November 03, 2004
The Election
The big shocker from yesterday's vote: The idea that a big turnout equals a big Kerry victory turned out to be incorrect.
It would appear that the lower middle/working classes of America, living in ex-urbs, driving hours to work in a gas guzzler, shopping at Wal-Mart and attending the evangelical mega-church on the outskirts of cities large and small, is just as much a forgotten group as the inner city/immigrant/working poor scattered everywhere that the Democrats put at the center of their get-out-the-vote strategy. Bush won his forgotten group bigtime. Until the Democrats and liberals discover how to reach this crowd, there's no hope of resuscitating progressive politics in America.
Tom Frank asked the right question. What is the matter with Kansas? Why when times are rough do so many Americans throughout the heartland turn to God, guns and disgust of gays, pregnant teenagers, the advanced degree crowd and anyone who tries to tell them that melting polar icecaps and traces of arsenic in the water are somehow more important than putting the bible at the center of one's life?
Kerry may yet win Ohio, although the latest numbers suggest all those challenged voters have to break his way for it to happen. The fact is there is no consolation in this fiasco. Bush won a clear majority of the popular vote because in huge swaths of the south, lower midwest, great plains and mountain states, which are the growth areas of this country, the Democrats are not competitive and do not even have a language for appealing to voters there.
Over the next four years, the last remnants of social democracy in America will be challenged and perhaps overturned. The universality of Social Security, Medicare and even the pretext of everyone having health insurance -- the elements of the social contract that remind us that we are in fact one people and have a common responsibility, expressed through the government, to take care of one another -- may be jettisoned.
The only thing I'm sure of is that in the every man for himself world that may come, it is the very people who voted for this administration and a Republican Congress who will fall through the cracks.
One final thought: Bush and the Republican majorities in Congress may not have a chance to move on all the issues listed above. Over the next two months, his administration will have to face the monumental disaster in Iraq. They need more troops on the ground to hold the election they're planning; they need $100 billion in a supplemental appropriation to pay for it; and the military is woefully stretched thin.
Bush and his narrow group of advisers didn't have an exit strategy when they went in. I doubt they've spent the past three months developing one. Indeed, there wasn't much advice offered by the Kerry campaign.
If I were a callous person, I'd say that the one consolation from yesterday's vote is that it's still their quagmire. But that is no consolation at all. Because when it comes to the war, all I can think about is the thousand dead, those dying every day, the tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians and the permanently maimed and scarred. Those are the ultimate victims of George W. Bush's policies. And it is to those issues that I suspect we'll be increasingly paying attention in the weeks and months to come.