News & Features Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
LIBERAL NIGHTMARE
Bush finally wins a national election
BY DAN KENNEDY

For liberals and progressives, the worst of it on election night wasn’t that the Republicans took back the Senate, although that was certainly bad enough. The worst of it was that George W. Bush finally gained the legitimacy he had lacked since being installed as president by the US Supreme Court nearly two years ago.

Bush campaigned nonstop for House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates during the past several weeks, turning the election into a referendum on his presidency. And he won, even in Massachusetts, where Democrat Shannon O’Brien suffered an unexpectedly big loss to Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney. In Salon, Joan Walsh quoted Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader who’s now the head of Georgia’s Republican Party, as saying, "The person who deserves the most credit tonight is the president of the United States." Reed is right. It’s going to be a long, long two years for liberals — and, given the shambles in which the Democratic Party now finds itself, maybe a long four or six years. Perhaps the Democrats will be able to turn themselves around quickly. But it’s just as likely that we’ll have to wait for 2008, and hope there’s a nascent Bill Clinton waiting to launch him- or herself onto the national landscape.

As I write this, at about 7 a.m. on Wednesday, the debacle looks pretty much complete. The 4:58 a.m. numbers out of Minnesota show Republican Norm Coleman holding a narrow but solid lead over former vice-president Walter Mondale, one of the most thoroughly decent men ever to win his party’s presidential nomination, but apparently seen by voters as too old and out of touch to replace the late Paul Wellstone. complete control is the headline on CNN.com. The Republicans have won 51 seats without even having to wait to see whether they can defeat Democratic Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu in next month’s runoff. That’s important, because it means Vice-President Dick Cheney can stay in his bunker rather than risk getting served with a subpoena every time he makes his way to the Senate to cast a tie-breaking vote. Then again, there’s no one left to serve him with a subpoena anyway.

Given the import of what happened, media coverage was desultory. The Voter News Service on which the networks depend, already staggering from the election-night embarrassments of two years ago, suffered its final collapse on Tuesday, no doubt never to be heard from again. I tuned in the Fox News Channel — after all these long years, finally bestowed upon our grateful community by a beneficent and monopolistic cable company — figuring I’d watch some serious crowing. Trouble was, no one wanted to get ahead of the story, as too many were thinking of their considerable humiliation two years ago. At 10:17 p.m., for example, Fox’s Linda Vester reported that the Associated Press had declared Republican congresswoman Nancy Johnson of Connecticut the winner over her Democratic rival — yet noted that Fox was not yet ready to make the same call. "We’ll caveat that," Vester said, managing to torture both the language and viewers.

But it wasn’t just tentativeness that gave the coverage such flatness. The Republican victory was not accompanied by the sort of voter enthusiasm — or anger — that you would normally expect to see. As the New York Times’ R.W. Apple Jr. wrote in Wednesday’s paper, "With pep rallies devoid of pep and stump speeches that stirred few voters, the campaign that led up to the balloting was nevertheless notably lifeless and cheerless. But the electorate sent a clear enough message." That it did.

Liberal commentator Josh Marshall, in his talkingpointsmemo.com blog, wrote that "I think the issue here isn’t poor tactics so much as an over-emphasis on tactics in general. The Democrats have lots of long-term and demographic trends in their favor. But they don’t really have a politics, a vision, or a message — or, perhaps better to say, the courage and imagination to get behind one."

That sounds about right. The postmortems will go on for weeks and months, but the most likely explanation is that voters will choose candidates who stand for something over those who stand for nothing, regardless of what those stands actually are. Despite winning the popular vote in the 2000 presidential campaign, for the past two years the Democrats have offered little but a timid me-too, even giving the president the power to wage unilateral war against Iraq, the UN and our allies be damned. By attempting to cede foreign policy as an issue and run against the Republicans on an ill-defined domestic agenda, the Democrats lost the right even to be taken seriously.

Issue Date: November 7 - 14, 2002
Back to the News and Features table of contents.
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend