Pelosi via Adam Nagourney in the NYT:
“We know who we are. We know what we stand for. We’ll make it clearer in the non-presidential election year what the differences are between the Democrats and the Republicans.”
It seems that $925 million just wasn’t enough to get the message out.
Jerry Orbach played the original El Gallo in The Fantasticks, which debuted on May 3, 1960, and, during its tenure at the 153 seat Sullivan Street Playhouse, became New York’s longest running show — finally closing on January 6, 2002. For four decades, a little ad appeared daily in the New York Times; you could not discern from it that the show was so famous.
Jerry Orbach died yesterday, and so part of Broadway tradition passes. Here’s a little of what the world was like a quarter century ago:
Broadway stars, from left, James Earl Jones, Julie Harris, Angela Lansbury and Jerry Orbach pose on stage after receiving Tony awards at the 23rd Annual Tony Awards (news – web sites) ceremony at New York’s Mark Hellinger Theatre, in this April 20, 1969 file photo. Orbach, who died of prostate cancer Tuesday night, Dec. 28, 2004, had won best actor in a musical for ‘Promises, Promises.’ Jones won best actor in a play for ‘The Great White Hope.’ Harris won best actress in a play for ‘Forty Carats,’ and Lansbury won best actress in a musical for ‘Dear World.’
The show may have closed, but it looks as though the pendulum is swinging back — if only a little — to the world The Fantasticks showed us. Say a prayer for Jerry Orbach.
We have argued that one of the blogosphere’s big new markets is the tripe sold as scholarly work in many universities’ departments of political science and their silly-studies offshoots over the last thirty years. The AP’s story tries, it appears, to cast the New Diversity movement in a bad light, but fails to do so:
Those behind the trend call it an antidote to the overwhelming liberal dominance of university faculties. But many educators, while agreeing students should never feel bullied, worry that they just want to avoid exposure to ideas that challenge their core beliefs — an essential part of education. Some also fear teachers will shy away from sensitive topics, or fend off criticism by “balancing” their syllabuses with opposing viewpoints, even if they represent inferior scholarship.
“Faculty retrench. They are less willing to discuss contemporary problems and I think everyone loses out,” said Joe Losco, a professor of political science at Ball State University in Indiana who has supported two colleagues targeted for alleged bias. “It puts a chill in the air.”
Conservatives say a chill is in order. A recent study by Santa Clara University researcher Daniel Klein estimated that among social science and humanities faculty members nationwide, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one; in some fields it’s as high as 30 to one. And in the last election, the two employers whose workers contributed the most to Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites)’s presidential campaign were the University of California system and Harvard University.
One suspects that the author of this piece, Justin Pope, thinks 30 to 1 is okay — but the point gets through just fine anyhow: our side is winning.
That was Goethe, by the way. It would be a useful language to speak in the upcoming Social Security debate.
Social Security reform is coming. It will be the single largest reform of the largest income transfer program in human history. The economic structure of Social Security is precisely the Ponzi scheme: people pay money to someone today in order to get a return tomorrow, all the while that money is actually being transferred to others in the scheme, allegedly as a return on their “investment.”
The Social Security debate is actually pretty simple, as we have previously discussed. If we do nothing, a disaster will happen, with taxes up and benefits reduced. So the sysytem must change: the only question is when, and earlier is always better in these matters. But the system should never have been set up this way in the first place. It’s always talked about as some sort of savings program, where you put money in today, through the payroll tax, and get it back later in a larger amount. It is talked about and sold in that way because that’s what it always should have been.
Everybody in the world, except many Democrats and some Republicans, knows that saving for retirement is better than depending on somebody yet unborn to pay for it. Everyone who owns a house, has a Keogh, an IRA or a 401(k), or who own some stock, knows the value and miracle of compound interest — except the aforementioned Dems and Reps.
The reason everyone in America is rich — compared to the world — is American business, or capitalism if you like, as we have said.
Here is the signal fact of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so.
Only a little of this has to do with government.
Mostly it is because 80% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and 80% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, standardized accounting, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.
People involved with owning and managing businesses speak a common language, accounting. It is a powerful language, and not knowing it is a great handicap in trying to understand precisely and coherently what happens in business, and sometimes government. A generation ago, for example, people were asked how much profit a company made on a dollar of sales and they answered $0.80, whereas the number is more like a nickel. We’ll see whether things have improved as the Social Security debate unfolds.
The government hasn’t helped matters. If a private corporation tried to get away with the accounting practices of the government, the CEO would be in jail faster than you can say Martha Stewart. Here are the US government’s 2004 financial statements, and this comment from the notes, which will stand in for every other atrocity in the report:
Expenses are generally recognized when incurred except that the costs of social insurance programs including Social Security, Medicare, Railroad Retirement, Black Lung and Unemployment are recognized only for amounts currently due and payable (p. 105)
General Motors, IBM and company in America with audited financial statements have to estimate, and record as a liability, the pension and other payments in the future they have to pay to all of us. Not so the US government. It does not record the $12 trillion (Moynihan report) in unfunded liabilities anywhere.
In truth the situation is not so bad, since it can be easily repaired by acting now, as the President has suggested. It will, I think, be amusing to see the Old Media, lately 12-to-1 in the tank for the President’s opponent, now try to report on a debate which take place in part in a language they have chosen not to understand.
I don’t know if the rest of the world found yesterday’s Bush press conference as impressive as I did, but impressive it was. The session had a wholly different feel to it. One immediately thinks of those encounters with the press dusing the campaign — including the famous one where 6 out of 15 questions asked Bush to admit mistakes — all for the purpose of generating a Kerry TV commercial-type sound bite. The President fumbled and mumbled then, as he did in the first debate, and supporters had to find a way to make lemonade out of those lemons. Not so yesterday. Dana Milbank in the WaPo noticed too:
For all the bobbing and weaving, yesterday’s news conference hinted at an emerging new style for Bush. In his first 45 months in office, he had 15 full-fledged news conferences, fewer than any other postwar president. Bush, a stickler for discipline, didn’t want to make unintended news, or to be embarrassed by an unexpected question, as when he was asked what his biggest mistake had been. But since his reelection, Bush has had two news conferences in as many months.
Bush is finding that, with some careful deflection of questions, he can hold a nearly hour-long news conference without serious gaffes or unintentionally making news. At times, his bluntness got the better of him, as when he acknowledged that “we don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now.”
When you get 50 million votes the first time, and 62 million votes the second time, and, even more importantly, are near a filibuster-proof senate, it does make a difference.
We’re second to none in our admiration of Powerline, and heartily endorse its Blog of the Year award from TIME Magazine. Fantastic work, as we noted earlier.
That said, highlighting Rathergate as the issue on which the award turned is a kind of sleight of hand by the Old Media. The award could just as easily have gone to Glenn Reynolds for his outstanding work on the SwiftBoatVets story, serving as a clearinghouse for research on their charges, from Christmas in Cambodia to the Sampan Incident, from the Magic Hat to VC the Wonder Dog, and so many more — here’s the list. Reynolds even did original research, including producing the picture below from the Congressional Record of 1986. Moreover, Instapundit was averaging over 3 million visits per week at that time, making it far and away the most popular blog. But recognizing Instapundit would have entailed the Old Media’s covering a story they, to this day, do not want to touch.
Thus, instead of giving Instapundit the credit it deserves, TIME lumps the highly respected and influential site with fake-lesbian blogs and others and has this to say:
So your blog hasn’t succeeded in getting national attention for your pet issue? Don’t lose heart. Just blog, link and repeat. It worked for conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who trumpeted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s claims this summer, as well as for liberal blogs like Daily Kos, which investigated evidence that President Bush wore a wire in his first debate. Some of the issues had questionable merit, but persistent bloggers made the subjects tough to ignore. Say it enough times online, and someone is bound to hear you.
Evidently not TIME Magazine, however, which not only ignores Instapundit, but Hugh Hewitt, Tom McGuire, Ed Morrissey, Bill Dyer, and the many others who made serious and substantive contributions to the SwiftBoatVets story.
The still-unreported major story of 2004 is a tell-all by someone in the Old Media on the degree of their complicity and coordination with the Kerry Campaign. Bruce Kesler of the SwiftBoatVets reminds us of some of the facts (hat tip, Powerline, of course):
Early in the year a friend with access to the Kerry campaign warned me it was digging for any kind of dirt to destroy us. Contrary to the liberal media’s story that we surprised Kerry in August, he thought the mainstream media could succeed in ignoring and stifling the Swift Boat veterans, and he had long planned a new smear campaign against us.
The surprise to the Kerry camp and liberal press was that the new media did break through and that Vietnam veterans could not be intimidated. In August, as reported by Newsweek, Kerry operatives fed negative documents and talking points to the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe. Subsequent articles in those newspapers reflected negatively on the Swiftees.
With only one halting exception, the mainstream media refused to investigate the sworn affidavits of 60 credible witnesses to Kerry’s behavior, or to follow up on the abundance of additional information given them. The New York Times repeatedly used “unsubstantiated” as its adjective describing the Swift Boat veterans’ allegations without ever exerting its considerable power to investigate. Kerry wasn’t pressured by the mainstream media to reveal his full military records to resolve issues, nor questioned as to what he was hiding. The mainstream media’s zeal in chasing down every scrap of trivia about Bush’s service stands in sharp contrast.
Guys like reporter-biographer Michael Kranish of the Globe, who penned the first, inaccurate hit piece on the SwiftBoatVets in August, have a lot to answer for, as do institutions like the New York Times (though maybe its eye-popping 22% decline in circulation is punishment enough). More to the point: TIME Magazine itself published a pre-emptive hit piece by Doug Brinkley on Kerry shipmate Steve Gardner on March 9, 2004. When Unfit for Command debuted in August, TIME joined the other Old Media outlets in silence, its few stories appearing only after Kerry went public. In late August TIME published its only piece addressing the SwiftBoatVets’ charges directly, an impenitrible, pro-Kerry list of “charges” and “evidence” which, of course, mentioned Christmas in Cambodia last, and confusingly. Elsewhere, in its insider report on the Kerry campaign, TIME referred to the SwiftBoatVets’ “phony charges.” In all, TIME had no more than half a dozen pieces that even mentioned the SwiftBoatVets prior to the election, and that included anti-Swiftee columns by Joe Klein. Hence, TIME’s reporters must have breathed easier at the thought of mocking CBS’s lack of professionalism rather than their own.
There’s plenty of money to be made in a tell-all of the sort we are suggesting, and, with the Old Media monopoly in tatters, there’s the slight chance some member of the Gang of 500 will trade in some dinner party invitations for a house on Nantucket. Let’s hope so; it would be a terrific book.
TIME Magazine named George Bush Man of the Year, not surprisingly a rather controversial choice. Here’s their instant poll:
And it named Powerline the Blog of the Year, an award Hugh Hewitt amusingly compares to TV program of the year in 1940, for Rathergate. TIME does some good reporting and writing in both the Bush and Powerline pieces; this from the latter:
If you haven’t read one, it’s hard to describe what makes blogs so special. There’s just something about the rhythm and pace of a blog that feels intuitively right. You don’t have to sit through fake-cheerful news-team chitchat or wade through endless column inches. It takes about 20 sec. to read a typical blog post, and when you’re finished you’ve got the basic facts up to the minute plus a dab of analysis and a dash of spin. If you’re not satisfied, you can click the link for more. If you are, you can go back to checking your e-mail and jiggering your spreadsheets or whatever you do for a living. This is news Jetsons-style. If it were any neater and quicker, it would come in a pill.
The appeal of Power Line goes beyond convenience. It even goes beyond the charisma of the people who run it and the relative sharpness of their political commentary. Blogs tend to be biased and openly partisan in exactly the way most mainstream news sources aren’t. Blogs aren’t objective, and they don’t pretend to be. When you read Power Line, you feel as if you’re part of a community, a like-minded righteous few. It’s as if you’ve stumbled on a sympathetic haven in the lonely, trackless wilderness of the Internet. Blogs like Power Line feed a need to belong. “We get a ton of e-mail from people all over the country expressing gratitude for what we do,” says Johnson.
How can a blog that caters to the right, the political majority who in fact run this country, make Republicans feel as if they’re part of a proud, persecuted minority? The villain here isn’t the political opposition. It’s the left-leaning Mainstream Media, a looming specter that is vilified so routinely on Power Line, it’s referred to in shorthand as the MSM. “My view,” Johnson says, “is that the mainstream media has acted as a means to obscure, as a kind of filter, a lens that makes it impossible to understand what’s going on in reality. We try to provide something that brings people closer to reality.”
“If you’re a liberal, what do you need blogs for?” Hinderaker asks, only half-joking. “You’ve got the New York TIMEs.” This kind of tough talk inspires a misty-eyed loyalty on the part of Power Line’s conservative following. “No one is as surpassingly adept at picking up on stories the MSM ignores,” a fellow blogger wrote about Power Line, “and which the average Joe can viscerally identify with.”
Speaking of Rathergate, it’s pretty funny that TIME’s programming automatically capitalizes that group of letters, so they get the NYT wrong. Don’t forge any memos, boys!
Congratulations to Powerline for their many contributions to America and journalism in 2004.
Bush lit the menorah at the event:
It is not often that the orthodox of any faith, and certainly within Judaism, are at the vanguard of a movement of change. But the number of ultra-Orthodox at the White House, and their passionate support for an evangelical Christian named George W. Bush, made manifest what is already known: Orthodox Jews understand that the Jews’ greatest allies are the only other group in the world to believe that the Torah is from God — conservative Christians.
And the sea change is affecting not only Orthodox Jews. Rabbi Eli Herscher, head rabbi of my synagogue, the Stephen S. Wise Temple, one of the two largest Reform synagogues in America, was at the party. He proudly told me that he, a lifelong Democrat, voted for Bush. Most Jews, including some at this celebration, still instinctively vote Democrat. For most Jews, secular liberalism, not Judaism, is their religion, and their social values are derived from liberal editorial pages rather than from the Torah. Additionally, for many older Jews, Franklin D. Roosevelt is constantly running for reelection.
Nice to see that the 22nd amendment is finally beginning to take hold.
In economics, there are leading, coincident and lagging indicators of economic performance. When I was a pup, these statistics were gathered and analyzed and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), headed by Geoffrey Moore, famous expert on the business cycle and the “father of leading indicators.” (Since 1995, the indicators work has moved to the Conference Board). Thirty years ago I was excited when I read the monthly WSJ articles on the indicators, featuring Moore in what seemed an obscure, but very powerful, upper west side location; in those days the world of business seemed obscure and inaccessible to non-specialists.
Stock prices are a leading indicator because the stock market looks toward the future, around six months out. Personal income is a coincident indicator since it tells you what you can spend now. Unemployment is a lagging indicator becuase businesses hire only after sales pick up and management decides it’s not a fluke.
Which brings us to Lileks. He is a coincident indicator:
Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive. But when I wish a store clerk “Merry Christmas!” they often appear stunned and flummoxed for a moment, as if I’ve just blabbed the plans for the underground’s sabotage of the train tracks in front of the secret police. I’ve said something highly inappropriate for the public square, and I almost expect a security guard to take me aside on the way out. He’ll lead me to a small room. He has no enthusiasm for this; it’s the end of his shift, and he’s done this a dozen times already today. But policy is policy. “Sir, you realize that the store does not use the, um, ah, C word. We have nothing against it, of course, and wish you a merry (cough)mas, as well. But when you say that to a store employee, it puts them in a difficult position.”
But which way are things moving? Towards the continued secularization of Xmas by the lawyers of the ACLU? Hardly. Roger Ailes knows how to spot a trend and a market opportinuty, as does the internet: the pendulum has begun to swing back. When Fox News tells you “Merry Christmas,” as it does hourly, it is playing to the vast majority of Americans who see things that way. Meanwhile, CNN and the rest of the Old Media play the role of lagging indicator:
The Two Marys
CNN Presents looks at two women at the heart of Christianity — Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, the most misunderstood and controversial of his disciples. This show reveals the historical reality of these two main archetypes of Christian womanhood, and examines how they are being reimagined today.
Way to go, CNN, Mary M as ‘ho, Jesus as her husband or gay for John, “the beloved.” As the man said, it’s not creative if it doesn’t sell.
It would be entirely in keeping with FDR’s legacy to rip apart the Social Security system if there was even a chance that it could be improved. The overarching theme of FDR’s entire governing philosophy, constantly touted by virtually his entire Brain Trust, was “experimentalism.”
Well done.
Like VDH and many others, we believe that morality has been stood on its head in much of contemporary liberalism. Liberals:
could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking — such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions “political correctness” or “progressivism,” the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.
To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right.
1. Arafat
2. Iraq
3. United Nations
4. Nobel Peace Prize
5. Rathergate
6. SwiftBoatVets
7. Profiling at airports
8. Bush
There are many issues that are litmus tests for your paradigm for seeing the world. People seem to coalesce on one side or the other. The issues seem to be so much more clearly drawn than even in 2003. We’re very pleased with the clarity of the side we’ve chosen. What about you?
Karl Zinsmeister:
“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically…. The evidence has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up…. Meteorologists are almost unanimous [that] the resulting famines could be catastrophic…. A survey completed last year reveals a drop in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere…. The present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average…. Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate, [like] melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot…. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
He’s quoting a 1975 Newsweek story. Coming soon: moderate temperatures threaten the future of earth!
in the WaPo:
I’m struck by the fact that you almost never find Orthodox Jews complaining about a Christmas creche in the public square. That is because their children, steeped in the richness of their own religious tradition, know who they are and are not threatened by Christians celebrating their religion in public. They are enlarged by it.
It is the more deracinated members of religious minorities, brought up largely ignorant of their own traditions, whose religious identity is so tenuous that they feel the need to be constantly on guard against displays of other religions — and who think the solution to their predicament is to prevent the other guy from displaying his religion, rather than learning a bit about their own.
We agree, but he’s far too generous. It’s not the weakly religious who are the big problem, but the radical secularists in the ACLU and elsewhere who use tax funds in their attempts to eliminate God in favor of a god they can be in charge of. To them: bah, humbug.
The term jihad fatigue comes from Afganistan. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Kids following lunatics with a vicious ideology that promises great victories but gets blown to bits every time it meet the US military. You get tired after a while, probably even the true believers. Here’s the Kerry Spot on the Washington governor’s race:
After I pay for my omelet and coffee, I ask the woman working the register what, if anything, she’s heard from her customers about the recount. “They think it’s ridiculous,” she says. “They’ve recounted and recounted. How many times are they going to recount? I count up tips every day and put it in a bigger bill. The number doesn’t change if I count it again. Is this going to occur every election time, in every election?”
When will jihad fatigue hit Air America so they will stop talking about Ohio?
EJ Dionne in the WaPo:
[O]rganizational obsessions are often linked to ideological concerns. But the thirst for a 50-state Democratic organization transcends ideology. As Ken Rudin reported on National Public Radio, the words “50-state strategy” tripped off the tongues of Dean and Rosenberg — but also of such party veterans as former Denver mayor Wellington Webb, former Michigan governor Jim Blanchard and former representative Martin Frost of Texas. Clinton administration veteran Harold Ickes also laid heavy stress on building state parties, while Donnie Fowler of South Carolina spoke for beleaguered Southern Democrats.
Thus, even before Democrats get to the question of ideology, they will have to decide what their party needs most. Is the new party chairman’s primary job to be public spokesman? Or is it to move the Democrats up the organizational and technological curve, to rebuild atrophied party structures, to keep asking: What Would Karl Do?
There are 3086 counties, parishes and boroughs in the USA. It is not clear that a focus on Democratic organizations in each of these would be a winning strategy, but it would have two major benefits: (a) even if John Kerry had found 125,000 additional votes in Ohio, the country will not long suffer Hayes/Tilden or Bush/Gore elections, so Democrats have to get their gross numbers up; and (b) a serious blue strategy in red counties would force Democrats to take much more seriously the concerns of the vast sweep of non-coastal red America.
Overview
We have written a lot about the apparent red shift of the last decade, the trend toward the Republican party at many levels of government. Today’s question is: if you were running the DNC, where would you try to find the votes you need to win. It’s a hard task, given the location of your voters, the growth trends of Republican areas, and the structural problems of the Democratic party. Here are some of the issues in play.
The 3 – 4 million Democrats who turned to the dark side
John Podhoretz put the figure at 3.6 million; Roger Simon says 3 million, and adds this:
The Democrats lost in the last election much more seriously than is commonly understood. A swing of three million votes is gigantic in our society where party allegiances are formed in childhood and reinforced by an omnipresent media. We can see the primitiveness of these allegiances in the remaining popularity of Howard Dean, a man who a very few years ago presented himself as a pro-gun centrist, jumping around like a re-upped version of Jerry Rubin to appeal to a segment of the Democratic Party that hasn’t changed one view about anything in thirty-five years. But… and here’s the crux… these people are not that exceptional. Few of us change our views over a lifetime.
Yet, three million did.
He has it exactly right. These Democrats didn’t stay home; they didn’t leave the presidential ballot unmarked. They crossed over to the dark side. One supposes they weren’t brought to the polls by anyone’s GOTV effort, though that is hard to know. In any event, they showed up, having voted for Al Gore, and pulled the lever for Bush. And they did so despite Bush being portrayed as an evil moron chimp Hitler. These Democrats rejected the leftward direction of their party; can the Democrats win them back or replace them with other voters?
The staggering 12 million vote difference between 2004 and 2000
62 million people voted for Bush in 2004 versus 50 million in 2000, including these 3 – 4 million Democrat Gore voters. The 2004 election had the highest turnout of any election in US history, and both sides pulled out the stops to make that happen. However, maybe the Democrats can do even more to increase turnout. Let’s take a look to see if that is feasible.
The Democrats’ structural problem of geographic concentration
Let’s look at where the votes are. You are familiar with the county map of the election:
You may not be familiar with the enormous concentration of the blue in a few major urban areas, as depicted by the folks who do the election graphics for CBS:
Now look at this map of Democratic fundraising concentration. The size of the circles indicates the amount of money raised in that area; the percentage of blue in the circle is the amount raised for the Democrat. You will not be surprised to see that the funding concentration is in the heavily Democratic media, government, and education centers — such as LA, NYC, Boston, DC, SF, etc — where a significant portion of the Kerry vote was also concentrated:
It’s as though the party bigwigs and the Democratic money men are standing in high rises in LA, New York and a few other cities, shouting through the Old Media megaphone at voters — and fewer and fewer people are listening. This is due, in important measure, to the rise of the New Media. Indeed, the scandals in the Old Media during the election season were, among other things, evidence of the panic that subconsciously gripped the Old Media titans as they felt their power slipping away.
The Democrats dominate mature or declining population centers
Add to the mix that the Democrats pulled out all the stops with their traditional constituencies, as described in Matt Bai’s excellent NYT Magazine piece about the GOTV effort in Ohio:
Therein, perhaps, lies the real lesson from Ohio, and from the election as a whole. From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and especially after the disputed election of 2000, Democrats operated on the premise that they were superior in numbers, if only because their supporters lived in such concentrated urban communities. If they could mobilize every Democratic vote in America’s industrial centers — and in its populist heartland as well — then they would win on math alone. Not anymore. Republicans now have their own concentrated vote, and it will probably continue to swell. Turnout operations like ACT can be remarkably successful at corralling the votes that exist, but turnout alone is no longer enough to win a national election for Democrats. The next Democrat who wins will be the one who changes enough minds.
”I can’t think of a thing in Ohio that we could have done more to boost our vote,” Steve Rosenthal told me three days after the election, as the trauma of the defeat began to subside. ”The shortcoming in some ways is that the national Democratic Party has built this values wall between itself and a lot of voters out there, and the Republicans took advantage of it. The rude awakening here is that I always thought there were more of us out there. And this time there were more of them.”
Hence, the Democrats dominate some highly concentrated, but mature or declining, urban centers, and a primary Democratic strategy for dominance, control of the Old Media, has lost much of its effectiveness.
The Republicans own the fast growth areas
Republican dominance of the country’s highest growth areas is nothing short of astounding. Ron Brownstein’s analysis for the LA Times discussed this, with frightening implications for the Democratic Party:
In this month’s election, President Bush carried 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them “exurban” communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas. Together, these fast-growing communities provided Bush a punishing 1.72 million vote advantage over Democrat John F. Kerry, according to a Times analysis of election results. That was almost half the president’s total margin of victory.
“These exurban counties are the new Republican areas, and they will become increasingly important to Republican candidates,” said Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush’s reelection campaign. “This is where a lot of our vote is.”
These growing areas, filled largely with younger families fleeing urban centers in search of affordable homes, are providing the GOP a foothold in blue Democratic-leaning states and solidifying the party’s control over red Republican-leaning states. They also represent a compounding asset whose value for the Republican Party has increased with each election: Bush’s edge in these 100 counties was almost four times greater than the advantage they provided Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee eight years ago.
These high growth Republican areas have been part of an electorate reshaped by the red shift of the last decade. Michael Barone:
The Bush organization literally reshaped the electorate. The 2000 exit poll showed an electorate that was 39 percent Democratic and 35 percent Republican. The 2004 exit poll, which was tilted toward Democrats, found a dead heat: 37 percent to 37 percent. That means that Republican turnout was up 19 percent and Democratic turnout up only 7 percent. This is the most Republican electorate America has had since random-sample polling was invented.
Notice that the trends are all in one direction. Virtually all the fastest growth counties in the country are in the GOP camp. National Republican turnout has reached parity with Democrats, after lagging behind since the Great Depression. As we noted two years ago, a survey of office holders showed 439 had switched from Democrat to Republican while in office, while only three went the other way. That trend continues today.
The other Democratic party structural problem: dominance by left wing kooks
Where would you go to get the votes if you were running the Democratic Party? The first thing you’d do is recognize that you are bumping up against some structural limits. In Cook and Cuyahoga counties, the dead people are already voting twice — it will be hard to get any more juice out of these mature or declining areas. The Democrats raised $925 million for Kerry versus the Republicans’ $822 million for Bush, so spending more money is not the answer. Hence, a good place to begin your quest for victory is not to keep losing Democrats who start voting Republican. The Kerry campaign actually did a pretty good job of this.
This space has argued previously that the Kerry campaign was very effective in keeping together the pro-war and anti-war factions of the party, and that’s how Kerry did so well; a straightforward Howard Dean/George McGovern type race would have made 2004 look a lot more like 1972. However, keeping the two wings together was a unique personal achievement by John Kerry, in his roles as war hero/war protester; it is an unsustainable situation for the Democratic party as an institution. Thus in the aftermath of the election, there have been calls by responsible liberals to dump the Michael Moore/MoveOn wing of the party, for example by Peter Beinart of TNR.
Beinart’s idea of kicking the anti-war crowd out of the party’s power structure won’t work, however, since the MoveOn people aren’t going away; indeed, they want to run the party. George Will:
Beinart is bravely trying to do for liberalism what another magazine editor — National Review’s William Buckley — did for conservatism by excommunicating the Birchers from the conservative movement. But Buckley’s task was easier than Beinart’s will be because the Birchers were never remotely as central to the Republican base as the Moore/MoveOn faction is to the Democratic base.
Coaxing the Democrat Bush voters back into the fold is not something the MoveOn crowd shows interest in. The 3 – 4 million Democrats who voted for Bush have been insulted just as much as the Republican Bush supporters in the aftermath of the election by the left wing of the Democratic party; these turncoat Democrats have become “predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant,” just like the President they voted for, or maybe they’re just plain stupid — in the minds of leftist Democrat elites. Among the GOP’s biggest voter recruiting and retention tools is the condescending attitude of the Left towards everyone who is not them.
Conclusion
The 3 – 4 million Gore voters who voted for Bush are not coming back to a MoveOn-dominated Democratic Party. Roger Simon is right. It is a very big deal when a Democrat pulls the lever for a Republican. Those Democrat voters explicitly rejected the left side of their party; unfortunately for them, the party is not coming back their way any time soon. Furthermore, the Democratic party’s concentration in mature or declining urban centers, where they have already milked every possible vote, suggests that getting an additional 3 – 4 million votes from these traditional Democratic strongholds is an impossible task. An ideological makeover is called for, but also does not appear feasible at present.
Absent making some real and necessary changes, the Democratic party’s default position is this: continue to complain about everything that Bush does, from social security reform to the pre-emptive hit on Clarence Thomas, and hope that the GOP screws up.
Perhaps George Bush will really screw up his second term and give the Democrats the break they need.
The economic case for social security reform is trivially easy to make: compound interest beats no interest at all. And we have to confess that it’s hard to imagine Harry Reid’s world, as conveyed to us via David Brooks:
Gone is the day when President Clinton could propose another plan diverting 15 percent of Social Security reserves into the stock market. Now the Democratic Party’s tone is much more populist and even antibusiness. Harry Reid has begun his tenure as Senate minority leader by doing his best imitation of Huey Long: “They are trying to destroy Social Security by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it’s wrong!”
What you hear these days is not liberalism. It’s conspiracyism. It’s the belief that the Bushite corporate cabal is going to do to domestic programs what the Bushite neocon cabal did in the realm of foreign affairs. It’s the belief in malevolent and shadowy forces that will grab everything for their own greedy ends. This is Michael Moore-ism applied to domestic affairs, and it will leave the Democrats only deeper in the hole.
What is Reid smoking? Probably Brooks is right, and these people don’t have a clue about the history of American prosperity. That’s pretty woefully, and willfully ignorant, but the esteemed ex-editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, said pretty much the same thing about American capitalism.
Let them keep saying it, these dinosaurs. It will help Republicans get a solid and sustainable majority among the younger elements of American society. Social security won’t be around for them as things stand now, so they know the Democrats are lying to them. They know the DMV is awful and that Apple is cool; which stock would you want to own? You can’t scare people who are the richest on the planet with prophecies of capitalist doom and government salvation — these folks have lived through their own IRA’s and 401(k)’s over the last five years: they know the score.
So keep it up, Democrats; it’s another big loser issue for you.
(1) John O’Neill. With nothing to gain, John O’Neill took the bullets aimed at the SwiftBoatVets. Roy Hoffman deserves the award, as does Steve Gardner, as do the POW’s who appeared in Stolen Honor. The award goes to O’Neill for calmness under fire from the lunatic ravings of Chris Matthews, Larry O’Donnell and others.
(2) Joseph Newcomer. Not a supporter of Bush, Newcomer took what the blogosphere did at Powerline, LGF, and many other sites, and engaged the hyperdrive. No one on the planet could entertain the thought that the Rathergate memos were real after Newcomer got through with them.
Dinocrat honors these men because of their dedication to truth. The highest value of journalism is truth, and it was found, in the cases of SwiftBoatVets and Rathergate, far away from the institutions which purport to treasure it.
AP:
WASHINGTON – Liberal powerhouse MoveOn has a message for the “professional election losers” who run the Democratic Party: “We bought it, we own it, we’re going to take it back.” A scathing e-mail from the head of MoveOn’s political action committee to the group’s supporters on Thursday targets outgoing Democratic National Committee (news – web sites) chairman Terry McAuliffe as a tool of corporate donors who alienated both traditional and progressive Democrats.
“For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base,” said the e-mail from MoveOn PAC’s Eli Pariser. “But we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers.”
Right on, baby! To the check-writers belong the spoils.
(1) You saw that the latest figures released by the government on productivity showed very slow growth, 1.8% in the period running up to the election. Why? Because if you, as an employer, add people, but do not increase sales, productivity goes down. (2) You saw that jobless claims unexpectedly rose in late November to 357,000, as more people were laid off. Let me explain. What theory explains these statistics?
Suppose all CEO’s got a memo from the Bush campaign earlier in the year saying that they had to take steps to deal with the Kerry campaign’s charge that Bush was presiding over the worst economy and worst job growth in 72 years (NYT). To combat this, the CEO’s needed to hire more people, even if they didn’t have real jobs for them, with the understanding that the new workers could be laid off in November. That would explain the statistics.
But how would the CEO’s be compensated for the loss in the profits of their own companies from taking these steps? That’s easy; everyone knows that a slush fund from Halliburton would take care of that. QED.
