Yes, we’ve lost again. We’ve lost the presidency. The House and the Senate are still out of our control. It seems quite apparent we are bound to lose more ground in the Supreme Court as well.
No one said we had to take it lying down.
This is a time for introspection. A familiar litany of proposed solutions to recapturing the favor of the voting populace has already begun: “Democrats need to find religion,” “Democrats need to move further toward the center,” “Democrats just need to sit tight and wait for the center to move back toward them.” While it may be easy to draw these sorts of conclusions from the election results and exit polls they really don’t get to the meat of the issue.
No, what the Democrats need is to get some balls.
Time and time again you hear those highly-courted swing voters say they voted for Bush because no matter how right or wrong he is on the issues (emphasis on wrong) the American people trust him to follow through. They know where he stands, even when they don’t always agree on him. He isn’t a “flip-flopper.” He isn’t a suck-up to opinion polls. He doesn’t necessarily care what you think about abortion, gay rights, the environment, combatting terrorism, or appealing to the rest of the world. He doesn’t talk about plans, he talks about visions.
Democrats could take a page from that book. Just because you don’t want to agree with the President doesn’t mean you have to sound so wishy-washy. That “global test?” Now that sounds wishy-washy, cowardly, irresolute. Yes, it is a good idea. Hell, it’s a fucking great idea. Terrorism is only going to increase in the United States as long as we continue to piss off the rest of the world by ignoring their protests. For the life of me I still cannot fucking understand how anyone could possibly believe that the world is safer now that Saddam Hussein, a man who attacked us unprovoked never, is no longer in power.
Democrats, you are allowed to dislike things! You can stand up and say “I think terrorism is bad!” You can express distaste at the violence and sexuality on mass media that so offends by-and-large honest, non-Bible thumping, hard-working American families. “B-b-but, free speech!” you cry, “That sounds like censorship! Censorship is bad!” Having an opinion is not censorship. Legislation and bullying are censorship. Shaking your head in dismay is not. Millions of Americans out there, the vast majority, are guided by morals that do not necessarily come straight out of two-thousand-year-old books of fables and allegories. Yes, there are a great deal of religious folk out there in between those amber waves of grain and those purple mountains majesty, and their faith is the largest decider of their system of morals and values. But I still think that a good portion of them respect that faith is a private thing, and doesn’t need to be beaten over their heads. You can have moral outrage without necessarily quoting scripture.
You do not need to move towards the center. Need me to repeat that? Democrats, you do not need to move towards the center. Yes, you will hear folks say “I couldn’t vote for John Kerry because he’s too liberal.” That is just the campaign ads talking. If they thought about it a bit longer or had a better description of liberal they’d probably start to question that decision. Americans are far more liberal than they realize. When it comes down to the real issues they tend to swing more left than you might think from the popular vote last Tuesday. They’ve been fed this image of the liberal as loose-spending, permissive, and largely amoral person. Liberals, they’ll say, are the sort of folk who allow folks to shit in public and call it art. Liberals want to take all of your money and give it to nihilistic Satanists whose only pleasure is to slaughter babies in their bizarre coked-up rituals.
I’m sorry to say that liberals deserve some of that. We come across as soft. We come across as indecisive. For chrissakes, some people are still calling us “politically correct!”
We do not need to abandon some of our most important beliefs in order to court the American people. We do not need to abandon abortion rights, gay rights, separation of church and state, welfare, universal health care, or any of the other tenets of our platform. What we need to do is to frame them in a moral context, just like the Republicans do. It is morally wrong to discriminate against another human being on account of he (or she) likes boys (or girls) instead of the other way around. Just don’t take it too far. Don’t cowtow to anyone who suggests that if homosexuality is okay, then surely bestiality is okay too. Excerise your morality here. Some things are right, and some things just ain’t. It is morally wrong to enforce a particular religion on schoolchildren, employees, or citizens for the same reason as above. Once again, don’t go too far. Don’t insist on the removal of holidays or words from the pledge (I know, they bother me too. If you really can’t bear it, just let your kids mouth the words. No one will notice and it doesn’t hurt you in the slightest.) as that sort of shit bothers folks and becomes fodder for talk radio blowhards.
What we need to do is pick our battles, but once we do we need to not let up until they’re won. Pick one or two issues, not twelve, and really bare down on them. Folks get all mixed up when you try too much at once. I’m not saying they’re dumb, it’s just hard to deal with too many promises and plans and problems all in the same 90 minute debate. Keep it simple, and keep it tied to the same moral framework. Don’t be afraid to call a spade a spade.
Oh yeah, and please don’t blame your guy again. John Kerry is not entirely at fault. Yes, he lost the election. That doesn’t mean he lost it alone. I honestly believe that he honestly believed in his message, he just didn’t sell it hard enough. I get the feeling he listened to his campaign advisers more than necessary and tried to be too much to too many different groups of people. The American people don’t want a suck-up. They want a leader. That’s why we lost, again. Our guys want to be everyone’s best friend. They want to be that kid at school who invited you over to play with his expensive new toys that you secretly hated.
