I hope the title got you to read this diary. And I also hope this diary will stick around long enough (perhaps by being recommended?) to provoke a serious discussion in which many will participate. Let me explain. Yesterday I experience what I consider the self-destructive tendency that is all too often a part of why I think Democrats continue to lose, which is the inability or unwillingness to learn from what others have to say. I think this phenomenon has been demonstrated in several other exchanges on this site recently, but I will begin with mine, perhaps refer to others, and then encourage a serious examination of the issue.
Yesterday I posted a
diary in which I discussed how a fairly prominent Republican, John Whitehead (former #2 in State and former head of Goldman Sachs) was highly critical of Bush, especially on foreign policy, and yet ultimately voted for Bush yet again rather than Kerry. John is a lifelong Republican who except in 1944 (his first vote) had never even considered voting for a Democrat. Last year considered, but ultimately held his nose and continued his party loyalty. The issue for him was that as little as Bush demonstrated what he considered leadership, he saw little in Kerry either.
Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but the number of vitriolic comments on the thread was something I did not expect. One person called anyone who voted for Bush over Kerry fascists - and remember, this is being said about a man who saw combat during WW II, and whose first vote fro President in 1944 was for FDR because he did not believe in changing leadership during a war. Others said that his head to be up his ass. Still more complained that anyone who could not see Kerry was a better leader was either blind or willfully ignorant. One poster pointed to Kerry's actions during Iran-Contra as examples of leadership and opined that anyone who wouldn't therefore consider Kerry a superior leader to Bush was placing party over the nation. You get the gist. In my opinion, most if not all of these comments missed the real point.
I accept that my diary was inartfully crafted - I was grabbing a few minutes between meetings of key alumni at my Alma Mater (Haverford College) and the rushed quality of what I wrote is clearly demonstrated by the number of typos. But I do not believe that my inexpressiveness justifies many of the kinds of comments to which I have referred. And I think the tone and quality of such responses is illustrative of why Democrats continue to lose, and makes me concerned that we will not learn.
Let me preface what I am about to say with the following, so there is no doubt about my own beliefs. I was not a John Kerry fan. For a long time after it was clear that he would be the nominee I was expecting to sit out the election. One major issue for me is education, and quite frankly I had been upset for a number of years about the positions he had espoused on public education. When I wrote about my perhaps not voting for Kerry, I was attacked by a number of people here, even though as I pointed out that since I live in Virginia if Kerry needed my vote to win Virginia in order to win the election he was going to lose big time, since it has been decades since a Dem last carried the OId Dominion. When Kerry picked Edwards as his running mate, I held out some hope and decided to support him, but was quite disappointed by the campaign Kerry ran in the general, perhaps almost as much as I had been disgusted by the campaign he allowed to be run in his name during the primaries.
John Whitehead is a loyal and partisan Republican. From 1948 through 2000 he never considered voting for a Democrat. I do not think that should surprise or shock people anymore than the fact that there are lifelong Democrats who would never consider voting for a Republican. In 2004 he was unhappy with the incumbent Republican president, largely over what he saw as a lack of leadership. He was willing to consider a Democrat, but when he looked he also saw a lack of leadership as exemplified by that campaign, so he continued to vote for his party. And that SHOULD be something about which people would want to understand, not to attack him for his decision or me for making it known.
Let me repeat what I wrote several times in comments late last night when I finally got home and read some of the responses. When an incumbent president is running for reelection, voters first have to decide if they want to fire him, and only then do they consider whether they are willing to hire his opponent. Bush did his part - enough independents and Republican were concerned that they were willing to fire him. But Kerry did not close the sale. And let me note clearly had Kerry "closed" the sale the race would not have been close and we would not have to talk about Diebold or Choicepoint or Kenneth Blackwell or anti-gay ballot initiatives. Bush would have lost IA, NM, CO, NV and probably FL and OH by wide enough margins that there could have been no question about stealing them.
Let's look at recent examples of incumbents who ran and lost, Carter in 1980 and Bush 41 in 1992. In each case they were beaten pretty decisively in the electoral college. In the latter case, the rejection of Bush was so great that he got only 38% of the vote as a sitting president, a figure lower than that of anyone except William Howard Taft.
Bush claims to have won by several million, a few percentage points. B ut if the election was stolen, which for sake of argument t I will allow to be on the table, why was it even close enough for that to happen? Why couldn't Kerry close the sale? And what does any of this have to do with the title of this diary?
John Whitehead is a fundamentally decent man who has given hugely in time, energy and treasure. One does not have to agree with his political philosophy or decisions - and I often do not - to acknowledge this plain fact. His words offer something to us, which is the ability to understand what we need to do if we wish to be trusted by the American people with the leadership of this country. The voters want evidence that someone is a strong leader. If a ma n as perceptive and committed to this nation's best interests in the broadest sense as John Whitehead says that he found Kerry lacking in leadership (as he finds most political leaders lacking in leadership nowadays) perhaps there is a message we ought to here, rather than lashing out in frustration and verbally attempting to kill the messenger. I found some of the responses the equivalent of a small child sticking his fingers in his ears and going "na-na-na- I won't llsten to you." And if we continue down that pattern, we will continue to lose national elections (as well as many at lower levels).
Why did a president who was so polarizing win reelection? Are we going to simply blame the voters for being obtuse, or worse? Are we going to lose the sense of self-deprecation Moe Udall had by only take the literal meaning of his words when he said after losing a primary in 1976 "The voters have spoken, the Bastards."??? Will we continue to be willful and call anyone who does not see the world as do we an idiot or worse?
Kerry did not respond to the Swift Boat attacks. For whatever reason, being overly managed, not understanding the effect the attacks would have, or something else, that gave many voters a sense that he was weak - if he wouldn't defend himself, how could he defend the nation? His campaign message was also more than a bit incoherent, offering no broad vision that would indicate to the American people how he would lead.
We have been down this road. I remind readers that in 1988 Dukakis had a 17 point lead coming out of his convention. That lead demonstrated how unhappy the American people were with Poppy Bush, their willingness to fire him and hire someone else. And Dukakis ran somewhat on biography - the son of immigrants being his equivalent of Kerry and his Vietnam buddies. But when Dukakis was attacked on the Pledge of Allegiance, he did not respond. That attack questioned his patriotism, and he knew it. That raised questions about his leadership. Certainly the Floyd Brown inspired Willie Horton attack ad also hurt. Dukakis's perceived lack of passion fed into an image of someone who was all head and unwilling to show real emotion. On Nightline Ted Koppel encapsulated the problem when he told Dukakis that he (the Governor) didn't get it - that the other guy was kicking him in the groin and he wasn't responding.
Look, many of the American people did not agree with Reagn's approach on the issues, but they decided they liked him, they felt that he had a sense of who he was and what he stood for, and that was better than what they saw in Carter. In 1992 they had had it with Bush, and there was enough of what they saw in Clinton for him to win .. and he might well have won more decisively had not Perot gone on a late attack against him -- that did peel some potential voters away from Clinton but remember that they went to Perot, not Bush -- 62% of those who voted rejected the sitting president.
We have on dailykos seen people excoriate those who disagree with what they themselves would do, or how they perceive issues and actions. That is not how to win elections. Winning office - and also governing - requires the ability to build coalitions. Coalitions are not built by disparaging those whose support you need in order first to win and then later to govern. A sitting United States Senator takes the time to explain to this community why the actions of some officeholders might not match the orthodoxy some here seem to require, and for this he is trashed? Other senators about whom there should be no doubt as to their commitment to a progressive agenda make a strategic decision on how to approach the issue of the Supreme Court and the reaction of some here is threaten to refuse to ever support them in the future? How is such an approach ever going to lead to winning elections? If we are not willing to hear and understand the reasoning process of those who take a different path than we do, how will ever learn to express things in a manner that might convicne them to act otherwise? Will we ever learn to win elections?
There have been Democrats who have learned how to listen - to the voters, to various constituent groups that have not been notably friendly to Demcoratic cnadidates - and as a result they have won. Governors such as Mark Warner and B rian Schweitzer have demonstrated this. Voters have shown a willingness to continue to vote for someone with whom they may strongly disagree on some issues because that candidate or officeholder presents as someone with a clear sense of where he is going, and voters are far more willing to trust him than someone who may appear to agree with them on issues but seems to ack with many shifting breezes. I have mentioned Reagan, and on the progressive side I can talk about Russ Feingold.
My hope is that this diary can in some way help people understand the importance of learning from those who might have voted for our side but didn't why not. I am not proposing triangulation or taking issues of importance off the table - I am neither Dick Morris nor the DLC. I am strongly suggesting that if we are unwilling to listen we will continue to lose. Much of politics is perception. If people do not perceive a candidate as a strong leader, our response should not be that they are idiots, or to yell even more loudly about how the other guy isn't a leader. Whitehead acknowledged that he was unhappy with Bush's leadership, and hyet he still wouldn't vote for Kerry, and the reason was his perception of Kerry not being a leader. We cannot argue that the voter (in this case Whitehead) should look beyond the campaign to the man, when the candidate is responsible for the campaign and how it presents him -- if it fails to demonstrate to the voters that he is a strong leader, then he is not a strong leader. If someone cannot shape his own campaign to portray his strengths, how will he shape and lead the nation to present it to friends and potential foes and thus keep America safe? Isn't that part of the unstated text in what Whitehead has to offer us?
And what does it say about our vision of this nation that when we have the opportunity to learn so many of us seem unwilling to take the oportunity to broaden our understanding and instead choose to demonize those with whom we disagree?
I akcnowledge that I too get frustrated, that I may respond to such comments directed towards me with a few selective (or not so selective) invocations of vitriol and scorn. As Markos has rightly pointed out, we often do fight among ourselves, and such should part part of the function of a site such as this. Thanks to his openness, we allow such disputation, we don't have a mandatory line to which one must adhere in order to participate.
That said, do we not also have a responsibility to be honest, to examine the evidence even when the result of that examination may require us to acknowledge our own failures i n connecting with the American people?
There are Democrats who are trying to learn. When I enounter them, my first question is whether they truly want to listen and learn, or merely repeat their talking points? If the latter, I have better things to do with my time and energy than to engage them. But if the former, then I have a responsibility to offer my insights, to listen to their responses, to learn their concerns. Insofar as we are unwilling to do so, we merely continue a pattern that has not proven sufficient to convince the American people to entrust us with the reins of power. If we cannot win elections, we will not have the opportunity to govern. And if we do not win because we are unwilling to listen and learn, then do not we become at least in part responsible for the damage done by those who do win?
I hope that we can have an honest discussion. I acknowledge that my thinking on this process is not fully fleshed out, and that I have much to learn. I recognize that at least some of the responses to my diary of yesterday were as much expressions of frustration as they were willful obtuseness. But I think what I encountered - and what I have more frequently encountered as I examine exchanges here - is symptomatic of a deeper problem that we must quickly and honestly address, otherwise we will yet again squander an opportunity to be bale to turn this country from the dangerous path down which it now lurches.