While I am hopeful and completely open to the remote possibility that the Ohio count may ultimately lead to a Kerry victory, I'd like to reflect for a moment on what I think was the real failure of the Democratic party in pursuing this election.
I think a lot of attention has rightfully been focused on the ground game, but it seems clear after last night's results that both camps can mobilize in a big way. This means that GOTV and other such ground efforts are surely vital, but that they, in and of themselves, are not sufficient to deliver a victory.
This election, by almost any measure, should have been a cake walk. But within that very phrase, "should have", I think lies the true cause for our troubles, whether we ultimately win or lose.
See below the fold for what I mean.
Why do we say that we "should have" won this? Well, we all know the reasons - Bush's performance on the economy, his planning and execution of the war, his policies on the environment, and all the other complaints that we've all made and heard a million times.
So why wasn't Bush defeated handily? It's because for each of the above points of failure, as well as almost any other such issue you could name, the Bush administration has developed an alternate interpretation of the facts which paints the news in a positive light.
Now, many times, these "alternate interpretations" involve cherry-picking or possibly outright distortion of the matter, but nonetheless, the arguments we've had with the administration over the last 4 years have been largely centered on he-said/she-said bickering over the validity of these alternate viewpoints.
This permitted the administration to deny passing the buck in almost every circumstance - they simply refused to admit the existence of any buck in the first place.
The reality of the matter is that, in order to intelligently select from one of two competing versions of the facts, people must either have a real understanding of the underlying issues (as many of us have), or they must have an independent, informed media who can parse the spin and provide a balanced analysis. The debate must - simply MUST - be framed in terms that both sides can agree is fair, before any coherent dialog can occur.
But this is not how the present-day system works. The way it works today is as follows: highly intelligent, well informed people on both sides of the spectrum try to exaggerate and sensationalize their side of the debate on nearly every issue in a hard-fought battle to capture the minds of millions and millions of relatively uninformed voters. These voters will literally believe anything they are told, so long as it is told to them in a fashion that does not rub them the wrong way.
So it is in this field, ripe with Orwellian promise, that the national debate on the issues truly takes place. Wishing for it to be otherwise is just that - idle wishing.
Over the last decade, the Republicans have looked hard at this reality and they have adapted to it in a remarkably powerful and thorough way. They changed their entire PR and campaign strategy to be optimized for winning under these circumstances. And, they have issued noseplugs to the better-informed Republicans so that the electoral masses can't see them holding their noses while they obfuscate the facts.
They have mastered the art of not feeling bad about lying because they've fully rationalized this process. Their number one goal is to create an environment within which their policies can flourish. And if this means pulling the wool over the eyes of a few million poor white Christians living in the South, so be it.
For a long time, the Democrats have relied on the media to referee this game, but it seems abundantly clear that the resolve of the media to do so has crumbled under the Bush administration.
In my opinion, the traditional left-wing bias of the media does (or, rather, did) in fact exist; however its magnitude was greatly exaggerated by the Right. So when Fox began to present news without this bias, the exaggerated nature of the perceived left-wing spin caused (or permitted) a tremendous overreaction: the media skepticism on which the Left had relied for so long was thrown overboard along with the slim bias. This was the only way that the adjustment could be made to seem commensurate with the vast, mostly imaginary liberal conspiracy that was ostensibly being overthrown.
The rest of this story is well known to all of us: the other networks viewed with alarm as Fox's ratings outstripped their own, and they all determined that they needed to tone down the skepticism in order to survive. This trend was exacerbated tremendously during the period of national unity that followed the 9/11 attacks.
So here we are. And the reality of the matter is this: The Democrats are playing their media game with a strategy based on an outdated set of rules. Do we need to throw away the entire playbook? No. But here's the big thing:
This time, we tried as hard as I think we are capable of doing to mobilize the youth and minority votes, and it just wasn't enough. In an electoral numbers game, there are just more of them than there are of us. So....
We need to win back the hearts and minds of a significant number of relatively ill-informed, impressionable, Southern Christians if we are ever going to return to real power. And we cannot sit on our hands and hope that the media will snap out of their trance and do it for us -- the Republicans are pushing too hard in the other direction, and they have already dug in & begun sandbagging their positions within these voting groups. Remember that winning these people's votes was recently a foregone conclusion for Democrats. So it is possible!
(Note that when I say "ill-informed" I am not trying to be derisive; I am referring only to the fact that these voters are not inclined to read multiple newspapers and do their own research online. Their breed of skepticism abhors cognitive dissonance more than it does inconsistence or oversimplification.)
Let's call these voters what they are: white, lower-middle class Christians who are relatively impressionable but have a strong sense of unity, morality, and pride, and who strongly dislike the feeling that they're being talked down to.
I think the big challenge for us is to determine how we are going to go about doing this.
I think it's a mistake to play into the Republican paradigm that labels these voters "NASCAR dads," etc. It would be a huge mistake, in my mind, to continue the "Republican-lite" method of pandering to these voters; instead, we need to start to change their minds about the meaning and relative importance of the issues. And I think the only way we are going to be able to do this is by re-harnessing the media.
In other words, rather than tempering our stance on progressive issues in tokenistic ways, we need to focus on convincing these voters that the progressive message is the right message. And the only way we are going to be able to do this is through a decades-long slog where we pick up the broken pieces of the liberal media and put them back together into something that is palatable, understandable, sensible, collected, and entertaining.
We may well suffer some painful losses during the interim, but I feel we need to eschew the two-faced pragmatism that currently defines our party (and permits us to cobble together the just-less-than-adequate coalition that is our voting bloc), and instead forge a coherent, limited, and appealing progressive message at our core. Then we can slowly convince voters that our message is the right message.
And the core of this process is within the media. We need to develop a progressive voice that speaks to these masses, and we need to project it loudly. How to achieve this is the challenge that I hope we can begin to focus on as this campaign comes sputtering to a halt.
I hate to say it, but we "should have" started this process after our defeat in 2002.