I don't often post diaries, but I wanted to lay out my brief take on the next four years and see if anyone has any thoughts.
This is now a race, and a pretty grim one, between how fast the reality that Republicans hid and ran against can blow up in their faces and how fast they can consolidate their power and implement enough of their proto-fascist philosophy to make the previous point irrelevant.
(More after the jump)
Bush has clearly been aided and abetted by the media in his effort to hide reality and put forward a second-term "platform" that makes no sense. But Bush will be unable to fix the economy and the healthcare system and tend to his base at the same time. And he will be unable to privatize social security or fix Iraq under any circumstances. Another terrorist attack is more likely than not and, without an opposition candidate to demonize and scare people about, the blame will be firmly pinned on Bush. Indeed, I think many of us feared the mess Kerry would have stepped into had he won, and with patience, we might finally see all his complaints and our criticisms vindicated.
BUT, can we afford to be patient? While Bush's house of cards is collapsing, his goons and his Congressional lieutenants will be consolidating their power. More states will redraw their district lines in an effort to bolster the House majority. The Supreme Court will tack hard to the right and Scalia and Thomas may soon be seen as the moderates. Congressional Democrats will be further ignored and shut out of power. And the rigid, intolerant society the red states voted for will move closer to reality.
Which will win and what can we do? My sense is that the next election won't really be about policies, in Iraq or at home. It will be about Democracy and whether the vision of our founders is slipping away. We need to start pounding on these fundamental themes right away. Dems need to make a stand against any expansion of the Patriot Act and they need to go to war over the Supreme Court.
Specifically, on the latter, I think the imminent retirement/passing of Rehnquist will be huge. Dems will have the luxury of laying out all of their themes about the radicalization of the judiciary while not actually needing to block the nominee. After all, Rehnquist votes the wrong way virtually all of the time and while his replacement is likely to be a more virulent strain of radical conservative, he or she won't actually alter the balance of power. Hopefully, then, we will make it to the midterms with none of the 6 "reasonable" justices leaving and we can make the Court a key issue in 2006.
But the broader question is, how do you make voters care about their personal freedom, their democracy and their constitution? How do you get the people to stop focusing on the rights and freedoms they are blithely willing to deny others and start focusing on the rights and freedoms they themselves may one day be denied.
It's going to take bigger men than Terry McAuliffe, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle to do it. I think John Kerry can help, but it has to come from above and below. Can we do it?