One night, drowned out by a myriad of other topics discussed that evening. Not even close to enough to make a dent in four years of Orwellian Republican talking points and insinuations.
Fine, you take the high road and continue to lose.
I’ll be out here trying to help craft an effective campaign strategy (not that I have any pull to get my ideas adopted, but still…)
I wish I were that confident. But we just finished with an election in which the fact that Osama Bin Laden is still alive, free, and making videos three years after he should have been captured at Tora Bora somehow became a point in favour of the President. My fear is that in four years if, heaven forbid, terrorist guerillas are still rising up in response to U.S. actions against foreign states, Bush supporters will still be shouting “don’t change horses in midstream”.
Is it worth it to win if we do so in a manner that throws the basic political philosophy of this country on its ear? Do we just give up on the idea of an educated and informed electorate and run our campaigns as giant misinformation engines, geared to tell the people what they want to hear so they’ll vote for us?
I have to agree with jayjay to a certain extent. Becoming “Republican-lite” is not a winning strategy for the Democrats, nor is taking the moral low ground.
But I also agree with Neurotik that the Democrats desperately need to be better at getting their message out. “Controlling the message” doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have to be a negative thing. But it does mean, as Neurotik stated, taking control of the parameters of debate for a change. It also means things like vigorously confronting slander and innuendo against us, and framing our issues in more positive ways.
Which dovetails back to the last part of the OP: not just having a plan to confront terrorism (as John Kerry did) but aggressively promoting and highlighting the advantages of that plan, not just in the next debates but for the next four years.
What put Bush over the top in Ohio were people coming out to vote in the strong Bush counties that usually don’t vote, leading to sometimes near total turnout. I just don’t see terrorism as bringing all those people to the polls, no matter what they might say. And I know, because I was there, what the Republican GOTV effort was pushing on. It wasn’t security (though they did have a few mailers with Kerry’s head looming over the WTC in flames): it was mostly gay marriage, abortion, etc. My guess is that these people did indeed get fired up TO VOTE because of these issues, but in general they see themselves as always supporting those issues anyway, so they pinned their votes on other, additional factors.
Thanks for backing up my Pit thread that he won on lies. Because if you examine the reality of his decicsions on fighting terrorism (net gain for the terrorists) vs. the rhetoric, you see that people are responding to rhetoric (lies) not reality. (And again…the PIPA study.)
I agree that the Dems have to get much better at getting their message out and not letting the Republicans define them. What’s ironic about this is that Clinton was a master of it, so the party was doing just that only eight years ago. When the Democratic Party started running away from Clinton, it ran away from its best media manipulator.
No, the problem I have is the idea of both parties starting to toss out lies and half-truths like monkeys flinging poo and hoping they can throw enough to make it stick like the Republicans did under Rove. It’s bad enough with one of the major parties falling under this kind of tactic. If both do it, that’s the end of the rule of reason in American government.
I think you are dead wrong about that, Diogenes. Because the people who are so freaked out about gay marriage that they would base their vote for president on it would never be in danger of voting for anyone but Bush to begin with.
Nuerotik has exactly right.
By the way, this all being the case, and given the Bush voters disconnection from reality, Osama popping up five days before the election may have actually pushed the vote in Bush’s direction. Because people who believed Bush’s lies are obviously not going to be making the connection that Osama being free to make little movies to send us speaks to bush’s lack of ability on the terror issue, but instead it simply reminded them that they are freaked out about terrorism, so they have to vote for Bush…
Sigh…
Then you’ll have to explain why in the 11 states that had anti-gay marriage referenda, Bush’s lead over Kerry was less than in the states that did not. As Paul Freedman writes in Slate,
If there is a statistical correlation between your “hate voters” and Bush’s success, you haven’t shown it.
Stoid, the PIPA study focused on questions for areas in which Bush was vulnerable. Where is the study that picked out areas in which Kerry’s plans were vulnerable or unclear, and questioned likely Kerry supporters about those?
White House press conference with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, 31 January 2003:
Could it have been any clearer?
And why did they flee Clinton? Because the Republicans hunted him down until they finally found something to shame him with. The Republicans are amazing at this stuff, I’ll give them that. They have an archaic and bankrupt philosophy, so they pour their energy into whatever machinations are required to win. And its workin’ for 'em.
See, the Dems don’t need to lie. They need to tell the truth louder, stronger and clearer. Both their own and the truth about the Republicans. Yeah, they need to get tough, but they don’t have to be dishonest. If Kerry had made the decision to go after Bush on his actual record, at the convention, in his ads, from the very start, and been less afraid to stand up and tell the truth about his own positions, he would have won, no question, even with all the dirty tricks on election day, becaue the vote would have been overwhelming.
The PIPA study was huge, huge. It showed clearly that people were operating from ignorance. It should have been Kerry’s crusade to eradicate that ignorance from Day One.
I should have been more explicit. He did say that. He also mentioned we “should be off getting Osama.”
Then he said he would have voted exactly the same on the Iraq war, and thought the invasion was a good idea – but he would have done it, like, differently, and better, and stuff, with help from Denmark and the consent of Belgium. Not red meat stuff. People were not mad that “there is no link between Iraq and terror.” They were mad that “There was no link between Iraq and 9/11 *and yet Bush dragged us into war partly on the pretext that there was, and the decision to go to war was not just procedurally wrong, but substantively wrong.” Why Kerry thought he could get mileage from pointing out the minor premise (Saddam is not al Q.) while refusing to state the real point (and thus we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq), I’ll never know. He also failed to fault Bush sufficiently for being soft on the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Egyptians, who’re all nurturing and exporting actual jihadis, unlike pre-war Iraq.
And the study focused on Iraq, Bricker, which is
supposedly Bush’s brilliant response to terrorism, and the reason he won!! Yet you say he’s vulnerable in those areas? Hello?
Once again: the people with the best grasp of facts were overwhelmingly in support of Kerry!
Let me break this down: the people who were hopelessly misinformed, clueless, ignorant, and wrong about Iraq, terrorism, WMD, etc., went overwhelmingly for Bush.
The people who were well-informed, with a clear understanding of the facts of terrorism, Iraq, etc, went overwhelmingly for Kerry.
The OP has made the point that the only place the numbers correlate with the vote is on terrorism.
It is also true that the ignorant were ignorant because they were being lied to and they believed it (again, see the PIPA study, which shows this clearly).
It follows, in the land of logic, that if the people listened to fewer lies and more truths, Kerry would have won. Period.
If you feel that Kerry had some glaring vulnerability that matches this, please share.
Whom do pro-lifers hate again? Women?
All true enough. He really was in an impossible situation regarding Iraq. Having to condemn a war and then say he could wage it better. There were many soft points in the Bush underbelly that Kerry could have slit like a dead deer but he didn’t.
No offense, but Freedman’s reasoning is trash. Think about what he’s saying: he’s trying to tell a story based on vote share. Let’s say that I’m arguing that people who normally wouldn’t have come out to vote came out in great numbers to vote for X. And someone responds: yeah, but the vote share wasn’t as close as last time, so that can’t be so.
What’s wrong with that picture? Well, for starters, there are a lot of other factors that determine vote SHARE than just how many people come out to vote for Bush. Namely, how many people came out to vote for Kerry. In 2000, for instance, Ohio wasn’t a highly contested state. The Kerry campaign had no real GOTV operation in the final month. That ALONE could explain why the vote share of Bush decreased in 2004, without considering who turned out to vote for Bush at all.
His reasoning also doesn’t tell you who the new voters were in 2004. It only tells you proportions. If all the terrorism voters were just the same die-hard partisans that voted Bush in 2000 anyway and also cited morality as a concern back then, his entire argument collapses.
Basically, trying to tell a story via statistical arguments is a lot HARDER than Freedman seems to be aware of.
From Kerry’s convention acceptance speech:
OK, but that makes those who offer the “hate vote” argument of Bush’s success just as obligated to show unambiguous statisitical evidence for their belief, doesn’t it?
So why was this basically the last we heard anything from the Kerry campaign on these themes, then?