I was wrong about this election. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I predicted -- I told my friends, my family, made two financial bets and my staked my honour as an armchair pundit (I had a nearly perfect record) -- that turnout would be 54% and that Kerry would win by 2 million votes. I said the Dems would lose four in the Senate but pick up two in the House.
It's not that I thought the country had gone more liberal in four years or that there was really a "silent progressive majority" out there that would turn out in droves for Kerry. In fact, I actaully though Bush was a more attractive candidate to the casual observer than the frat boy from 2000. But I was sure that, in the end, Bush and his cronies would prove too radical for voters. Too callow. Too blatantly mendacious. Too willing to play on people's fears, to laugh in their faces, to take their votes and sell them out. I talked confidently about the "rationality surge" -- to Gore at the end of 2000, to Dukakis at the end of 1988. I said the polls would break toward Kerry at the end, that people would come to their senses in this razor tight election and put him over the top. I said Bush's commercial "Alone in the booth -- why take the chance?" would come back to haunt Karl Rove. I was ready for some serious sachenfreude.
I was so sure.
I was sure when I read the Suskind article two weeks ago that the "reality based community" would prevail. Americans in the purple states, old Perot voters, Reagan Democrats, would see what I saw in Bush, or some variant of what I saw in Bush, and reject it. I thought a majority of Americans would recognize that Kerry's "global test", his "war on chaos" -- on despair, disease, poverty, international alientation, the root causes of terror -- would keep us safer, make us better, and that Bush's "freedom"-fetish mixed with his distain for nation building, for responsibility, was a pretty thin a gruel for these "times of change". Even if they didn't come to love him, even if they thought he was too elite, too liberal, a majority of Americans would come to see Kerry as the best -- the only -- rational alternative this election, on national security and on everything else.
I thought Americans would, in the end, come to see Kerry, however grudgingly, as a man of genuine faith -- a Catholic liberal wrestling with his faith, with his duties to his pro-choice base and to his God. They'd see through those outlier bishops' partisan bullshit, like the Swift Vet bullshit. They'd appreciate how much Kerry's children like him, how well they turned out; how he's managed to remain friends with his ex-wife through all these years; how he can laugh at himself for "marrying up", like in the third debate. Kerry is a Brahmin, sure, but he never struck me as a phony. Kerry is who he is. I thought enough Americans would come to share that view enough to offer their votes.
For months I read the words of Kerry supporters: liberals and neoliberals, moderate libertarians and socialist progressives; even a few arch conservatives like Robert George. People I agreed with and people I disagree with fundamentally on policy and political matters. I read Shrillblog and Brad Delong. David Corn and Peter Beinart. Tom Oliphant. Garence Franke-Ruta and Will Saleton. Katha Pollitt and Daniel Drezner. Military people and War opponents. Religious leaders and libertarians. Arab-Americans and Jews. Nader voters and Bush voters from 2000. Kerry supporters all. And unlike four years ago, when I was pratically the only die-hard Gore enthusiast I knew, I saw lots of people supporting Kerry with hope, not fear, with real enthusiasm. I didn't have to convince my friends this time. This time, my enthusiasm was contagious or at least reciprocated.
My parents voted absentee from their home in New Brunswick, Canada, for the first time since Mondale in 1984 for John Kerry and Rush Holt in New Jersey (the last place we lived). They're old-school yellow dogs from North Carolina: Carterites, refugees from the Methodist lower-middle-class Republicanism of our still-unofficially-segregated Southern hometown. I'm a New-Republic-reading Krugmanite neoliberal. We've argued about politics for years. They despaired of Clinton over everything from Monica to welfare reform and were happy to see him go. I couldn't persuade them to register and vote for Gore in 2000 (we knew he'd take New Jersey).
But this year, it was different. My Dad and I quibbled weekly over elements of the campaign, the platform, but, in the end, we were all proud to vote for Kerry. He was old-school liberal enough for my parents and New Democrat moderate enough for me. At my college at UBC, my American friends -- all New New Lefties or yellow dogs -- voted for Kerry without holding their noses. Kerry straddled the great divides of American iedology. It's hard to represent everyone in the Reality-based Community from the far left to the centre-right -- he certainly pissed me off from time to time, on the War, on social security, on the no-new-taxes pledge/trap -- but he still just about pulled off the impossible. He endured the endless humiliation of the mediawhores -- Fineman, Dowd, Kaus, Peretz (whom I used to like) and soldiered on. He focused the anti-Bush anger, gave it direction. He worked his ass off. He took advice but made his own choices. He believed in himself and we believed in him. All of us, everyone I know, hated Bush. But we voted for Kerry.
I was so wrong about the election. And now we face four more years without a hike in the minimum wage, without attention paid to the dark side of welfare reform, without expansion of health care benefits to the working poor. Four more years for Bush to wreck havoc on social security and international order, abortion rights, and to reinstate the "Constitution in Exile". And to talk his mean-spirited, illiberal small-minded cowbody talk to the nation. I hate that 51% of us are willing to hear it.
And yet, despite all that, I'm more a Democrat than I've ever been. I've cast ballots twice now for Democratic candidates I believed in, despite their faults. I believe the Dems, for all their lack of discipline and occasional spinelessness, offer a real alternative, something better. I see liberals across the blogosphere conducting themselves with more grace and candour than I saw after 2000: crunching the poll numbers, trying to figure out what went wrong, what we need to do, recognizing there are no easy answers and that lots of us got it wrong. I appreciate Salon's Geraldine Sealey's praise for Kerry today, and TAP's proposal of Kerry for Senate Minority leader. I'm grateful for Josh Marshall and Pandagon, Digby, Brad Delong and Steve Gilliard -- for clear-eyed, openminded, brokenhearted liberals everywhere. We're ready for the fight ahead.
And God, it's going to be a hell of a fight...