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I love reading my favorite blogs, but in the past few weeks I’ve been obsessed with a steady stream of political and polling analysis, while I remain a third of the way through _The System of the World_. Time for a change. I’m going to scale back dramatically on blog reading, which will hopefully lead to an increase in other reading, blogwriting, and other stuff. Accordingly, I’ve mashed together all the categories of the blogroll into one long list again. They’re all blogs I admire, though the number I’ll actually be reading will be small for the time being.
Until some as-yet-unreported source of missed Ohio votes appears, I assume that it’s over for Kerry. Items upon which I take only small comfort:
1. I wasn’t the only one who expected a clear Kerry win; in the final runup all the buzz on both sides of the fence was going his way, and it appears that both campaigns were equally surprised at the ultimate result.
2. Bush will now have to face his own mistakes and their consequences.
In my heart of hearts I was holding out for a very strong Kerry victory — clinching Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida all before midnight, or something to that effect. But new voters and increased voter turnout didn’t sway to the left; they stayed pretty much even, and so we got another razor-thin result that tilted Bush’s way.
Before I swear off paying attention to polls ever again, there are two things that struck me about the exit numbers reported last night. First, the Bush lead on the question of “who’s better to fight terror” was _huge_, and this despite the fact that when it comes to Iraq (mistake or not, success or failure, relevant to WoT or not) the results were more or less even. These numbers aren’t new, but seeing them verified in the voting booth reminded me of them, and of the fact that they make no sense to me at all and never will.
The other thing that struck me were the high numbers that put “moral values” as their number one concern. More did so than put “terrorism” or “the economy,” according to a couple of sources on TV last night. That, coupled with across-the-board passage of measures opposing gay marriage, tells me that the culturally conservative segment of our society is bigger than I thought, or at the very least way more motivated than I thought. It’s that resounding victory on the cultural front that makes things look especially bleak. Republicans have cemented their Congressional leads and now have a President who actually won the popular vote. Democrats are demoralized and will likely turn to if-only games and petty squabbling — at the very least they’ll be off their game for a while. Er, _more_ off their game than normal.
Here’s a hopeful take on things, one that my mind tells me is valid even if my heart isn’t in it right now:
After 9/11 Bush had approval ratings in the nineties. These have steadily eroded since then, and will continue to erode — it just so happens that at the moment of the election he still had it together enough to squeak out a victory. He did this thanks to a highly motivated cultural conservative base and a significant segment of the populace that takes solace, against reason, in his “tough guy” approach to terrorism. That latter group is going to keep shrinking, and history is against the cultural conservatives too, though that may take more time. And let’s not forget that the margin of victory was _miniscule_. It feels like a big defeat, but as I noted yesterday, the election results were still basically a statistical blip on what is essentially a divided nation. There is all the chance in the world of a comeback in four years.
Stupid early exit polls. It’s not like I expected Virginia to go to Kerry, but I picked up a surge of optimism in the past few days, and even more this afternoon, that it would be surprisingly close and that that would bode well for the other races. Nope. It’s all close and Bush has Florida and it’s all about Ohio. I’m nervous.
UPDATE (12:16): Stupid exit polls. I’ve been doing a bit more poking around the Internet, especially the blogosphere, and the shift from afternoon-and-early-evening perspective to evening perspective is startling. “Slate’s”:http://www.slate.com current headline (“Kerry’s ahead in FL, OH, PA, WI, MI, MN, NM, and NH”) is just embarrassing for them.
I knew in my mind that the polls would be a mirage, but I was stupid and let them fuel my optimism. But part of my optimism, too, was an assumption that if the polls were wrong they’d be wrong in Kerry’s favor — that increased voter turnout and new voter registration would swing heavily his way. In reality: not so much.
It’s still all about Ohio, and I’m still nervous.
UPDATE (12:53): If I thought that by staying up I could get to see Kerry win in the next couple hours, I would. But that doesn’t look likely. Either Bush will win it or it’ll still be too close to call and there’ll be legal fun and games in Ohio — goodness knows there’s grounds enough for it. In any case, I’m going to bed.
Ella and I had to wait an hour and a half in line, but she was incredibly well-behaved, considering all the down time. California Tortilla’s giving a free taco to everyone with an “I voted!” sticker. Chipotle’s giving you a free burrito if you saved a receipt from the past few days (which I did). Oh, and Kerry’s up in the exit polls — he’s only down one point in Virginia! All in all, a good day so far.
No liveblogging from here, though probably some comments late tonight. And after that, I may even go back to blogging about roleplaying games and books and backgammon and stuff . . .
Some scattered thoughts on election’s eve:
1. You hear a lot that this is the most important election of our time. But it’s not. The one four years ago was — we just didn’t know it. Bush turned out to be a radical President, and there’s no doubt that things would look very different today if it had been Gore. 2000 was the big kahuna. This is just the election where we have a clue.
2. Even if the electoral college vote is decisive one way or the other, even if the victor is established tomorrow night without question, we will remain a nation evenly divided. A mere 55/45 split is enough to put a state out of play; a 60/40 split marks a state as an unassailable stronghold for the candidate in question. That works for electoral math, but how does it work when it comes to livin’ with your neighbors? If there’s a hundred people on your block and sixty of them like baseball and forty prefer football, then there’s no talk of the majority “dominating” — it’s an evenly mixed neighborhood, where everyone has to just get used to living around people they disagree with. That’s where we are, and that’s where we’ll be, even after an electoral blowout.
(I was going to save this for after the election, but “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005032.php beat me to the punch, so I’ll lay it out now before the bandwagon gets too crowded.)
Goldwater was before my time, but I remember Reagan well enough. However you define “movement conservatism,” his presidency was its apex. “Conservative” stopped being a dirty word, and “liberal” started to become one. The notion that government action was, _a priori_, troublesome and suspect took root. Taxes became a “burden” that required “relief.” In terms of policy and in terms of language, conservatives succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate their way.
By movement conservatism I mean the long-term campaign to consciously return Republicans (especially the anti-government, socially conservative types) to and maintain them in _power_. That word is very important, because for the Grover Norquist wing of the Republican party, ideology and policy priorities take a back seat to getting power and holding on to it. Only by remembering that focus on the reigns of power can we make any sense out of conservative behavior during the Clinton years. He was, by all accounts, a moderate, but he was laid into as if he was a left-wing extremist. Well-coordinated operations that crossed and blended the boundaries between political and media operatives tried to dig up dirt out of his past. They mounted a blatantly sexist smear campaign against his wife. They started all this not as election season was ramping up, but at the very moment he took office.
Clinton ended up digging his own grave by lying about the Lewinsky affair, but even that wasn’t enough to get their guy elected President. It took recorded-setting amounts of money funneled to George W. Bush, a candidate carefully groomed for mass appeal over depth or substance. It took ruthless attacks on a kindred spirit to manage victory in the primaries. It took a lousy Gore campaign that distanced itself from Clinton to its detrement, among many other mistakes. And, of course, it took the Supreme Court. Bush won by a hair, but that didn’t stop him from grinding “compassionate conservatism” under his heel the minute he started appointing his Cabinet. With Bush, over the past four years, we have seen the endpoint of movement conservatism. He is where win-at-any-cost power politics will take you. He has been a hollow president, unconcerned with matters of policy, speaking only in the broad strokes of what passes in his own mind as “principle,” while all the time every move of his handlers is motivated always, first and foremost, by the goal of holding on to power. It has been a disaster.
Movement conservatism’s days are numbered no matter who wins the election. Fundamentally, its tactics are not those of a movement confident that the natural direction of change is heading their way. They are the tactics of people who know that history is _not_ on their side, and that the only way to stay viable is to fight, tooth and nail, and never give up. This is admirable to the extent that their ends are good ones — which is to say, not very admirable at all. As Kevin notes, traditional conservatism is fast losing ground on social issues, especially gay rights, and the long-term solutions for Social Security and Medicare are going to involve bigger government in the years to come. Indeed, while people are perfectly happy to pay less taxes, they also want more from the government when it comes to a safety net, and the notion that you can have both is starting to wear thin.
When I think of movement conservatism these days I think of Bush and the machinery that got him into power. I think of Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, and Grover Norquist. They are the “they” behind movement conservatism, but they are _not_ all Republicans. When I was a kid in West Michigan, our U.S. representative was Paul Henry, a Republican who happily got the votes of my parents and countless other local Democrats because he was a circumspect, principled legislator, universally admired. After his tragic death he was replaced by Republican Vern Ehlers, a former physics professor, whom my wife (a Democrat) was happy to work for for a number of years. Suanna then went on to work for Connecticut Republican Nancy Johnson, one of those moderate New England Republicans that used to be the heart of the party but are now a dying breed. They, and those like them, outnumber the party thugs. If they can be faulted it is only for not stepping up to resist the influence of movement conservatism on their own party.
If Republicans are smart they will realize that the train wreck of the Bush Administration is exactly where movement conservatism has taken them. They will see the writing on the wall, and change course. I think this is inevitable in the long run, but the movement won’t go down without a fight — the battles of which will make for some interesting politics in the first months of the Kerry Administration.
