Many writers are debating how “values” turned the election for Bush or against Kerry. We’re a country so divided by ideology that we’re referring to our common land as Blue States versus Red States. We Blue Staters can’t understand how the mass of Middle America could ignore the obvious failures of the Bush Administration. The Red Staters can’t understand how the urban islands of Blue could ignore the obvious decline in American Values.
I find myself in the middle of this debate because I am a progressive thinker from a Red State living in a Blue City. Many of my family and friends still live in the Red States and most of them voted for Bush. If the Democrats are ever going to win the presidency or the Congress again, we will have to consider their arguments and learn how to present a message that speaks to all Americans, not just the Blue States.
With this new sense of “reaching across the aisle” I present “Radical” Russ’s Three Point Plan for a Progressive America.
Number One: Strive for efficient and transparent elections.
This is the most important point. I still refuse to believe that exit polls were so wildly inaccurate in this election. It doesn’t take a computer expert (though I am one) to understand that corporate-controlled black box voting with non-audited proprietary software and no paper trail is a system just ripe for corruption. Anyone who has seen the Microsoft Windows “blue screen of death” should automatically distrust touch screen voting.
Kerry was polling ahead of Bush in Ohio, Diebold is based in Ohio, Diebold’s president is a GOP contributor who “guaranteed” Ohio’s electoral votes for Bush, Ohio has a Republican governor and Secretary of State, and, hey, whaddaya know, Ohio flips to Bush by 130,000 early in the morning after the election. Let’s assume for the moment that the numbers are legit and Bush did get the votes from the most economically depressed region in the country whose voters stood in line in the rain until well after midnight. Even with that assumption, nobody can prove it. Kerry can’t prove his votes were stolen and Bush can’t prove his votes were legit because there is no independent verification – there’s no receipt!
By the same token you can’t convince me that Bush lost the 2000 Election by a half-million votes, spent four years presiding over a failed economy, failed foreign policy, failed intelligence, failed terrorist manhunt, and a failed war, then won the 2004 Election by 3.5 million votes. How many counties that were 70% Bush had their black box totals bumped up to, say, 72%? Who would notice if one little red county here and there got just a bit redder? Some will call me a conspiracy theorist or accuse me of sowing sour grapes, but again, Kerry can’t prove his votes were stolen and Bush can’t prove his votes were legit.
Then there’s the “denial-of-service” attack against voting in heavily Democratic (read: poor and minority) districts. Seven-hour lines at polling places are inherently anti-Democratic. How many working poor could afford a day off work to stand in line? How many were generously granted an hour off work to vote, saw the lines and turned around and went back to work? Along with fighting for software auditing and paper trails, we need to fight for a federal elections standard that guarantees a certain number of voting machines per thousand residents. A national holiday with guaranteed time off for voting, weekend voting, universal early voting and same-day registration, all of these should also be considered. If we feel brave, we could adopt Oregon’s vote-by-mail system on a national basis. Anything would be an improvement over seven hour outdoor lines on a cold rainy Tuesday evening.
This is not a Red or Blue issue; this is an American issue. It might be hard at first to gain traction on meaningful electoral reform; after all, the system is currently working for the party in power. So we sell it to the Red States as a way to fend off the liberal elites who are trying to de-legitimize the “values” voters of “flyover” country. Besides, the average Ma & Pa Red State aren’t too fond of computers anyway. “Them big city lawyers in California and New York are trying to say the computers stole the election for President Bush. Heck, I don’t know nothin’ about computers; where I come from, a man’s word is his bond. But I also know that when you do business, you’re smart enough to get a receipt. Let’s get the computers out of voting and give us voters a receipt, so no fancy lawyer can argue against the will of the people.”
We are already seeing some of the evidence of black box voting fraud, besides the fact that exit polls have been accurate for every election except for Gore, Cleland, and now Kerry. We’re finding that counties with less than a thousand voters logged four thousand votes for Bush. We’re finding districts with a 3-to-1 registered Democrat to Republican ratio voted 3-to-1 in favor of Bush. There are machines that crashed, votes that were lost, and all sorts of funny touch-screen shenanigans. If you believe, like I do, that fraudulent computer-based elections are a threat to our very democracy, learn more about it at www.gregpalast.com and do something about it by visiting www.blackboxvoting.org.
Number Two: Use their slavish devotion to religion to our advantage.
We progressives whine about how the Republicans motivated the Evangelical Christian vote to come out for Bush by using wedge issues like Gay Marriage against us. Many of us are failing to see the silver lining in the “values” voter cloud.
We are the party of Christian values.
There are many people out there on what we call the “Christian Right” who have doubts about the Bush Administration. True Christians know in their hearts that Jesus stood for feeding the hungry, healing the sick, tending to the poor, protecting the weak, and turning the other cheek. Rather than demean the people who hold these values, we need to embrace them and show them how the Republicans are less like Jesus and more like the moneychangers in the temple.
John Kerry did a poor job in presenting the failures of the Bush Administration in a moral light. Until we can frame political issues in the W.W.J.D.? (What Would Jesus Do?) prism, we can expect to continue losing the South, the Heartland, and the Mountain West. The good news is that true Christian values are true progressive values; we only need to do a better job of pointing that out to the Red States.
People in Red States live there because they like the non-threatening atmosphere of homogeneity. They like security and independence and high school football and church on Sunday. They cling to a sanitized ideal of an American culture that never was – the “good ol’ days”. Then they turn on their TV and see a world completely unlike their own and fear that their “way of life” is disappearing. They see comedians and pundits constantly denigrating or patronizing “people of faith.” Sometimes I believe that they think America is in more danger from liberals than from terrorists. In their mind, al Qaeda only managed to kill 3,000 New Yorkers, but “Will & Grace” leads millions into accepting an ungodly lifestyle on a weekly basis via our national television. Given that 67% of Americans polled support some form of gay civil union, I don’t think all these states were voting against gay marriage per se, rather they were voting against the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade coming to a town near theirs.
We need to turn this issue around on them and show that the “way of life” that is important is not on TV; it is the way we treat our fellow man. We need to frame the Republicans as the “false prophets” foretold of in Revelation. We need to show the pictures of war dead and Abu Ghraib prisoners with the caption “W.W.J.D.?” We need to ask them how a Christian nation could allow children to go without health insurance and good men to go without jobs. We need to remind them of the admonition to “live and let live.” We especially need to remind them that America was founded by people persecuted for their religion who knew that church and state need to be separate in order to protect the church from the state (not the other way around), and believed strongly that no one should be persecuted for their beliefs. Eventually the truth shall set them free and we can bring over enough true Christians to our side of the ledger. There are some rabid Fundamentalist bigots who we’ll never win over but we can at least return them to the irrelevant minority they used to be.
I’ve put some thought into who would be the perfect candidate to espouse these progressive Christian ideals. He’d have to be a Southerner, someone who can speak in the genuine accent and authentic dialogue of the Red States. Maybe a former farmer who can speak to the rural communities with experience and vision. He can’t be a senator; he would only engender distrust of the “Washington insider.” He needs to come out of nowhere; a completely unexpected pick to give the right wing echo chamber less time to reverberate. A governor from a small Southern state would be perfect. He should be an older man so he can connect with the aging baby-boomers, but he should also be beloved enough among younger people to speak to their issues. He’d have to be a man of peace able to speak with clarity against our warmongering. It would help if he had some knowledge about Middle Eastern affairs. Above all, he’d have to be an absolutely unimpeachably Christian man with a solid marriage and a long history of faith recognized in deeds.
Have you already figured out who I am talking about? That’s right, former president, former governor of Georgia, Nobel Peace Prize winner – Jimmy Carter! OK, I know, it’s far fetched. Jimmy Carter will be 84 in 2008. The Republicans would scare voters with visions of late-70’s malaise. Furthermore, Carter could only serve one term – but perhaps that can be spun as an advantage (no re-election pandering from one-term Jimmy!)
All right, I know, there’s as much chance of Carter running for president as my dream ticket of Oprah/Carrot Top. (A black female self-made billionaire media superstar would make an excellent president and we keep Carrot Top on the ticket as insurance against assassinating Oprah.) But we should be looking for someone like Carter, and that person is not Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or Howard Dean.
Number Three: You can’t stay above the fray and expect to win the fray.
This is where I take my hat off to Karl Rove. He understands that politics is a dirty no-holds-barred battle. He’s studied his Sun Tzu and knows that you take the fight to your opponent. You capitalize on his weaknesses and redirect his strengths against himself. Somewhere in the upper echelons of Democratic leadership they decided to “stay above the fray” and they ended up showing up to a gun fight with a pocket knife.
Many voters voted for Bush because they knew what he stood for and they couldn’t make the same claim about Kerry. In Bush, voters got “pro-war”; in Kerry, voters got “pro-war-but…” In Bush, voters got “anti-gay-marriage”; in Kerry, voters got “anti-gay-marriage-but…” In Bush, voters got “I’m George W. Bush”; in Kerry, voters got “I’m not George W. Bush…” That was all many of us needed to hear, but apparently was not enough for the majority of voters.
Kerry was not in a good position to plausibly oppose the war, something that Howard Dean might have done better, but then Howard Dean had his own baggage as well. But Kerry could have supported equal rights for gays by saying he supported the right of states to make their own decisions regarding marriage, maybe even highlighting the issue by saying “what’s right for Massachusetts or California may not be right for Mississippi or Colorado.” By going “states rights”, he might have even pulled in disaffected Republicans and some Libertarians, too.
Also, the Democrats have got to learn how to play dirty. Kerry’s strength was his Vietnam service, so the Republican dirty tricksters served up the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They attacked Kerry’s strength and forced him to defend himself and back away from his illustrious service record. Kerry could not play the “I’ve been through a failed war, I know better” card
Where was the Democratic response against Bush’s strength, the War on Terror! Where was the commercial juxtaposing Bush’s “I don’t know where Osama is… I’m not that concerned about him” with Condoleezza’s “I believe the memo was entitled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the United States.” Where was the commercial with the split screen of Saddam being routed out of his spider hole on one side and Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam on the other? Where was the commercial that morphs Bush’s head into the hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib which then morphs into Osama bin Laden, with the tagline of “torture is terrorism.” Where was the animation of flag-draped caskets parading by on a timeline, showing the US military war dead, punctuated by graphics that appear as cartoon balloons and then pop! – “weapons of mass destruction” (pop!) “wanted dead or alive” (pop!) “Mission Accomplished” (pop!) “Iraqi sovereignty” (pop!) – and the caskets just keep rolling by, in greater and greater numbers. Where was the ad with the background chanting of “four more years” as pictures are faded in and out of maimed soldiers, terror alerts, tortured prisoners, escalating debt, faulty intelligence, and so on?
There were so many ripe opportunities for political mudslinging and the Democrats just let them wither on the vine. I saw a few catchy ads on the Internet, produced by MoveOn and other 527’s, often created by regular directors and cybergeeks, but none that made the level of national attention or would have been seen by that great mass of Red States that aren’t glued to a computer. The only ripple in the national psyche on these topics came with “Fahrenheit 9/11”, which brought many important truths to light, but it was delivered by such a polarizing figure that it just further separated us into Red and Blue.
So fellow progressives, those are my tips for the next election. Frame our issues in high and lofty Christian moral terms, attack their issues with down and dirty mudslinging, and work like hell to guarantee free and fair elections in America. Keep your chins up, progressives! Forty-nine percent of America supported our candidate and a majority support our stance on the issues. The conservatives bought the next four years, now they own it. There’s no liberals left to blame for their mistakes anymore.