Ta-Nehisi Coates is on fire, praising Obama for running a hell of a campaign, and telling liberals to quit their usual handwringing and realize what amazing thing is happening right before their eyes. (The opening visual is profane, but hilarious). Excerpt:
John Kerry wasn't swift-boated--he was beaten by a superior campaign. I guess Al Gore lost because of Nader and the Supreme Court. But why was it ever even that close? What is the use of being a Southern senator when you can't carry a single state in the South? I mean no disrespect to any of those guys, I really don't. But this notion that mystical and nefarious forces deprived them from claiming what was rightly theirs is odious and self-serving.No one has conspired to deprive us of power over the past few decades. The American people aren't stupid. We've sucked at articulating our message. If you have any interest in a more progressive country, we need to be honest. At the presidential level, at least, conservatives have hammered us. Give them their due. Don't blame Rush. Don't blame Kristol. Don't denigrate states you've never visited. Give them their due. Give them their respect. Study them, and then get better.
Denial is bad for two reasons. First, if you can't accept that you lost, you don't have a prayer of getting better. If you think Kerry and Gore lost because they were too "high-minded," then you miss the basic fundamentals at work, and spend your days congratulating yourself for being up on the latest Paul Krugman. This is a war, and you don't lose wars because of abstract principles, but because of hard immovable facts.
There's great advice in that for conservatives in defeat. By the way, Daniel Finkelstein, a Tory who was at Conservative HQ on the night Tony Blair swept into power in 1997, has some advice for disconsolate fellow US conservatives anticipating the Morning After: "You won't matter."
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Coates is right: the left is suffering from the political equivalent of the battered wife syndrome, in which every move from the GOP makes the wife flinch. If the Republican candidate had the overwhelming lead that Obama has in this race, the discussion would be about who will be in his cabinet, which legislation will he bring first to Congress, etc. Ironically, only commentators on the right are looking at these questions now.
Still, you can't really blame Democrats for being nervous, not after they saw this country re-elect a president who was not just manifestly ill-prepared for the job, but who even took the nation into a disastrous war under false pretenses. Most Americans have made peace with this catastrophic mistake, but if you talk to other folks around the world, they still ask: After all his screw-ups, how could the US possibly re-elect George Bush?
Nobody I know has a very good answer to that question. Hence it's natural for Democrats to wonder if Americans have really come to their senses, or if they once again will elect a right-wing Republican for no apparent reason.
After all his screw-ups, how could the US possibly re-elect George Bush?
He was running against John Kerry. One of the few people on the face of the planet who could make George the Dumber look charismatic and attractive. Both parties have had trouble recently selecting good candidates, historically with all the baggage that McCain has to carry, a tanking economy, an unpopular war, and so on, the political discussion would be whether or not McCain could even carry Arizona let alone win the election. This year, thanks to another weak candidate in Obama, McCain still has a shot, a slim shot, true, at winning the election.
Not really.
It is an important PR strategy. The WORST thing that could happen was if the electorate truly believed (even if polls and such were to back such an assertion) that this would be a landslide.
That's true no matter who the landslide was for. The US voter default is apathy and complacency. Even in the most exciting of Presidential election years a pretty small fragment of eligible voters actually go out and do so.
If they felt that 'Well, he's got this in the bag' (again, doesn't matter who 'he' is.. and this year its both he..), they will stay home. Many will anyway, who claim they're gonna vote.
THAT is why you have the whole 'let's not get overconfident', rather than any sort of battered wife, or handwringing.
They could be at home secretly, hoping nobody hears, doing victory dances already. But you are NOT going to see much of that in public.
Kit Stolz writes "Still, you can't really blame Democrats for being nervous, not after they saw this country re-elect a president who was not just manifestly ill-prepared for the job, but who even took the nation into a disastrous war under false pretenses"
We forget about a lot of things, we Americans. The invasion of Iraq was really the inevitable result of Desert Storm 12 years earlier. The pending collaspe of the international sanctions agaist Iraq in 2003 and the challenge to the reserve currency status of the dollar forced Bush's hand. I have come to conclude that Desert Storm in 1991 may have been an overreaction and we could have gotten Iraqi army out of most if not all of Kuwait without firing a shot. Bush I wanted a war, think Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime would fall. It did not. And then with the crushing sanctions after, maybe invasion looked like the best thing after all.
Remember all the super-patriotic war fever in 1991?? Well this is the resulting negative pay-back for all that crap. We are all guilty, not just George Bush!
Is there any wonder that there is apathy about elections when even the well-informed see
1) the media supporting one candidate and/or party above others,
2) the vast amount of money being spent (much of it coming illegally from overseas),
3) no proof of identity, residence, or citizenship required for registration or voting
4) massive fraudulent registration and voting.
In Washington, in 2004 the number of proven illegal votes cast was well above the number needed to turn the election after the third recount. It didn't matter. Why should it be different this time?
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