Posted on 11/07/2004 6:48:38 AM PST by ambrose
Democrats' harsh new world
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John F. Kerry's loss to President Bush and setbacks in the House and Senate leave the Democratic Party looking at a troubling future.
By JERRY ZREMSKI
News Washington Bureau
11/7/2004
WASHINGTON - Democrats across the country awoke from last week's election to a reality more troubling than just losing the White House. This was not just a defeat for John F. Kerry. Party leaders and pundits agreed it was a defeat that showed growing Democratic weakness in what once had been the party's heartland and new weakness among some of its longtime core supporters.
"We're the "out' party now," Ed Kilgore, policy director of the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference, said on his Web log. "Republicans now control every nook and cranny of the federal government they still pretend they are fighting."
For proof that the Democrats face big problems, witness these facts:
• President Bush became the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 to be re-elected while his party gained seats in the House and the Senate.
• The Democratic Party lost all five open Senate seats it was defending in the South along with the two competitive Senate races in the Midwest.
• While Democrats struggle to compete in the Plains states and the South, the Republicans control the governorships of the four largest states, including solidly Democratic New York and California and marginally Democratic Florida.
• The party's support among key longtime constituencies - such as women, Hispanics, Catholics and seniors - appears to be slipping.
The problem, many academics and Democratic politicians agree, is the party's urban focus. Both on economic and values issues, the party has plenty to offer urban centers and liberal enclaves but comparatively little to offer the heartland.
"The party has to recognize that it just can't count on its urban base," said Herbert B. Asher, a political scientist at Ohio State University. "The Democrats did a spectacular job turning out their urban base - and it wasn't enough."
Moreover, the party's urban focus leaves it marginally competitive elsewhere. In fact, you could drive from Miami to Phoenix to Boise, Idaho, to Arlington, Va. and cross only one state - Illinois - that Kerry won.
While Republicans have long dominated the heartland, making such a drive would not have been so easy a few years earlier. Even in the 1988 presidential race, which Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush in a landslide, you would have had to cross three Dukakis states on that drive.
A paragon of urban Democratic politics, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, acknowledged the party's problem.
"One of its challenges as a party is to become a 50-state party, not a 17-state Electoral College party," Jackson said on National Public Radio last week.
Democrats also face a challenge in holding onto their traditional supporters. In that regard, Tuesday's election provided several troubling signs.
While Kerry won among women voters, exit polling data shows Bush increased his share of the women's vote by 5 percentage points.
The president boosted his share of the senior vote by the same margin and won it.
He also gained 5 percentage points among Catholics and 9 points among Hispanics, a fast-growing group that Democrats have been counting on to lead them back to majority status.
While political analysts say that Bush's increasing support among women might have been tied to fears of terrorism, they say cultural issues explain his gains among seniors, Catholics and Hispanics.
"Sen. Kerry was not connecting with Latino voters, primarily because he was focusing his Latino campaign on liberal themes that alienated those independent-minded and conservative Democrats," said Robert Deposada, president of the Latino Coalition, which endorsed Bush.
The party's lack of appeal in Middle America and its new struggles in parts of its base have one thing in common, political pros said.
Class is no longer the dividing line between the parties.
"The country is now divided on the basis of culture," Mark Mellman, Kerry's pollster, told Newhouse News Service last week.
That divide is complex, even on the signature issues of abortion and gay rights.
Oddly, exit polling indicates that the nation is more in tune with the Democrats on those issues than it is with the Republicans. Some 55 percent of voters surveyed said they favored abortion rights. And 60 percent said they favored either gay marriage or civil unions for homosexual couples.
Yet a plurality of voters named "moral values" as the top issue in the race. A plurality of voters also favored some restrictions on abortion, and far more voters favored civil unions than favor gay marriage.
To those moderate voters, Kerry probably seemed too extreme, analysts said, perhaps because he opposes a ban on partial-birth abortions as well as the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.
"You can be pro-choice and still address the number of abortions," said Asher of Ohio State.
Similarly, Kerry said he was against gay marriage but never made a strong case against it or explained why civil unions might be an acceptable compromise.
"From my perspective, I said all along: if there is an issue that's going to kill us, it's going to be that," said former Rep. John J. LaFalce, D-Town of Tonawanda. "Marriage is just a word, but it's also a symbol, it carries a meaning, and it's important."
While largely avoiding the abortion and gay marriage issues, Kerry also continued the Democratic Party's long-standing love-in with Hollywood.
He met with Steven Spielberg and appeared at a fund-raiser with actress Whoopie Goldberg, who unhelpfully said that Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards, "looks like he's 18."
That, combined with Kerry's stolid New England personality and vast personal wealth, may have alienated voters who aren't enthused with what they perceive as the elitism of the East and West coasts.
One top Democratic insider said that more moderate candidates, like Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, might have appealed more to those voters.
Evangelical Christians turned out in droves to support Bush, thanks to a Republican get-out-the-vote effort. But Kerry's reluctance to speak out on matters of faith also hurt him, said Robert D. McClure, a political scientist at Syracuse University.
"The Democrats need to nominate somebody who carries a Bible in his hand comfortably," McClure said. The last two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did.
With such images in mind, many Democrats see the seeds of their party's comeback in the ashes of Tuesday's election results.
Democrats need to stick to their principles of economic and social justice and convince voters that they, too, are moral issues, LaFalce said.
"I think the Democratic Party has to be much more aggressive. In terms of strategy, the Republicans beat us every time," said Brian Higgins, the Buffalo Democrat who appears to have won the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Jack F. Quinn, R-Hamburg.
Democrats noted that Bush still faces mammoth problems in Iraq, which could benefit their party in the long run.
And Bush could also create big trouble for himself with his promised effort to partially privatize Social Security. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill aren't overly enthused with that idea, fearing a political backlash, said David C. John, a Social Security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Looking out at that political landscape, the Democratic minority leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, isn't pessimistic.
"Quite frankly, I think the table is set for us in the next election," Pelosi, D-Calif., told Associated Press last week. "We have lost just about everything that we can lose."
e-mail: jzremski@buffnews.com
Hmmm...that position has been available to the Dems, but they consistently forsook that compromise...a little too much nuance, perhaps, too much paranoid 'slippery slope' rhetoric and extremist intransigence.
Could it be that their most demanding interest group makes an awful lot of cash on abortions? naaaah.
It's all about rights...pay no attention to the human corpse in the garbage can.
I really respect that Bush wants to tackle Social Security. It is an issue that has typically been the kiss of the death for any politician who has dared to touch it.
This is not even close to true. First, an awful lot of democrats burrowed in in places like State and CIA where they try to undermine the US at every turn.
Second, a lot of those that burrowed in are protected by laws and regulations, and are busy enforcing other democtratic regulations to keep the nanny state in palce. It will take years to gain control, clear out the logjam of rules, and make redundant the byzantine bureaucracy in place to enforce the whole crumbling mess.
Third, judicial appointments are for life. Some folks need to be impeached - the one's for instance on the 9th circuit whose decisions are overturned per curiam every time the SC opens a new session.
I thought Dems were still stuck on defining is
Now there's a double entendre.
Didn't get to yours before I posted mine. Obviously we agree. Part of the problem is that the democrats think it is about who has power and who has programs and who gets to make rules and regulations. They don't understand that the opposite of democratic program is not a republican program. It is no program at all. The opposite of government programs is freedom and individual responsibility. The opposite of the democrats is the death of the nanny state.
Carter and Clinton carried what were reputed to be Bibles, but who knows? They did not live their public and/or private lives as if they had ever cracked it open.
The RAT party has become the party of metrosexuals, leftwing labor bosses, whackjob billionaires, and EU/UN worshippers. Clinton just had to fool enough of the "great unwashed" to get his 48/49% pluralities. Now the Clinton machine has to fool even its own liberal base.
What is a policy director. Sounds like a self-appointed dictator to tell the little people how they should think since they are too dumb to understand the properly nuanced policies of the nanny-state.
Who, 8 weeks before the next election will show up to be photographed attending church. Hint, that stuff they serve during the sacrament is not kool aide. It is meant to save your soul not kill it.
Some 55 percent of voters surveyed said they favored abortion rights. And 60 percent said they favored either gay marriage or civil unions for homosexual couples.
BS meter off the scale on this quote.
So the reason Kerry wasn't elected was that we're too dumb to comprehend the brilliant excution and communication of the PLAN!
We must keep up to date, with events. Root out and identify these Socialst Democratic operatives (SD), move them out and replace them. Cut funding on all of the Socialist Programs that are supporting abortion etc and that will help balance the budget!
'"The Democrats need to nominate somebody who carries a Bible in his hand comfortably," McClure said. The last two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did.'
Carter I see as a legitimate man of faith; Clinton is lucky his Bible didn't burn his hands. His only use for a Bible was as a political prop; I'm sure it was anything but comfortable for him to carry it.
"Quite frankly, I think the table is set for us in the next election," Pelosi, D-Calif., told Associated Press last week. "We have lost just about everything that we can lose."
Nancy Pelosi will be the pig with the apple in its mouth.
One huge problem that Dems can't seem to understand is that most Americans aspire to acquire more wealth. For the Dems to perpetually make class warfare on wealthy Americans (I am not one of them) makes no sense. When they wake up and realize that capitalism and the free market are good things, they might make some progress.
I just don't believe it!
This is push-polling male bovine scatterology. Most Americans believe abortion should be legal in the cases of "rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother." The Rats and NARAL have used this to claim that most Americans are pro-abortion. However, if a politician only believes abortion should be legal in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother, they are labeled "anti-choice." Similarly, most Americans don't care if a couple of guys or a couple of women want to live together. They're getting tired of groups like the Boy Scouts having to deal with constant lawsuits and harassment because they don't want to sign on to the homosexual agenda. This is the same garbage they've shoved for years. It's also their basic court methodology of asking a relatively innocuous question, and then extrapolating the answer into a blanket endorsement of all their policies.
Another example, from NARAL. I was polled, and asked if I "believed students should have access to off-campus health care." I knew about the push-polling, and said no. What they were really trying to get was endorsement of the Los Angeles Unified School District policy of busing girls to the abortion clinic during school hours, paying for the abortions with Federal money, and lying to the parents about it. They don't count girls absent while they're getting the abortions, and will lie to the parents about whether the student was in class or not. Same old Democrats.
Er, that just might be part of the Dems electability problem right there.
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