New Englanders are. Or Californians. Yet not a word about that either.

Bubba Clinton knew that. Goose-shooting, wind-surfing Kerry did not.

So, let’s not talk about moving farther to the right. They tried that, and it didn’t work. We already have a party on the right, which may just self-destruct if it loads its cannons with anymore cow pie “values” fodder like the holy bloviators mentioned above.

Rather, let’s get back to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, reconfigure the all-over-the-map, reactionary persona the Democrats have now and stick like glue to postures and programs that have made the Democratic Party the party of the people.

But most importantly, let there be a strong voice for Democratic values. Let there be no fear of or compromise with Republicanism and its apparent ability to lure voters with magnificent snow jobs and threats of nuclear disasters in Cleveland.

The Democrats might begin their trek back by dumping Harry Reid, the heir apparent to Daschle, as minority leader. Why on earth would you place in such a position an anti-gay, anti-abortion, mining corporation-loving milquetoast? And why is Nancy Pelosi blathering about “working with the Republicans” to make our country safer? How stupidly suicidal can the gutless Democrats get?

Which brings us back, I suppose, to the Daily Mirror.

November 9, 2004