Posted on 11/06/2004 9:59:14 AM PST by Former Military Chick
Soul-searching on the left ... and a softening of the right?
Question: which leading Democratic senator was the big loser in Tuesday's American election? Answer: Hillary Rodham Clinton. No one predicted that result. On the contrary, conventional wisdom held that if John Kerry lost the 2004 contest, it could only be good for Ms Clinton. With no Democrat in the White House destined to seek re-election, the path would be clear for a bid of her own in 2008. And yet, far from igniting the Clinton '08 campaign, Tuesday's result may have snuffed it out at birth. For the post-election analysis has revealed that a key factor in Kerry's defeat was a problem for which Hillary Clinton could never be the solution.
Asked what single factor played the chief role in determining their choice, some voters cited terrorism, Iraq or the economy - but the greatest number picked "moral values".
Translation: faith, flag and family. Cruder translation: God, guns and gays. These are the social, cultural questions that mattered to millions of Americans more than jobs, healthcare or an ongoing war. And this group simply felt George Bush shared their core values while John Kerry did not.
It goes deeper than a policy difference. To these conservatives, Kerry seemed to inhabit a different culture. His own advisers confessed one of their greatest regrets was allowing the senator to be photographed windsurfing - a sport of the jet-set elite, rather than the average Joe. Meanwhile Bush - the son of a president and the scion of a New England political dynasty - came on as a man from the heartland: jeans and cowboy hat, complete with a stay-at-home wife who wouldn't look out of place if air-dropped into the 50s. Voters said they felt comfortable with Bush even if they disagreed with him; they said he was like them.
This leaves a twin challenge for the Democrats if they are ever to win back power. They need to reconnect with those cultural conservatives, the millions of Americans living in states that turned the map red on Tuesday, in both their values and their way of life. New York senator Hillary Clinton, lawyer, arch-liberal and feminist, could never hope to make that connection. She is every bit as "coastal" - remote from the rural heartland - as Kerry.
So Democrats will have to find a candidate who, at the very least, can get a hearing from this vast slice of the electorate. A look at the map, and past experience, suggests it will most likely be a southerner, comfortable speaking about faith. After all, the only Democrats elected in the past 35 years were Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both southern Baptists. (Expect some early interest in Mark Warner, the charismatic Democratic governor of Virginia.)
Finding a messenger is the easy bit. Adjusting the message will be harder. It starts with a long, cold look at the numbers. Nearly one in four of Tuesday's voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians: of those, nearly 80% went for Bush. The president won thumping majorities of all Protestant and Catholic voters. Almost the only religious group that went for Kerry, by three to one, were Jews - who make up just 3% of the electorate.
No party that wants power in America can afford to cede this vast demographic - white Christians - to their opponents. Democrats have to learn to speak to them anew.
One immediate suggestion, from Bill Clinton's former labour secretary Robert Reich, is to eschew Kerry's technocratic talk, of plans and policies, in favour of the language of morality. Reich believes Democrats can frame left or liberal arguments in terms that will stir people of faith. The party would thunder that it is morally wrong to give tax breaks to the wealthiest; that it is a moral outrage the worst-off are not covered when they fall sick. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, Reich recalls, presented itself precisely this way, as a religious crusade. Martin Luther King was a churchman.
Black Christians have never stopped talking about poverty and injustice in religious terms; now other Democrats may have to follow. America is a religious nation: tapping into morality is not just smart - it is essential.
But that still leaves the stubborn heart of the problem. What are Democrats to do with the fact that, on some questions, their own deeply held values simply clash with those of the emerging conservative majority?
Here the Democrats of 2004 might look to the Labour party of 1983. The beating Labour took that year began a long, painful process of realisation that the party's traditional economic socialism was out of step with the British people. Over the next 14 years, it dropped what had once been a defining set of beliefs in order to persuade Britons that Labour was not alien, but saw the world the way they did.
Should Democrats now embark on a similar process, changing their stance on abortion or gay rights or guns? Most would balk at the very thought: if they did that, they would surely cease to be themselves. Besides, why would "red state" Americans vote for Republicanism Lite when they could have the real thing?
Even so, change will have to come. Democrats might have to stake out new positions on these divisive questions, positions that, while still liberal, nudge the party closer to the mainstream. Take gay rights. Many, perhaps most, Americans would now say they favour equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals. But most draw the line at gay marriage, regarding that as a step too far. On abortion, even those who support a woman's right to choose find late-term, "partial-birth" terminations too much to tolerate. On these and other questions, Democrats may have to meet their fellow Americans halfway.
They have made these shifts before. Michael Dukakis was rejected in 1988 in part because he opposed capital punishment. Four years later Bill Clinton took the opposite line - and he won the White House, twice.
Of course, there are some principles that the party could not and should not abandon. Here the Democrats will have to do the toughest job of all: change people's minds. What Tuesday proved is how mammoth a task that will be.
freedland@guardian.co.uk
Yes, I have been known to vote for a democrat on the local level. Don't yell at me for that. As a military family we always seem to be thrown into a new political venue that if were lived there the whole time, perhaps there would be a viable republican but it hasn't been so in the past.
The author says adusting their message will be the hard part. That's just the problem. Republicans don't have to "adjust" their message. Democrats need to lie about who they are and what they believe.
The party that needs to adjust their message doesn't deserve to win.
"They have made these shifts before. Michael Dukakis was rejected in 1988 in part because he opposed capital punishment"
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG
Dukakis was a doctrinaire Marxist, and the RNC finally came up with Dukakis's statements to that effect.
Amazingly this article from the Guardian is one of the best post-mortems I've read. I love the way Hillary! is dissed and dismissed by the author.
It is true liberalism was dealt a severe blow this election, we all knew how important it was for that to happen.
If so, maybe they should reconsider writing anything about America or politics for a while. There are bound to be other subjects they don't know anything about that they could tend to.
The dems will never succeed again unless they stop being a party of socialists. But how can they stop? That's who they are. Fifty years ago they had some extreme lefties in their ranks, but basically they were for the unions, for the "working stiff," for the minorities who were "out" while the fat cats were "in." Even with their messed-up economic ideas they were strongly pro-American. But when you're tied to that "poor versus rich" mentality, it's a really slippery slope to hard core socialism, which is how they ended up where they are. I don't see how, as a party, they can ever come back.
They'll have to go with Evan Bayh to be listened to.
The problem the Democrats face in trying to steer their party to the center is that the bulk of their supporters are liberals. Are the hardcore libs going to stand by and let the party hacks moderate the Democratic view on issues such as guns, abortion, taxes, and national defense. No way. That will start a civil war in that party. Not that I would be complaining. Can you imagine a pro-life, pro-gun, tax-cut supporting, defense hawk winning the Democratic nomination? Of course not, but that is the kind of leader that the majority of Americans chose to reelect last Tuesday. Unless the Dems can find another slick operator like Bill Clinton, who can hide his liberalism by feinting moderation on some issues, it looks like they'll have a hard time winning the presidency for maybe a generation or longer.
This is their plan? HAHAHA! This is still the old one.
Even if Hillary runs in 06, she will lose. The party is gone off the deep end.
We'll witness the return of Halley's Comet in 2061 before they figure out their morals problem.
I wish you were right, but unfortunatley 49% of voting Americans actually *do* buy what they are selling.
It is amazing to me that this writer seriously postulates a leopard can change his spots. Atheists should posture as Believers to win votes and that is okay with him??
"Democrats will never be a national power until they take their party back from the liberals."
This grunting and groaning by the left is a farce. They already have a comprehensive, sympathetic and accurate analysis of the problem, and a set of solutions all laid out.
It's in a book by Zell Miller. But they're so ego-involved in being intellectually and culturally superior, they would rather die off than do what they need to do to survive.
Fine with me, let a new genuinely pro-American centrist party evolve from their rotting corpses.
"I wish you were right, but unfortunatley 49% of voting Americans actually *do* buy what they are selling."
It was 49% in 1996, and 49% in 2000. It is edging toward 47% today, as late ballots drift into the totals. And we have gained in every election since 1992. I think they've hit their high-water mark.
Not a bad trend.
"Amazingly this article from the Guardian is one of the best post-mortems I've read. I love the way Hillary! is dissed and dismissed by the author."
I too love the way the article treated Hilderbeast. However, the best thing for us Conservatives/Republicans is for her to be the canditate in 08.
In this election, there were the "Bush haters". In 08, there will be the "Hillary haters" and at that time we can really kick butt and do some real damage to the DemoRat Party.
In the meantime, we need to start calling Liberals what they really are - Socialists, Socialists, Socialists. The next time you have to engage in a conversation with one of these nitwits, ask them why they want to implement a Socialist government in the United States and subject the USA to the United Nations.
Liberalism/Socialism is AIDS of the brain - lots of sick puppies out there with no known cure.
First, there was Goldwater, then Regan, then Rush and now Bush........
The only thing I hear on the MSM is that the red states/counties need to be "educated" or "re-educated". Very communist mentality.
The democrats are starting from a deficit because their entire world view is that those who do not agree with them are uneducated and stupid.
They also can't understand how their massive PAID get out the vote effort was beated by mere volunteers from the GOP.
It will be interesting to see how the democrats can hold up in an environment when they have a harder and harder time forcing pork spending.
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