Getting Better at Long Division

In a campaign marked by several outrageous failures, John Kerry's concession to George Bush - just hours after sending running mate John Edwards before the country to tell us once again that the Democrats would fight to ensure all votes were counted - may stand as a betrayal of singular ugliness. Journalist Greg Palast, who was responsible for some of the best investigative reporting about the large-scale disfranchisement in Florida in 2000, began warning some time ago of similar Republican-backed dirty tricks in New Mexico and Ohio this year, and Palast is now convinced that Kerry won both states despite reports to the contrary. I'm not ready to get into the merits of Palast's charges, but I will say this: if Kerry will not fight for the rights of his own voters, then the issue becomes largely academic. I guess Edwards was talking to the cameras for the sake of a "media moment," and never mind the people who voted for him (or tried to).

The drivel that spews from the corporate media purporting to explain the election to us in terms of some alleged public concern over "moral values" is nothing but noise pollution. If I have to read one more story about some Christian family in Ohio - always accompanied by a photo of mom and dad holding their precious children - who voted for Bush despite severe economic woes over the last several years because Bush allegedly stands for the things they believe in, I'll probably throw up. As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have been arguing for many years, the basic propaganda function of the corporate media is to establish the framework of debate, its major terms and concepts, and the range within which opinion will be considered "legitimate." Ideas that reside outside the spectrum defined by the corporate media are marginalized, ignored, and (when they become troublesome) vilified. Given the role of the corporate media and the many troubling issues of our time, you can expect editors and publishers to spend most of their days keeping news out of the papers, while in the broadcast world we get mind-numbing shoutfests over trivial nonsense instead of meangingful debate, and ever more vapid "infotainment" on what are quaintly called "news" shows. The net result is to place a burden on those of us who would like to make sense of the election, because we're not going to find it in USA Today, and we can't afford to buy the Wall Street Journal. In other words, we're going to have to do our own research.

But how hard is that? Maybe it's comforting to some self-styled liberals and progressives to believe Bush won because an army of ignorant religious yahoos overran the best efforts of noble, enlightened Americans. To my great disappointment, Air America Radio host Janeane Garofalo promotes this foolish characterization of the election as a battle between the smart and the stupid on the air at almost every opportunity. But Garofalo is dead wrong, and like most of the other Air America hosts who embraced Kerry without reservation she shares the contempt of the Democratic campaign for the working-class majority that is still routinely invoked as the party's "traditional constituency." Who supports the Democrats today? And why? Working-class Americans and their concerns do not interest the Democrats. The election strategies of national Democratic tickets have no regard for the majority, and this has been the case for many years. A working-class constituency audacious enough to believe it can demand some accountability from a political party claiming its support is troublesome, especially when that party has more well-heeled patrons demanding attention. The once-invincible "New Deal coalition" that succumbed to the strains of war, economic crises, and multiple conflicting demands in the 1960s and 1970s is now less than an echo within a Democratic Party that has long since restructured itself by sacrificing the interests of labor on the altar of wealth. Every national Democratic campaign since 1980 has offered fewer reasons to command the support of working Americans. On the campaign trail, in Congress, and in the White House, Democrats of the last generation have jettisoned programmatic commitments to labor, openly embraced the agenda of wealth, and now fail to give even lip service to the interests of workers.

With nothing to support, it's not surprising that workers simply stayed away from the polls on Election Day. The general increase in voter turnout this year - to about 60 percent of registered voters - should not obscure the critical fact that the Democratic Party failed miserably to draw voters to the polls. The numbers in New Jersey illustrate the pattern of Democratic decay despite massive voter registration drives conducted by grass-roots organizations and despite the fact that Kerry won the state. Kerry won majorities in 12 of New Jersey's 21 counties, area's representing 71 percent of the state's population. In the 9 counties Bush won, almost 47 percent of the population voted. By comparison, only about 38 percent of the population voted in Kerry's counties. You might think this is no big deal, but the gap between the two participation rates represents over 527,000 votes; Kerry's margin of victory in New Jersey was only about 212,000 votes. Voter turnout in New Jersey counties correlated positively with median household income (0.45) and median family income (0.49). Somewhat weaker positive correlations existed between those couties that turned out for Bush and median household income/median family income (both 0.37), while Kerry's counties showed a negative correlation with median household income/median family income (both -0.37). The strongest correlations, however, were between voter turnout and candidate strength: -0.73 for Kerry, and 0.73 for Bush.

Against electoral weakness of this magnitude, the Christian right didn't have to do anything special to look strong, and it didn't. Citing Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, Conservative columnist David Brooks pointed out in a recent story that

there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.

So with no massive upsurge on the right and no Naderites to blame this time, the Democratic implosion stands naked and exposed. A few perceptive post-mortems will suffice to drive this point home:

Here's Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair on the Democrats:

"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....October surprises? No candidate was more burdened by them than George Bush....You can troll back over the past fifteen months and find scarce a headline or news story bringing good tidings for Bush....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 make 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."

Cockburn has followed this analysis up with a more thorough one, worth reading in full.


Here's Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler:

"Against [the Republicans' culture wars] the Democrats chose to go with ... what? Their usual soft centrism, creating space for this constituency and that, taking care to antagonize no one, declining even to criticize the president, really, at their convention. And despite huge get-out-the-vote efforts and an enormous treasury, Democrats lost the battle of voter motivation before it started.

Worse: While conservatives were sharpening their sense of class victimization, Democrats had all but abandoned the field. For some time, the centrist Democratic establishment in Washington has been enamored of the notion that, since the industrial age is ending, the party must forget about blue-collar workers and their issues and embrace the "professional" class. During the 2004 campaign these new, business-friendly Democrats received high-profile assistance from idealistic tycoons and openly embraced trendy management theory. They imagined themselves the "metro" party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the "retro" Republican Party.

Yet this would have been a perfect year to give the Republicans a Trumanesque spanking for the many corporate scandals that they have countenanced and, in some ways, enabled. Taking such a stand would also have provided Democrats with a way to address and maybe even defeat the angry populism that informs the "values" issues while simultaneously mobilizing their base. To short-circuit the Republican appeals to blue-collar constituents, Democrats must confront the cultural populism of the wedge issues with genuine economic populism. They must dust off their own majoritarian militancy instead of suppressing it; sharpen the distinctions between the parties instead of minimizing them; emphasize the contradictions of culture-war populism instead of ignoring them; and speak forthrightly about who gains and who loses from conservative economic policy.

What is more likely, of course, is that Democratic officialdom will simply see this week's disaster as a reason to redouble their efforts to move to the right. They will give in on, say, Social Security privatization or income tax "reform" and will continue to dream their happy dreams about becoming the party of the enlightened corporate class. And they will be surprised all over again two or four years from now when the conservative populists of the Red America, poorer and angrier than ever, deal the "party of the people" yet another stunning blow."

And last but not least, Ralph Nader, who probably inspired more anger from the Democratic Party this year than Bush himself. From a press release on Nader's campaign web site:

"The Democrats need to become an effective, bright-line opposition party that plays strong defense against the worst of the Bush administration’s policies and plays offense to shame and weaken the Republicans. The upcoming escalation of the war in Iraq will be the first opportunity for the Democrats to distinguish themselves from Republicans,” said Nader. “During the next four years the Democrats need to begin to build a coalition of the economically deprived and disrespected. These include 50 million low wage workers and their families, small farm and rural families. This is a winning coalition that can compete with Republicans throughout the United States especially in the Midwest and South.

Nader noted that in this election Kerry lost the support of his base. Youth did not come out to support him in large numbers. And, 44 percent of Latinos voted for Bush, as did an astonishing 42 percent of those earning under $30,000, 40 percent of those with union members in their households and 36 percent of union members. Nader noted:

If the Democrats do not stand for the issues that affect the daily lives of these people, many will vote on whatever issue of the day the Republicans can dream up to distract attention from their cruel corporate interests against the people. This year it was a vague hypocritical morality message, and a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage; four years from now it will be something else but this only works if the Democrats continue to take off the table the mainstay economic, peace and justice issues."

Yes...I'm afraid it IS that simple.