Who to Blame
This Time?
By Alexander
Cockbun and Jeffrey St.Clair
04 November, 2004
Counterpunch
The
crusade that George Bush called for in 2001 against terrorism from abroad
came to fruition yesterday in a more homely context as Christians flocked
to the polls in stronger numbers than in 2000 to battle against such
manifestations of post-modernity as gay marriage.
There are many reasons
for what is an overwhelming Republican victory across the board. They
range from the disastrous choice of John Edwards as Kerry's running
mate to delusions about the potency of electronic organizing (that should
have been demolished after Howard Dean's implosion last spring), to
the fatal deficiencies of Kerry himself.
The strategy of
the Democratic Party as formulated by DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe amounted
to belief in the simple potency of corporate cash, plus hysterical demonization
of Bush and Nader, represented at full stretch by Michael Moore, who
began the year backing General Wesley Clarke and ended it as a pied
piper for Kerry. They came to the Rubicon of November 2 replete with
fantasies, about the unknown cell phone vote, the youth vote (which
actually remained unchanged from 2000), the galvanizing potential of
Bruce Springsteen and Eminem.
Week after week
Kerry and his boosters displayed an unmatched deafness to political
tone. The haughty elitist from Boston probably lost most of the Midwest
forever when he said in the high summer that foreign leaders hoped he
would win. The applause of the French in Cannes for Michael Moore's
9/11 was the sound of the cement drying over the corpse of Kerry's chances
of carrying the Midwest. Soros's dollars were like flowers on the grave.
After the billionairess Portuguese-American Teresa Heinz Kerry said
in mid-October that Laura Bush had never held a job it was all over.
If there was a visual
premonition of why George Bush would achieve a popular majority beyond
challenge it was probably the photographs of gay couples celebrating
their marriages outside San Francisco's city hall. America is a very
Christian country. In the regular national survey conducted by the University
of Chicago in 2002, 53 per cent of the adult population identified themselves
as Protestant, 25 per cent as Catholic, 3 per cent as Christians of
some other denomination, 3 per cent as adhering to "other religions",
2 per cent as Jewish and 14 per cent as having "no religion".
That's a lot of Christians, and though many of them may have had a mature
tolerance for the preference of Dick and Lynn Cheney's daughter Mary,
a strong percentage felt very strongly that state sanction of same sex
marriage was going way too far.
There was a ballot
initiative in Ohio to ban gay marriage and it was probably what helped
Bush overcome the smoldering ruins of the Ohio economy and the increasing
unpopularity of the war.
October surprises?
No candidate was more burdened by them than George Bush. Just in the
last couple of weeks, headlines brought tidings of US marines killed
in Baghdad and other US troops rising up in mutiny against lack of equipment
to protect their lives. The president's brother Neil was exposed as
influence peddling on the basis of his family connections. The economic
numbers remained grim as they have been all year. And this was just
the icing on the cake. You can troll back over the past fifteen months
and find scarce a headline or news story bringing good tidings for Bush.
History is replete with revolutions caused by a rise in the price of
bread. This year the price of America's primal fluid--oil--on which
every household depends, tripled.
But Kerry and the
Democrats were never able to capitalize on any of these headlines, a
failure which started when Democrats in Congress, Kerry included, gave
the green light to the war on Iraq, and which continued when Kerry conclusively
threw away the war and WMD issues in August. When he tried to a chord
change at NYU on September 20 it was too late and even then his position
remained incoherent. He offered no way out. More tunnel, no light.
It was like that
for Kerry on almost every issue. Outsourcing is a big issue in the rustbelt,
yet here was Kerry forced to concede that he had voted for the trade
pacts and still supported them. All he offered, aside from deficit busting
(which plays to the bond market but not to people working two jobs),
was some tinkering with the tax code alarming to all those millions
of Americans who play the lottery and believe that if they are not yet
making more than $200,000 a year they soon will.
Edwards added absolutely
nothing to the ticket. At least Dan Quayle held Indiana back in 1988
and 2002. No one state in the south went into Kerry's column. Gore did
better in Florida and West Virginia. Dick Gephardt would certainly have
brought the Democratic ticket Missouri and probably Iowa and hence the
White House.
The Republicans
played, on the ground, to the bedrock members of their party, and got
them to the polls. The Kerry campaign conducted an air war from 30,000
feet, bombarding the population with vague alarums and somehow thinking
that ABB (Anyone But Bush) would pull them through. There was indeed
a lot of popular animosity towards Bush but the Democrats could never
capitalize on it. The crucial machinery of any political party is organization,
its capacity to rally its supporters on the big day. In this crucial
area the Democratic Party is in an advanced state of disrepair. The
SEIU wasted $70 million of its members' dues money attacking Ralph Nader.
A grotesque amount of energy went into trying to suppress the Nader
vote. They did suppress it and this achievement gained them nothing,
except, perhaps, the destruction of the Green Party.
It's as grim a day
for the Democrats as was 1980 when the Republicans swept the board.
What will the Democrats do? You can already hear the Democratic Leadership
Council cranking up its message that you can only beat the Republicans
by outflanking them on the right. The Nader alibi has gone. The Democratic
Party and its leaders have nowhere else to look than in the mirror.
They would do well to examine Nader's critiques, but we bet they won't.