Pontifications Post Election Style.
Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been reading the various posts from his good Minister of Agriculture and Poet Laureate. He has also been reading many other pieces of commentary and opinion. And all he can say now is Great Jeezey Chreezy! The world is not ending for you because Kerry lost the election. Did the sun not rise? Does the rose not smell as sweet?
Of course the sun ascended in the east, and the rose still smells sweet. In politics some times you win, sometimes you lose. Your Maximum Leader remembers feeling really terribly depressed in 1992 when Clinton beat G.H.W. Bush. But then as time went on your Maximum Leader realized that it was just another election. Just like the ones we’ve had in America since 1788.
Now on to business.
Allow your Maximum Leader to answer on behalf of his Foreign Minister some of the questions posed by the good Smallholder.
Q) Are we likely to get a smaller federal government from this administration/congress?
A) No, we are not likely to shrink the size of the federal government. But your Maximum Leader is confident it will not grow at the rate it would under a John Kerry administration.
Q) Are we likely to get fiscal responsibility from this administration/congress?
A) No, not to the extent that many fiscal conservatives would like. But your Maximum Leader is confident we will have a more honest attempt at fiscal responsibility than we would under a John Kerry administration.
Q) Is the muscular foreign policy of this administration likely to be effective?
A) Yes. Your Maximum Leader would say that is has already been effective in a number of ways. And your Maximum Leader is confident that our foreign policy would not have remained muscular under a John Kerry administration. (See below.)
Q) Are we comfortable or uncomfortable with the ascendancy of the morality police?
A) Good Lord! This is a variation of the same tired argument that your Maximum Leader has heard after every election since he became politically aware. In 1980, 1984, 1988, and 2000 it was Reagan/G.H.W. Bush/G.W. Bush and his religious loonies are going to have morality brownshirts on the streets to keep us all in line and stone the unbelievers. In 1992 and 1996 it was Clinton was going to tear down the very building blocks of civilization and we were going to have wanton orgies of vice in our cities and towns. When last your Maximum Leader checked, we don’t have the morality brownshirts on the streets, nor do we have orgies of vice in our cities and towns. At what point does the “power of the religious right is on the rise” become as clichéd as “the middle class was rising” and “France surrenders?”
Your Maximum Leader thought the election was getting bad. The post-election is getting just as shrill. Your Maximum Leader nearly put out “a contract” on NPR “Commentator” Daniel Schorr yesterday after listening to his “woe-is-me-the-world-is-ending-and-by-the-way-Bush-has-no-mandate” wail yesterday. (But then your Maximum Leader wondered what the point would be as someone else from the Pauline Kael classes of Manhattan would just take his place.)
And frankly the smugness of many Republicans and Conservatives is just as difficult to put up with.
Your Maximum Leader even got an interesting e-mail yesterday. The jist of it was that bipartisanship is out the window and your Maximum Leader shouldn’t expect the Democrats to roll-over just because Bush won. Your Maximum Leader isn’t expecting the major players of either side to roll-over. What your Maximum Leader hopes is that Bush will take a step toward statesmanship and try to work together on issues where it was possible to do so. That is a rather narrow strip of policies to be honest. But if he tries, it might lead to more attempts. Bush will have to give, as will Democrats. If neither side is willing to give, and it is completely possible that neither side will; then we’ll have gridlock for four years. The Democrats can do it in the Senate, and they will.
NB: Your Maximum Leader will reiterate his long-standing claim that he doesn’t mind gridlock. You’ve heard the old Jeffersonian expression; the government that governs least governs best. Well gridlock equates to government doing less governing. Our government is not designed to work efficiently or effectively, and so long as the Democrats have 45 seats in the Senate they can bring everything to a halt.
Now, let your Maximum Leader be frank about all this talk of bipartisanship here. The Democrats will likely have to give more than they would like to get things started.
This is because the Democrats, in case you missed it, lost the election.
That is the way it works. When you lose and are in the minority you have two paths available to you. The first is to make deals. When you make deals you gain political capital. The more political capital you have the more deals you can make that are more favourable to you. Republicans had to do it in 1992 and 1996. And the Republicans had to do it in the House for over 50 years.
The second path is much less pleasant. It starts with the whole school of thought out there that says that you will gain political capital with voters by obstructing everything. While this type of method for gaining political capital wasn’t a big factor in this election, it was a factor in the 2002 elections. The Democrats in the Senate were obstructionist, and that didn’t gain them enough political capital with voters to hold onto the Senate. This is a dangerous game to play. It is dangerous because when you are already in the minority you risk completely marginalizing your party by obstructing everything. Your Maximum Leader would recommend the Democrats dust off the olive branch to start. If Bush turns out to be unreceptive - which he may - then you don’t have much of a choice other than gridlock. But as your Maximum Leader says, he’s cool with gridlock.
Now this discussion of two paths leads your Maximum Leader to the next point he’d like to make. That of what position the Democrats find themselves in. They don’t find themselves in a good place (if you are a Democrat) that is for sure. Allow your Maximum Leader to be dismissive of his best buddy and Poet Laureate for a moment. He writes:
“…I still maintain that we’re going to see a Dem backlash in 2008. If it’s spearheaded by the likes of Hillary Clinton, it’ll fail. But with someone else leading the charge, it’ll probably succeed in breaking the GOP’s grip on all three branches of government.”
Your Maximum Leader will agree with his Poet Laureate on a few items. The first is that the Poet Laureate is, by his own admission (unquoted here), a poor prognosticator. The second is this. If the Democrats even start thinking seriously of nominating Hillary Clinton in 2008 they should also start looking around for good sword smiths.
If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic standard-bearer in 2008; the loss the Democrats just experienced will pale in comparison to how badly they will be beaten in 08. They will need to fall on their swords and make quick work of themselves because the agony will be too much to bear.
Allow your Maximum Leader to reiterate: Hillary Clinton - Unelectable to highest office in the land.
Having said and restated that Hillary Clinton is unelectable as president, the prospect of the Democrats breaking GOP control of all three branches of government in four years (barring some unforeseen occurrence) are so small as to be hard to calculate. The possibility of taking the Presideny and the Senate are feasible (and depending on the candidates, the political and economic situation, and the “mood” of the country it could be quite possible). But the House will not change hands until 2012 at the earliest; and control of the Judiciary is likely to be molded pretty decisively by President Bush. If the Democrats are smart, they will start focusing on finding good Senate Candidates to start challenging Republicans. And they will focus on retaking State Houses and Governor’s mansions around the country. Until they can have a bigger say in the next redistricting process, the House is not likely to change hands. And your Maximum Leader doesn’t see why they should waste their money on trying to take control of the House.
Let’s look at a few more items from this election.
First off… If you haven’t read the latest Newsweek on their accounts of how the campaigns worked you really ought to. The Kerry Campaign was more poorly run than your Maximum Leader even suspected.
When he says poorly run allow him to elaborate. He means the decision process was atrocious.
It seems Kerry couldn’t take decisions. He wanted to hear everyone’s opinion. Talk about decision-making… Then talk some more… Then talk some more… Then pull out his cell phone and call some other people to get their opinions. This became such a problem Kerry’s staff actually took his cell phone away in an attempt to force decisions out of the candidate.
In reading the article, your Maximum Leader mused to himself that off all of the problems your Maximum Leader had with imagining John Kerry as President this was the largest. Policy differences are normal. Ideological separation happens. But not being able to take a decision and stick with it is not a trait you can overcome. The Divine Minion Molly wrote your Maximum Leader that she was laughing at your Maximum Leader’s friend who worried that Kerry would talk and talk and talk and never decide anything. But it turns out that Kerry does just that! He finds it hard to come to a decision. That is a fine trait to have as a US Senator. But it isn’t a good trait to have as president.
Anyway… Go read that article…
What is incredible is that even for being so mismanaged at the top, the Kerry Campaign pulled off a tremendous result. No matter how you look at it, the Democrats and the Kerry Campaign, with all their 527s and Union cohorts, mobilized more voters than had ever been mobilized before. They did a superhuman job.
But the Bush Campaign did a better job.
Your Maximum Leader feels that this is the most depressing element of this election for Democrats. They did a superhuman job only to be beaten by someone who did a heroic job. (That is Heroic is the classical Greek sense.)
To do you best and still get beaten is a hard thing to deal with. Your Maximum Leader has dealt with it before. It is made harder for many “progressive” people because it appears that the “hatemongering/religious nuts” outnumber them. Now Democrats and media talking heads are tearing over the exit polling information and declaring that the religious war is beginning.
Allow your Maximum Leader to state, once again, that these exit polls being used to forecast the end of American Democracy and the onset of the American Theocracy are the very same exit polls that pronounced John Kerry President of the United States. Your Maximum Leader understands that Democrats are depressed, and he understands that depression is often a downward spiral; but do you all really want to beat yourselves up and yell the sky is falling over numbers that are patently wrong?
That said your Maximum Leader is sure that many voters were swayed by moral issues. Your Maximum Leader is a strong believer in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. And he is a stronger believer in the Anglo-Western Civil Tradition. And there is, despite what most Democrats want to think, a strong connection between the two. People will make different decisions when they feel their very concept of civilization is under threa.
Just because a person votes against a Gay Marriage initiative doesn’t mean they want to crucify every gay on the nearest sturdy tree. The e-mail to Andrew Sullivan that the Smallholder quoted is not the mainstream of Americans. The writer is an extremist. The Smallholder, in the same post, points out that the Ohio measure that was overwhelmingly adopted didn’t just stop gay marriage but stopped anything approximating marriage. The Smallholder sees this as proof of American’s bigotry. Your Maximum Leader sees it as proof of normally tolerant people feeling they are being pushed to the limit by extremists and judges.
According to the flawed exit polls and some not-flawed data we have from states, George W. Bush made noteworthy pickups in the black and hispanic communities. This is being attributed to the Gay Marriage ballot issues. While there are true homophobes among all races, they are a small portion of the population. They are certainly not a big enough group to account for all the Bush gains. What your Maximum Leader feels they do show is a frustration by normal Americans at the perceived assault on the basic foundations of civil society by judges and homosexual activists.
Your Maximum Leader will suggest that Andrew Sullivan (and too a much lesser extent your Maximum Leader’s good friends the Smallholder and Big Hominid) that they are too wrapped up in the gay marriage debate to really see the social problems incumbent in their position.
Gay marriage has been cast as an issue of “basic civil rights.” It has been likened by some to the fight against slavery and racial discrimination. That is not how the majority (and your Maximum Leader will posit great majority) of people view it. They view it as nothing less than an attempt by a very vocal and very small minority group to undermine the commonly held understanding of how civilization itself is organized.
You may scoff at your Maximum Leader’s opinion here, but he asks you to stop and really ponder this issue dispassionately if you can. We live in a culture that is proud of and supports toleration. But we have historically had major problems with the intolerant people among us. Isn’t that what Locke told us, be intolerant of the intolerant? The voters may have been saying that it is the gay marriage activists who have been the intolerant ones in not trying to find some sort of acceptable middle ground.
In some ways this argument is like the Gun Rights/Anti-Gun argument. Most people in the nation are probably in the middle somewhere. But the people on both sides doing the arguing are not anywhere near the middle.
This is a point your Maximum Leader tries to make again and again. The people who run the advocacy groups, the people who give their blood, sweat and tears to a cause are not the moderate ones. Andrew Sullivan, when it comes to gay rights at any rate, is a radical advocate for his position. He is, as many are on both sides of the argument, a fanatic.
Remember the words of your Maximum Leader’s hero Winston Churchill. “A fanatic is someone who will not change is mind, and won’t change the subject.”
Your Maximum Leader believes that most Americans would be happy to be more tolerant of alternative lifestyles if they had some say in how the subject will be decided. Your Maximum Leader can speak personally when he says he cannot stand judges taking what he considers “political” decisions. When a judge decrees any type of policy from the bench it diminishes our ability to self-govern. Because a judicial decree that creates a new legal situation that must be adhered to by all is a dictat from an authority over which voters know they have no direct control.
Voters generally don’t like being told what to do by officials over which they have no direct control. And if they do like it or don’t care, they don’t deserve the liberties they have.
Your Maximum Leader firmly believes that there is an acceptable political solution to this issue. Wht we have just seen is a backlash meant to curb the power of judges to take decisions people don’t want forced on them. Gay marriage activists need to realize that their cause will not be well advanced by the courts. It can only be advanced by dialogue in a political forum. That means that progress will be slow and tortuous. But that is the only way to gain acceptance. That is how society really changes. That is the only way that true progress happens.
And your Maximum Leader thinks that progress should only come about through a tortured, slow, open, inefficient political process.
And if Democrats want to direct our tortured, slow, inefficient political process they need to make some basic changes.
The first change is to take a deep breath. Now suck it up and take it like a man. You lost. It is not the end of the world.
The second change is to tell so many of the pundits and intellectuals that the party seems to rely on all the time to find themselves a nice quiet university town and stay there. Your Maximum Leader had the misfortune of seeing Naomi Wolf on the Today show this morning. She was going on and on about how Bush projected an iconic image which appealed to the wives of the proletarians… Blah… Blah… Blah… Look your Maximum Leader has read the shit she’s spouting off. And if you give your Maximum Leader a few shots of bourbon, a computer, and a long night he can write the same shit for himself. The problem is that the Naomi Wolf mindset is deep, meaningful, insightful, and most of all intelligible to about - oh - one friggin percent of the population of the western world.
The complete failure of Naomi Wolf’s reasoning was made clear in an instant by the other woman in that segment, Charmaine Yoest. Wolf had just completed a long rant about iconography and symbolic language Kerry used during the debates when describing his love for his wife. When Yoest spoke, she said simple words to the effect of “women understand the strong cowboy who loves his wife.”
There you have part of the problem. Snobby intellectualism isn’t going to do anything to help any Democrat anywhere convince anybody that they value anything beyond smart postmodernist chit-chat amongst the “Cape Cod set” or Harvard faculty. Take a moment to go back and read the transcripts of the things Democrats were saying over the past two years. Your Maximum Leader paraphrases the Wall Street Journal when he notes that for the past two years as far as Democrats were concerned opposition to gay marriage is the same as antebellum bigotry, opposing abortion is not-so-sublimated misogyny, devout Christians are the same as Islamofascists, and protecting our interests abroad is imperialism.
That talk really turned people on didn’t it?
Did Democrats learn anything from Bill Clinton?
It appears not.
Your Maximum Leader would like the Democrats of our great nation to take to heart some of the words from John Kerry’s recent speech. After the elections we are all Americans. Now suck it up and take it like a man. Regroup and decide how you want to go forward. Tomorrow is another day.
And in closing your Maximum Leader does have a thought for all of his Republican friends. The day of celebration is over now. As Ronald Reagan once said “Wipe the glee off your face, sister.”
It is time the winners wipe the glee of our faces and get back to the business of politics.
Carry on.
