Wednesday, March 02, 2005
"All we need to do is do a better job of getting our message out."
We've heard some variation of that from many Democratic party figures lately-- from Howard Dean, from Nancy Pelosi, from the [i]Nation[/i] crowd. The people would elect Democratic presidents if only 1) Karl Rove didn't deceive them and 2) we didn't keep nominating stiffs. There is some logic to this, after all-- the fact is, the last two stiffs did substantially better than 80s stiffs like Mondale and Dukakis. Around 1992, the Democrats looked a lot more like a permanent minority party than they do now. Nominate someone with a real pulse, and they could eke out that extra point or two that makes a president. (Well, assuming you eke it out in the right states.)
Sounds good-- heck, John Judis and Ruy Texeira wrote a whole book about how demographic trends alone would soon carry the party to majority status. But it's self-delusion-- as becomes clear if you step back from one election and look at several at the same time.
Every election is a confluence of unique factors, which makes it easy enough to say "Well, it should have been a Democratic year but the war/Swift Boats/Kerry's lack of charisma/[insert reason here]..." Excuses were as common as balloons the day after the vote. Look at a bunch of elections, though, and the virtues and failings of individual candidates balance out-- for every Reagan a Clinton, for every Mondale a Dole. What's left is the broad historical trend-- which is, not surprisingly, Republican.
The modern presidential political era begins in 1968-- the year Vietnam began to fracture the Democrats, the year Nixon's Southern Strategy began to remake the Republicans. There have been ten elections since that year. If we add the vote totals for each party in those ten elections, here's what percentage of total votes cast for the two parties (excluding third parties) each party claims:
Republicans: 52.2% (456.2 million votes)
Democrats: 47.8% (418.5 million votes)
Take that as a baseline for the electorate over the last 36 years-- 52-48, Republican to Democrat. Though even that, perhaps, is overgenerous to the Democrats-- if we look past party affiliation, and consider the races in terms of ideology, giving each side credit for significant third party candidates (defined as polling more than 1% in the race), the split looks more like this:
Right (Republicans + George Wallace, John Schmitz, Ed Clark, Ross Perot): 53.7% (495.9 million)
Left (Democrats + John Anderson, Ralph Nader [2000 only]): 46.3% (427.1 million)1
So that's the real ideological break in the electorate-- 54 to 46, right to left.2 Now let's do another bit of figuring.
Notes
1. Who the hell were John Schmitz and Ed Clark? Schmitz ran on what was basically George Wallace's ticket in 1972 after Wallace's shooting and got 1.4%, while Clark is the only Libertarian candidate to (barely) break 1%, in 1980.
2. If you wanted to make things even more dire for the Democrats, you could start to weight your figures to make each election equivalent. The population's bigger today, so more people vote-- John Kerry, losing, got about 10 million more actual votes than Richard Nixon did in a landslide in 1972. If you accounted for that, by making a 51% win in the 60s or 70s equal to a 51% win today (a perfectly reasonable judgement call for a statistician), it would give even more weight to two blowouts-- Nixon over McGovern and Reagan over Mondale-- which would make the Democratic position even that much more dismal. But why twist the knife with statistical games?
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
How can something be "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time?" If all those conditions are wrong, isn't it a different war entirely? Is Kerry saying we should have fought the War of the Spanish Succession now? In fact, if a war fails on all three of those counts, does it even exist?
Sunday, September 05, 2004
A few excerpts from a rather shockingly gay-baiting editorial in the New York Times by Frank Rich:
ONLY in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy's connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man...
Mr. Bush was fronted by a testosterone-heavy lineup led by... a governor who can play the role of a warrior on screen more convincingly than can a former Andover cheerleader gallivanting on an aircraft carrier...
Of late, Mr. Bush's imagineers have publicized his proud possession of Saddam Hussein's captured pistol, which, in another of their efforts at phallic stagecraft, is said to be kept in the same study where the previous incumbent squandered his own weapon of masculinity on Monica Lewinsky...
Gee, awfully homophobic talk coming from a guy who used to review theater. Will Andrew Sullivan go after him for this the way he's gone after Zell Miller for, actually, not much other than one racial slur 40 years ago?
On the other hand, it does contain this priceless factoid:
When the Democrat asks "Who among us does not love Nascar?" and lets reporters follow him around on a "day off" when his errands include buying a jock strap, he is asking to be ridiculed as an "International Man of Mystery."
International Male catalog model would be more like it. But Kerry actually said "Who among us does not love Nascar?" (His aides are probably grateful he didn't say "doth not love" or "Whither Nascar?") Jeez, what a fa... n of theater.
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Saturday, September 04, 2004
Rich Lowry at National Review's The Corner provides a pithy pre-post-mortem two months before the election is over:
Read all the polls and there is genuine discontent with Bush in this country, but it has nothing to do with what he did or didn't do in Vietnam. Amazingly, Kerry is letting Bush, more or less unchallenged, tap into some of that sentiment--with his proposals to address worries about health care, education, and retirement last night--while he shadowboxes with his own obsessions.
A point no one has made yet about Kerry's midnight ramble, so far as I know: isn't it weird that he framed the whole thing in terms of the main anti-Kerry book title, Unfit For Command? It's like if Clinton kept saying "I'll tell you who the real Slick Willie is!" or Reagan kept referring to how Mondale's act wouldn't have cut it at Warner Bros. Now part of it is just the degraded craft of speechwriting, which tries to fit everything into a repeated rhetorical device (Bush had one of those in his speech too). But clearly this whole "Unfit For Command" thing is eating at Kerry personally like battery acid, and so he obsesses on it and uses any excuse to bring it in and throw it back at Bush's face-- using it, in fact, somewhat inaptly, since the anti-Kerry folks use it as an old-fashioned military-culture character attack while Kerry twists it into a synonym for mere incompetence:
...Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare makes you unfit to lead this nation...
No, it makes you the other party, with a different set of priorities. They may in fact be the wrong priorities (I don't think so, but it's possible), but if you think failure to enact universal health coverage makes you immoral, then every president in history is immoral (or you're a Massachusetts liberal).
But the idea of "unfit to lead" is clearly preying on Kerry's mind so much that he's determined to stuff the words back down Bush's throat. The only problem is, no one else cares... the election isn't about "fitness to lead," it's about what you'd do when you're there. By failing to articulate an alternative for much of anything, by insisting that the election is just about character and then mounting himself as a heroic statue and waiting for the admiration to begin, Kerry has left it wide open for Bush to offer the kinds of specifics that close the sale. If "unfit to lead" were truly synonymous with "incompetent at running for president," then Kerry would be in the dictionary next to it.
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Tivo'd and watched Ginger Snaps, a Canadian-made horror film from 2000 about two "weird girls" (I use quotes to indicate that that description is a specific category in high school), obsessed with death (they stage fake suicides as a class project and obsess about the real thiing), and what happens when one of them gets her first period at the same time a werewolf is roaming the suburban subdivision. (The blood attracts, you see.)
Now, I realize that that description right there might be enough to cut off any interest you had in the movie, I don't normally see menstruation movies any more than I raced to see Menopause: The Musical when it opened here in Chicago. It's not perfect-- at first it may seem a bit caricatured (the standard-issue movie suburb and clueless parents) and too reminiscent of things like Heathers or Harold and Maude. And the ending is more action movieish than satisfying on a character level.
But for its picture of screwed-up teens (superbly acted by two unknowns, Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle), this is just about the smartest teen horror film ever made, which finds lots of good analogies between the destructive and disorienting awakening of sexuality and the ravenous desire for destruction of a werewolf. In fact, it's one of the best teen movies of recent years, at least as intelligent as a straight drama like Gas Food Lodging, which had a similarly-aged pair of sisters.
So of course it went straight to video while dozens of I Still Vaguely Recall What You Did A Summer Or Two Back, Or Was It Someone Else get nationwide release. However, it seems to be popular on video, as it's spawned two sequels which sound better than average, too, or at least more than casually tossed-off junk-- the third, bizarrely, transports the two girls to a fort in 18th century Canada where werewolves are on the prowl!
Friday, September 03, 2004
A good explanation of why the undecideds really aren't the key to this still-close election. The same site, Slings and Arrows, has a lot of similar smart analysis of factoids recently dropped by pollsters and such.
It also has this:
Kerry's mad and he's not going to take it anymore. I say good.
I am tired of Kerry's pussy-footing around, trying to take every position to please everyone and obviously, so is he... If Kerry continues on this track the election will be more than anything else a referendum of the left vs. the right -- winner take all.
I was ready to be won over by the Democratic convention, I really was. I was sold on Obama; I was sold on Bill 'N' Hill, who still seem more moderate than practically anyone who has followed them, for all their checkered record; I was sold by Edwards, despite thinking that he should be a really impressive mayor somewhere, not vice president; I was sold by old Joe Biden, for cryin' out loud, who had seemed as thrilling as Gephardt until then but who I'd sure rather see running than Kerry at the moment.
And then came Kerry's Army-green plate of mush, that awful mix of Hollywood fascism ("This is Starship Trooper Kerry, reporting to kick some Bug ass!") and No Interest Group Left Behind. And I knew it was over. Kerry, like Bob Dole, was running because it was his turn, and he was running on the most specious basis possible, in a way that was as out-of-touch with most voters under 50 as Nixon's chitchat about football was out of touch with those Vietnam protesters he visited one night. And he was scrupulously avoiding talking about anything that mattered, which would be the only thing that matters-- how can you stop the nukes going off in American cities better than Bush is doing?
I am offended by Kerry's refusal to run on anything of substance. I am not the only one. And though I could be swung, I suppose, at the moment I am most definitely not Undecided.
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1. Bush did very well. Which means he failed to lower expectations adequately for the debates. He's in trouble.
2. Kerry's late-night rambling from last night is embarassingly bad, legitimately raises questions (was he toasted? Medicated? Hasn't slept since Iowa?) Get ready for his stock to go up when he manages to keep his head from hitting the table with a loud thunk at the first debate.
3. Cheney-- where have we seen that ski-jump nose, that dry delivery out one side of the mouth of lame zingers like the one about Edwards being chosen for his hair, not to mention getting mild chuckles from pretending that you think you're irresistibly handsome? Here's a clue: substitute "Crosby" for "Edwards." Dick Cheney IS Bob Hope.
4. I read the Zell Miller speech first. Seemed tough, but not unhinged. Then I saw two seconds of him and it was like watching a harpy from hell screech at you. So I can see why people are freaked out about it, but I don't really think the Democrats will get much traction from it-- and the ranting about it being segregationist or whatever is just kooky (and quite blatantly bigoted-- as is much of the Bush hatred generally, of course, when it comes from sophisticates attacking his Southern speech patterns and, presumably, the stupidity that goes with talking like that).
5. Wasn't there a guy running with Kerry? Whatever happened to him? Dude, you go to the secret undisclosed location AFTER you win.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Joshua Micah Marshall tries to buck up the panicking Democrats about panic in the Kerry campaign:
Many folks look back and say Al Gore ran a terrible campaign. Maybe. Maybe not. For me, I look back and see something different. I remember a campaign that was far too sensitive to the spin and CW of the moment and thus capable of being buffeted by the smallest political squall.
Fair enough, except... isn't being "far too sensitive to the spin and CW of the moment" one definition of "running a terrible campaign?" Of, in fact, being a terrible candidate, with nothing more than a sense of entitlement as your reason for running?
You may regard the Bushies as evil, for all I know, and you may regard them as boundlessly cynical, willing to write any check to any interest group for power-- but when you say someone is evil and cynical, you give them the credit of knowing what they want and what they're for, because they're willing to do anything to get it.
Likewise, it's a revealing moment in Bob Woodward's The Agenda when Clinton reflects on the fairly conservative fiscal policies he's been forced into and says sarcastically and bitterly, "We're Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?" What it reveals to me is Clinton's insight that the job has taken over the vision-- that he knows he's just made a choice between what he wants to do and what it takes to stay in power, and he's not happy about it.
In both cases the cynicism reveals what there is beneath the cynicism that is being protected, or at least given up ruefully-- and that, in itself, makes it the man's core value. Does one feel that there's anything like that deep within John Kerry, that there's some private obsession (like tax cuts for the rich) that he desperately desires power to achieve? Or do you suspect that he only wants to be president because he's always wanted to be president-- and that if he'd grown up in a less tony social setting, as the son of a dentist rather than the son of a diplomat, finally becoming Grand Antler of the Greater Montana Quonset of the Ancient and Noble Order of Caribou would fulfill his psychological needs just as well?
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
One of the things that George W. Bush is often credited with in the blogosphere is a "rope-a-dope" strategy-- letting his opponents hog the limelight until they screw up. One of the things John Kerry is often condemned for in the blogosphere is keeping a low profile and hoping that being Not-Bush will be enough to let him squeak to victory. In other words, a rope-a-dope strategy. So what happens when two guys play rope-a-dope and nobody ever gets into the middle of the ring to throw a punch?
Well, they can't both lose-- though that's one way to look at the results of the 2000 election mess, I suppose-- and more to the point, there are three debates scheduled, as well as a speech that Bush will pretty much have to make tomorrow night. So much as they might like to avoid the election for a couple of months, much as Bush and Cheney seem to prefer operating the government completely out of the view of anyone, like a closely held family business, these events will eventually force both of them into actually campaigning and not simply letting their surrogates fight it out, Obama versus Schwarzenegger in the battle of the immigrant all-stars.
What does history tell us will be the likely outcome? Two things. Bush will blow his speech Thursday night. He will be dull and awkward as only he can be, in that weird, American as a Second Language manner he has. And as a result, Bush will win.
Why will blowing his convention speech mean Bush will win? Because it will lower expectations to the third sub-basement for the debates. It will pump Kerry up, even prompt press nostalgia for his truly lousy and pandering (but effectively delivered) "I'm ready for duty!" acceptance speech. And then, just like he did Gore... Bush will rope-a-dope in three debates out of three. He will remain robotic, seemingly tuned to a Texas version of Andy Kaufman's wavelength; he will blow simple questions and stammer helplessly when the going gets tough; he will bring Jesus up in response to questions about free trade zones and say, in response to a question about foreign policy, that he doesn't have one, he only has an American policy, so there.
And it won't matter a bit, because Kerry will say something devastatingly inappropriate in one debate, ten times worse than "a more sensitive foreign policy"; he will offer a hopelessly tongue-tied rewriting of his Vietnam era history that makes everything much, much worse, he will say our real enemy is Poland and invite Osama Bin Laden to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom and talk things over, and he will call his Secret Service bodyguards "cocksucking motherfuckers" on national TV during family hour. If there's one rule of modern politics, it's this: in a contest of rope-a-dope, never misunderestimate the power of someone opposite George W. Bush, convinced that they have 50 IQ points on him, to go absolutely, totally insane on national television and destroy their career forever.
