Election: Canadian perspective?

If only this could be...

Election: UK perspectives (1)

Leave it up to the British press to provide useful news reports. This Guardian article begins:

Ruthless campaign mastermind got the Republican vote out

Network of 300,000 volunteers built up over four years.

The Bush campaign's election victory marks a strategic triumph for one man's ruthless and iconoclastic approach to ground-level politics.

In the last days of the race, a smile rarely left the face of Karl Rove, the president's chief strategist, and now his upbeat mood has been justified.

Convinced that his candidate could have pulled off an easy win in 2000 if only more faithful Republicans had turned up at the polls, Mr Rove vowed to challenge the Democrats' traditional status as the party pre-eminent at getting out the vote.

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And this Guardian article characterizes the general depression and anxiety that fell over liberal Yanks and Brits alike. My favorite quote:

If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. At least the scandal in Florida four years ago gave people something to focus on; there was a battle to be raged. This time, despite some lingering uncertainty over the final result in Ohio, there isn't the consolation of injustice, of having someone to blame. Depression is not a very focused thing and yesterday's mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result. Some of these reasons are seasonal: the clocks have gone back, the leaves are coming down, the bloody Christmas stock has appeared in the shops. Everywhere you look is raw material for misery and it's tempting to hang one's reluctance to get out of bed on a more profound psychological state than laziness. To this extent, "collective depression" is a misleading term; it has connotations of Jung and a mystical union between people. But even given all of this, there was a unified sense yesterday morning that the prospect of having Bush back in business made all the small, crap things in one's life worse.

"Ach," says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"

Election Response 3

I e-mailed a dear friend with some post-hoc observations. Call it "Wednesday evening quarterbacking," or just smug attempts at self-righteousness as a way to appease the hurt, but here are excerpts (names of friends changed to protect identity). Here goes.

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Some thoughts, posts, and old e-mail excerpts here, as I sift through my pain. The blog at Daily Kos has a lot of interesting stuff right now, and captures the array of bewilderment, hurt, anger, apathy, and call for intra-party reform (i.e intellectual overhaul) that we progressives are facing at this moment. The analyses are astute too, sometimes colorful.

And while I don't want to indulge in post-hoc I-told-you-soes, which are all too easy and which can't change what's happened, I feel compelled to speak on certain things. Among my immediate friend circles, I tend to be the ONLY one who has lived, grown up, in the South and who keeps warning us to pay attention to its power. In an e-mail to many friends on January 20, on the night of Dean's "Iowa screech", I wrote to you and several friends (bold added later):

After considerable thought, I've decided that two candidates have the right tone and the right credentials to take on Bush on the issue that Bush campaign is making central: national security. Those two are Senator John Kerry and General Wesley Clark. Of them, Kerry has more domestic experience, to be sure, but I believe Kerry cannot win the South either, because he will be perceived as an elite Massachusetts liberal (which, believe it or not, hurts one's campaign in the heartland). (Kerry's victory speech last night was opened by Sen. Kennedy). Without winning at least 5 southern states, a Democrat cannot win the White House. So I'd like to ask you to take a second look at Wesley Clark, a son of the South: www.clark04.com.

Well, I said "believe it or not" and the Democrats in their bizarre system of primaries decided on "not." I also feel that, as a gay man who has faced deep, immovable homophobia all his life, I'm perceptible to the catastrophic divisiveness of gay rights while all my straight, liberal allies of northern origin (like you, JB, Sandy) see gay rights as a fundamental civil rights issue that needs to be confronted now, and that can be confronted without jeopardizing more important things. Consider an excerpt from this post on Left Center Left:

Matt Yglesias points out that "values" and gay marriage especially tend to have been more decisive than expected, more decisive than policy issues even. If that's true, I can't convey how disheartening it is. Back when the SJC mandated equal marriage rights in Massachusetts for gays and lesbians, many liberals were lukewarm, fearing that gay rights advances, particularly marriage, would give fodder to Bush's reelection and GOP power in general. Then after the Constitutional Convention and the first marriages, such fears seemed unfounded. Gay men and women were getting married and life, even political life, went on as normal. Even nationally, the FMA was a wash. Now, to think the naysayers were right is distressing.

Well, I was one of the naysayers disturbed by the sudden "breakthroughs" in the gay rights movement this past spring. Recall from my e-mails to you (and others) in March of this year:

Gay marriage, even if legalized in various states, will remain shaky in the U.S. for years to come (and not just because of the Defense of Marriage Act); the larger struggle, I think, is to push for states to adopt civil unions and gay/lesbian equality into their legal codes, state by state, until we can get the federal government to acknowledge gay civil unions NATIONWIDE, at which point we can then decide whether or not to call it "marriage." I don't see why this isn't possible within 30 years or less. But right now, this debate is premature, misleading, and even potentially counterproductive in its divisiveness.

Well, it seems that looming larger than actually relevant issues like jobs or national security was the fear of gays, fear of losing gun rights, the fear of losing rights for fetuses---these aspects of conservatism's "values" played a larger role in the electorate's mind than the President's record of the past 3 years (abysmal), let alone ANY concrete issues involving the reality-based world (as opposed to the "faith-based" world of the right-wing).

A post in the Daily Kos says:

It wasn't the war or the economy that killed us. It was the notion of "values".

Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, yet Kerry was bad because he had "Massachusetts values" or other such nonsense.

We need to retake the language. We need to reframe the notion of "value".

That's why Obama's speech below is so brilliant. He speaks of God in a way that not just fails to offend this atheist, but inspires me. It's faith used for the purpose of living a good life, rather than faith wielded as a weapon against a whole class of people.

The wedges: gays, abortion, and guns.

Democrats have abandoned guns as an issue, and over the next three or four cycles it will prove an increasingly ineffective wedge. The NRA won. Good for them.

That leaves the two "faith based" wedges -- gays and abortion. And with great skill, the Republicans have equated those two issues with the word "value".

That's going to have to change.

To which there was the colorful post by "B":

sexual politics (3.50 / 2)

This is really all it comes down too. You might argue that this is all it has ever come down to:

Fear of the black man for his presumed sexual prowess and alleged promiscuity.

Fear of gay men for their alleged promiscuity.

And, why not fear of "liberals" for their desire to take away our favorite penis substitutes: guns, large automobiles.

Fear of the French for their alleged effeminacy, (and presumed sexual prowess). What's worse than limp wristed men who are attractive to our women ?

Fear of women who seek abortions, for they must also be promiscuous, and a demand that they pay the price for their sexual activity: denial of the right to control their bodies.

This is the difference between the two groups in the US. One body of people thinks that they have every right to impose their prejudices on those they fear. The other wants to eliminate those fears altogether.

We're screwed. It took a civil war to eliminate slavery, and a near civil war to begin the process of giving civil rights to all Americans. Lyndon Johnson, was wrong. It wasn't the South he lost for two generations, it is the would be theocrats he lost for who knows how long.

Note, I don't for a moment think that a majority of Americans necessarily think this way, but I do think that this is at the core of today's conservatism.

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Any thoughts out there? (Is anyone even reading this blog?)

Election Reponse 2

Today, I wrote to sent the following e-mail to some friends:

I helped the Kerry team in Pennsylvania Monday night through late last night. Last night I was feeling great about what we'd done with PA, but I drove back in the wee hours of the morning, I began to get angry and heartbroken about the bigger picture, angry at potential cheating on the Republicans' part, pondering on how, for instance, Manish never got his absentee ballot from Cuyahoga County, and pondering on how, if we prolonged this fight for a few weeks, maybe all the irregularities would show up and Kerry would be awarded Ohio, in the end.

But now, I can't help noticing the big picture: Bush won the popular vote by 3.7 million--the first presidential candidate to win an absolute majority since 1988, and the candidate receiving the highest number of popular votes (apparently) in American history. The exit polls say "moral values" played a big role, Republicans gain 3 net seats in senate, NH went blue while the entire South and desert Southwest has gone red, and the ballot initiatives forbidding gay marriage passed in all 11 states that they came up in.

Sure there were irregularities in voting that hurt us but they can't explain the above, can't explain why the majority of our voters would select an imbecilic stooge of a religious fanatic who, with his cabal of liars, comprised one of the most incompetent and delusional presidential administrations ever. History will not smile on the two terms of the Bush presidency. How did this happen? I've got 3 words: the culture wars. The above tells us something about who the bulk of Americans are, how they think, how they feel. John Kerry conceded just now, calling for unity and saying "When we wake up, we're all American." No. If being American means what we saw last night, then I have to say: when I wake up, I'm not American. And since the clump comprising the Northeast, Upper Great Lakes, and West Coast will not secede from the Union, I have no choice but to think that my worthiest goal is NOT political activism here in the U.S. but rather to finish my Ph.D. at Yale as soon as possible and seek to repatriate to Canada or the UK. I'm sure many of you, my good friends, feel the same way. Maybe one day, a few years from now, we'll have a smashing party when we all end up moving to Notting Hill.

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And here, taken from the Friendster pic of a friend of a friend, a different way to express the feeling:

Election: Devastating.

Election Day and the results brought in during Election Night were devastating. Bush wins the popular vote by 3.6 million, exit polls say "moral values" played a big role, Republicans gain several additional seats in Senate and House (with incoming freshmen Republicans even more right-wing than their predecessors) and the ballot initiatives forbidding gay marriage passed in all 11 states that they came up in.

The official poll results for Ohio show (since 3 AM and not changing significantly into midday) that Kerry is down by about 140,000 votes. Despite the potential of massive voter intimidation in Ohio and Florida by Republican "poll-watchers," no complaints of irregularity are made by any of the major watchdog groups on Election Night or this morning, and so the poll numbers seem legit. And then, perhaps based on the calculation that even counting all the absentee and provisional ballots wouldn't grant him the sufficient margin necessary, Kerry makes a swift concession to Bush by 11 AM (public speech at 2 PM).

These are the facts. The previous and subsequent Election-related responses are tied into these crucial, devastating facts.

Election Response 1

(I post with the expectation that this blog might remain a monologue for a while, a place for me to synthesize the e-mails I send to friends, and where my friends will eventually post back...)

The election. Kerry has conceded?! Wait! No! Stop! Or maybe not?! This is like a bad, bad breakup. Witness the parallels:

"Wait, he can't leave yet! He hasn't given US a chance! WE've invested so much time in this, and now he's quitting too early before giving it all a chance! Can't I call him? Maybe if I just explain, he won't leave yet. Maybe if I tell him that he missed some voters--I know he did, I know them by name, and this must be part of a larger pattern of rampant irregularities! So he can't quit just yet! =( .... What? He told HIM that he's quitting, told Monkeyface himself? At 11 this morning?!? So they're in this together? And he's gonna tell everyone in an hour? Noooo! OK, I'm calling Kerry.... OK, I just called his Ohio HQ's but they're not picking up! =( But he's not picking up the phone!?! What will happen to us when he leaves? We've invested so much? I mean sure, neither of us was THAT happy with each other, but still. We got used to each other. We were going to make it work. Will I see him again? Will he see me again? What will we do after this? Ugh, I need to stop thinking about this."

The New Bin Laden Tape

I begin my first post with the sudden (re-) injection of Osama Bin Laden (or his body double) into the American political scene four days prior to the general election. Hearing parts of the translation on NPR, I couldn't help wondering whether middle America might not perceive an unholy alliance between Michael Moore, John Kerry, and (gasp!) Osama himself. Consider the following Times excerpt:

Mr. bin Laden said Mr. Bush reacted slowly to the Sept. 11 attacks as they were occurring, giving the hijackers more time than they expected to carry out the plot. At the time of the attacks, the president was visiting a group of second graders at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla., holding a book called "My Pet Goat."

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," Mr. bin Laden said, referring to estimates of the number of people who might have been at the World Trade Center.

Referring to the president, Mr. bin Laden said: "It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God."

Setting aside the (expected, profound) shift in moral perspective regarding "the operations, thank God," Osama's criticism of Bush is almost reasonable. After all, on hearing the news, our President did sit there in the classroom for a good while, doing very little. For starters, this jab at Bush shows that Osama watched Fahrenheit 9/11 along with the rest of us. (But Bin Laden's sarcasm misses the point slightly–-it wasn't so much the Bush was transfixed with rapt attention to the pet goat story as transfixed by utter confusion and inability to think of what to do, i.e. how to lead.) But Osama's derision of the President, alongside Moore's, is just the beginning of the unholy alliance.

Next consider this line from the Bin Laden tape: "Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you." Again, not unreasonable at all. To accuse Bush of lying, of hiding things, is not the delusional, bitter cry of radical Islamism: it could be the bitter cry of Michael Moore. Hell, given the facts, it could even be a Hertzberg piece in the New Yorker.

Consider also this line: "Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security....Oh, American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results." The first statement has a tit-for-tat ring to it. Far Left critics of American "neo-imperialism," e.g. Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky soon after the 9/11 attacks, seem to have characterized the motivation of 9/11 hijackers as purely political: the oppressed fighting back. Osama almost concurs.

This way of characterizing the 9/11 hijackers, I've long felt, is misleading and incorrect. To justify the 9/11 attacks on the basis of American injustices abroad is morally untenable, and to think in terms of purely political dichotomies such as the "superpower vs. the global South" misses out on the enormous draw--psychological and spiritual--of radical Islamism. Since 2001, I was more sympathetic to Christopher Hitchens' notion of "Islamo-Fascism" than I was to Chomsky's moral equivalency thesis. (Hitchens' urgency about Iraq, though, was misplaced). As well, I've been sympathetic when writers have highlighted the individual, psychological aspects of this phenomenon, as opposed to the stark power-based analysis. (I could've sworn there was a piece off of A & L Daily that I read last summer that offered a compelling of a torn Mohammed Atta who "chose" Islamic radicalism as the solution).

But the very fact that Bin Laden makes an appearance four days before the U.S. election and lampoons and criticizes Bush along much the same lines as Moore and Kerry is, well, a bit surreal. And it's all potentially damaging to Kerry. (Has anyone else noticed the weirdness?) After all, recall that one of the Republicans' running themes has been that Kerry would acquiesce to other nations, and, as "an unprincipled anti-war flip-flopper," by extension, to the terrorists too. And the GOP has continually insinuated that criticizing the President is tantamount to agreeing with the terrorists. Now inject into this loaded situation a Bin Laden who criticizes Bush for being weak and deceitful, and who calls out to Americans they cease harming Muslims. Consider that Kerry has also criticized Bush for not reaching out to Muslims, for losing the "battle over hearts and minds in the Middle East"...Hmm...wouldn't it be very tempting for a naïve observer to conceptualize a dichotomy with Bush one end and Kerry/Bin Laden on the other?

No small wonder, then, that Kerry responded to the to this strongly and abruptly, much more so than Bush. And he does:

"In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period."

Josh Marshall observes the relative strengths of the Bush and Kerry here.

The recent Bin Laden message and his last one in April, the audiotape offering a truce to European countries should they pull out of Iraq and other Muslim countries, leads me to wonder whether Al Qaeda isn't evolving, perhaps getting smarter. Perhaps they've moved away from "Islamo-Fascism" toward something distinctly more political than religious. Or perhaps, they're just cloaking their "Islamo-fascism" better, in the language of quasi-tolerance and truces. Or perhaps the Chomsky-Zinn circles were right about Al Qaeda after all, if not right about the individual motivations of people like Mohammed Atta, i.e. that its primary aim is to seek redress for grievances committed by the U.S. upon the world stage. After all, Bin Laden has long made concrete, political demands, like the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia or the withdrawal of U.S. support for Israel. Yet these political aims tie into the larger religious vision of having "pure" Islamic states with "pure" Islamic leaders. And both aims resonante with a mass psychology that glorifies violent self-sacrifice for the cause of establishing "pure" Islam (rewarded with a Paradise containing decidedly less "pure" things like rivers of wine and virgins, though some Muslims contest this). And while corrupt Arab regimes and their Islamist antagonists have both pumped such notions into the mass psychology, the individuals most likely to take up the cause through violent martyrdom aren't day laborers in Cairo or Baghdad but the highly "Westernized" once-playboy sons of rich oil sheikhs. It's not a leap to speculate that in Mohammed Atta's psyche, there raged a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" not found in the macro-picture of actual international affairs.

In marked contrast, Osama's rhetoric is changing from fire-and-brimstone jihadism to quasi-conciliatory pleas hinting of calculated Realpolitik. I'm not sure whether this is legitimate political leveraging or morally untenable blackmail, but either way, it's "smart" from the vantage point of goals--Europeans already pissy about Iraq seem now even more reluctant to touch it, and the Spanish voted out its government shortly after the Madrid bombings (though arguably Aznar was on shaky grounds even before the bombings). If Bin Laden or his movement got any smarter, a year from now, you might hear Bin Laden start to issue Clintonisms like "I feel your pain."