There's a special circle of Hell reserved, in the minds of liberal and moderate Democrats, for anyone who claims to oppose the crimes and delusions of the Republican Party who then ends up voting for a third party candidate, or who doesn't bother to vote, or who (worst of all) ends up voting for a Republican. The very mention of the name Ralph Nader sends these folks into verbal fits of frothing at the mouth and textual fits of ALL CAPS. The Green Party and the Libertarians can induce similar if not quite so violent seizures. And the targets of their wrath are generally to be found in those groups known as the independents, the "swing voters", the hopeless idealists, and the disaffected non-voters or infrequent voters.
The loyal, rock-steady Republican voters are dismissed as much more understandable objects of scorn (all the usual wingnut, racist, greedhead, fundamentalist tags) or pity ("why do they keep voting against their own interests?"). But the less predictable voter, the one whose party loyalties are not so assured, the one who may just blow off voting as an exercise in futility—those are the ones who will be harangued with choruses of "IT'S YOUR FAULT WE HAVE BUSH" or "anything but a vote for us is vote for the Republicans!!" What's missing from all of this outrage is any sense of the Democrats' own responsibility for these situations and any attempt to understand what is making "those stupid voters" not automatically fall in line behind every Democratic candidate more than a sliver to the left of Zell Miller.
Problem #1 that has to be overcome is the idea that there is a spectrum of political beliefs and opinions running from left to right, and that "swing voters" and independents (and to a lesser extent, non-voters) are those whose beliefs and opinions fall toward the middle of this spectrum and who can therefore be wooed to one side or the other by the Democrats or the Republicans being better at "appealing to the center". In reality there is no one left-to-right spectrum that people fall neatly into. There are probably several different types of spectra based on one's attitudes toward sex, authority, community, helping others besides yourself, privacy, religion, localism versus globalism, punishment, progress versus tradition, equality, diversity, etc. While it's true that there are large groups of people that have similar positions on all these scales, there are also pretty decent sized groups of people who don't fit consistently into the larger clumpings that the left-right spectrum is supposed to represent.
The consequence of this is that plenty of independents and others who don't reliably vote Democratic (but who sometimes do so) have major disagreements on fundamental issues with the Democratic Party, not nuanced shades of difference, so merely pointing out the badness of the alternative or scattering some crumbs in their direction to placate them is not enough to close the deal. Sometimes the Democratic candidate seems to think it's sufficient to mutter darkly about who the Republicans might appoint to the Supreme Court, or they may go out of their way to start talking about their religious beliefs or how they really do like hunting. These are misguided tactics.
The reason they're misguided is because of Problem #2, namely the idea that if Democrats state their positions on the issues and Republicans state theirs, the voters will do some kind of mental arithmetic and vote for the one whose positions they are more in agreement with (or against the one whose positions they disagree with the most). Of course by this logic the voter could just as easily pick a third party candidate, but the voter is also supposed to know enough to vote strategically (see problem #3 below). But voters have two reasons not to perform this calculation, especially when it comes to positions that they are supposed to be in agreement with.
One is a matter of emphasis. Positions that the Democrats mention on page 17 of their platform statement but don't hammer away on in the actual campaign tend to be discounted by most voters, although they are often the ones that Democrats count on voters to automatically associate with the Democratic "brand". In short, if you don't talk it up the voter will assume you don't really see it as important. While it's true that the pseudo-issues that do get maximum airtime during a campaign are often the ones that the corporate media want to push, independents in particular are looking for someone who can break through this blather and assert their own agenda vigorously, even noisily and disrespectfully. Which is why Ross Perot got as many votes as he did in spite of being considered a freak by the media and doing his best to live up to that.
The other reason your positions get ignored, even when they seem like ones the voter should agree with, is that the voters don't believe you. In other words, they have heard this promise before and nothing much has ever come of it when you were given the chance to do something about it—you have no credibility on it anymore. Even worse, the voters often don't even think you're ineffective—they think you're just plain bullshitting them and that you have no intention of doing what you say. So if anything the position which is supposed to draw their support only engenders their cynicism. Often the language used can aggravate matters: as an example, the DNC sends out surveys (along with pleas for money) periodically asking Democratic donors to number issues from most important to least important based on a canned list. One of the issues is the mealy-mouthed "Ethics in government", which immediately alerts the voter that the best that can be expected from the Democrats is minor lobbying reforms and major platitudes. The reasonably bright voter knows the real issue is "Corruption in government", not ethics, perhaps even more accurately "Wholesale corruption of government and the democratic process by moneyed interests"—there, that wasn't so hard to say, was it? Franklin D. Roosevelt would have had no problem saying it. The fact that today's Democrats phrase it as the neutral sounding "Ethics in government" indicates that their interest in doing something about the real issue is minimal. Given that, it's easy to see how a voter might choose Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney, even disagreeing with 75% or more of their positions, because the positions that the voter does agree with them on actually seem to be sincerely held, so at least the voter gets something out of them, plusses to go with minuses, rather than minuses to go with zeros for fakery.
Now for positions on which the voter is supposed to definitely disagree with the other side and therefore give you their vote, a similar if not quite so complicated logic is used. Disagreement gives the voter a reason not to vote for one candidate or party, but less of a reason to vote for the other most of the time. One tempering factor is how realistic the chance is that the position being promoted will actually translate into action. When the two houses of Congress are relatively balanced in party representation, many voters figure that they can vote for a candidate with whom they disagree on a particular issue because the likelihood of the candidate getting Congress to go along is slim. That's how Republicans used to be able to get votes from people who were in favor of abortion rights but otherwise liked the Republican pro-business agenda— those voters assumed that the opposition party would prevent Republicans from actually doing anything serious to implement their abortion agenda. (Too bad this turned out not to be the case—expect the Democratic-approved court to repeal Roe v. Wade later this year.) Gun owners who vote Democratic may have to perform the same mental jiu-jitsu (crossed fingers: hopefully we'll elect more Webb-Tester Democrats and not have to rely on Republicans for this).
Problem #3, which the Democrats tend to minimize to their peril, is that not everyone votes strategically. Yes, a voter can realize that a vote for the Green Party is not likely to have any effect, since the odds of the Greens winning anything are never particularly good and in national races are downright horrible. So therefore the voter should pick the least worst major party, in this case always assumed to be the Democrats, and vote for them—if one believes in voting strategically. But for many people the rewards of doing this are too meager to justify it, while for others the whole concept is either foreign or reprehensible. Voting in solidarity with a cause you believe in is the natural behavior versus voting to minimize your losses in a calculated way, and it's reinforced by the unrealistic expectations that some voters get when they've committed to their chosen cause. (I've been there—heck, I was one of the few people to think McGovern was actually going to win in 1972!) Even moreso than the third party voter, the non-voter or infrequent voter has little use for this type of thinking—to them the idea of voting for either of two parties that they consider crooked, insincere, and antagonistic toward their own interests is the height of foolishness.
So while "those stupid voters" and their non-voting compatriots may seem irrational and irresponsible to Democratic activists, they are responding logically to the types of campaigns that Democratic candidates for national office often run:
- Issues of real importance to the voters are rarely discussed
- When they are discussed, those issues are couched in wonkish sounding jargon or in mealy-mouthed language that is meant to appeal to a mythical centrist voter but instead projects a lack of passion, sincerity and real interest
- Voters are expected to keep associating the Democrats with helping the working class when they haven't delivered anything big on that score for decades—and the voters know that well
- Democrats highlight other issues where they have similarly failed to produce any significant results when given the chance, and assume voters will forgive or forget that
- When the Republicans are on the unpopular end of an issue, the Democrats do the minimum necessary to differentiate themselves and then expect to get votes by default from voters who don't like the Republican position
- While Democratic activists present every election as choice between their party and ultimate doom, the national party is more often than not unwilling to be quite so dramatic, so mixed messages abound
- The voter is expected to behave in his or her "rational self-interest" and vote Democratic after adding up the plusses and minuses of issues as filtered through the media, and everyone is aghast when she or he doesn't
In the 2006 election, one of the more successful ones from the Democrats' standpoint, they didn't follow the above script. Basically the campaign boiled down to
Iraq and Abramoff, with images of Cindy Sheehan standing in the dirt of Crawford, human bodies floating through the post-Katrina destruction of New Orleans, and various grim-faced right-wingers caught in gay sex scandals forming the visual backdrop. The message was: elect us and we will get American troops home from Iraq posthaste and end the Republican culture of corruption. Voters bought that message and gave Congress back to the Democrats for the first time in over a decade.
In 2008, the Democrats are back in the familiar position of having not delivered on what were essentially new promises from them back in 2006. Even worse, they've served up a lot of big talk on other new issues like FISA and repeatedly caved in despite their big talk. The only thing standing between them and what would probably be a crushing electoral repudiation a la 1994 (after Clinton failed to deliver on national health care) is that the Republicans have poisoned their own brand so badly. Fortunately for the Democrats, one other reason that motivates people to vote is to punish a ruling clique that is steeped in arrogance, criminality and incompetence. The Democrats have to take advantage of this by differentiating themselves sharply from the Republicans, not merely claiming that they can be marginally more competent stewards of the same corrupt kingdom (the tack John Kerry tried in 2004). The issues to highlight include: subversion of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, corruption of the electoral process by attempts to suborn federal prosecutors and retaliation against those who wouldn't play along, complete mismanagement of the economy and connivance with Wall Street insiders at the expense of both taxpayers and small shareholders, the abuse and exploitation of our soldiers via "stop-loss" and the shabby treatment they receive from the government when they return, etc. There are lots of opportunities to go negative, and in this case that's the right move because most voters know something is seriously wrong and want to punish those who have gotten us into this mess. Obama may need to stay positive to keep his image consistent, but every other public face of the Democrats should be going the other way.
Paul Craig Roberts, the right-wing ex-Treasury official under Reagan, makes the case for this in a recent CounterPunch. Roberts, a vehement critic of Bush and Cheney, is no fan of Obama and considers his "message of hope" an insincere cover for "more of the same", but he says:
Where is the hope when Obama endorses a foreign policy that benefits only Israeli territorial expansion and an economic policy that benefits only multimillionaires and billionaires?
The answer is that Obama’s election would signify the electorate’s rejection of Bush and the Republicans. Considering the cowardice of the Democratic Congress and its reluctance to hold a criminal regime accountable, electoral defeat is the only accountability that the Bush Republicans are likely to experience.
It is not sufficient accountability, but at least it is some accountability.
If the Republicans win the election and escape accountability, the damage Republicans have done to the US Constitution, civil liberty, and a free society will be irreversible. The Bush Regime and its totalitarians have openly violated US law against spying on Americans without warrants and US and international laws against torture. The regime and its totalitarians have violated the Constitution that they are sworn to uphold. Bush’s attorney general Gonzales even asserted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the US Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.
When federal courts acted to stop the regime’s unconstitutional practices and abuse of prisoners, the Republicans passed legislation to overturn the court rulings. The Republican Party has shown beyond all doubt that it holds the US Constitution in total contempt.
Today the Republican Party stands for unaccountable executive power.
To reelect such a party is to murder liberty in America.
The Democrats are treading on thin ice and may only be able to avoid punishment of their own for another electoral cycle or two, but they have to make sure no one is uncertain that it's the Republicans who need to be rejected resoundingly this time out. After that they may only have a window of two years, maybe four at the outside, where they can start delivering some real benefits to the people who have voted for them rather than to the big corporate donors. Otherwise Obama may end up being a transitional figure, "one and done", the "next Jimmy Carter" that the Republicans were originally hoping Hillary Clinton would be, and some breed of New Republicans (Huckabee-style if not Huckabee-led, perhaps) may be sending the Democratic majority in Congress back to the unemployment line. As the economy inevitably worsens, the political climate will grow increasingly volatile, so the Democrats have to grasp whatever opportunities they get with both hands like Roosevelt did in his time. The path to disaster is to stick with half-hearted measures, broken promises, and assumptions that one will get (and will deserve to get) votes by default. It won't be the voters' fault if that approach leads to defeat.