it's mourning in America
Nov. 3rd, 2004 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backup3.5 million popular vote spread... all those Senate seats. To repeat: not even close.
Oy.
OK, now, here's the thing.
You grow up under Reagan for eight years, you really have no right to expect any sanity from the American public ever again. And talk about reelecting evil: Nixon won reelection by a landslide in 1972, after invading Cambodia.
More generally, ya, this is a Republican/conservative country. Has been for at least as long as any of my LJ readers has been alive. (Perhaps as long as this country has existed, though that's another story.) Has been getting more so almost uninterruptedly during that time as well. Clinton won with Perot -- that was the anomaly, and then he lost the Congress for good. You put your chips on the table, you expect the house to win. That's how it goes.
I don't see that as unremitting cynicism or pessimism or what have you. It's a clear set of trend lines on a long-term graph. There are other trend lines on that graph too -- the rise of Latinos, for example -- but they're not politically realized yet. American politics will change someday, just not soon.
In the meantime, console yourselves with the fact that Kerry did a lot better than Mondale or McGovern, even did a lot better than I would have expected in March or so. The problem was that Kerry didn't do anything with those trends and focused exclusively on whether you like Dubya or you hate him. 49% is pretty good with that kind of strategy.
Dubya dominates the minds of everyone, left, right, and center -- just as Clinton did. That's why Dubya was always going to be hard to beat. The devil you know, and all that.
Also, it's a documented historical pattern that reelected presidents tend to overreach and have terrible second terms. The Republicans lost badly in '86. These guys, well, they ran the table last night, so we are in for some rough few months... But this whole Iraq mess is not going to go away, and there are a bunch of other more or less insoluble problems waiting around to bite them on the ass. And they would have bitten Kerry on the ass, with a Republican Congress, had he won. This I have said many times.
Okay, so I have limits with silver-lining this thing, but I'm trying, people. I'm trying.
I dunno. You expect nothing, you're never disappointed. That maxim comes in handy sometimes.
Oy.
OK, now, here's the thing.
You grow up under Reagan for eight years, you really have no right to expect any sanity from the American public ever again. And talk about reelecting evil: Nixon won reelection by a landslide in 1972, after invading Cambodia.
More generally, ya, this is a Republican/conservative country. Has been for at least as long as any of my LJ readers has been alive. (Perhaps as long as this country has existed, though that's another story.) Has been getting more so almost uninterruptedly during that time as well. Clinton won with Perot -- that was the anomaly, and then he lost the Congress for good. You put your chips on the table, you expect the house to win. That's how it goes.
I don't see that as unremitting cynicism or pessimism or what have you. It's a clear set of trend lines on a long-term graph. There are other trend lines on that graph too -- the rise of Latinos, for example -- but they're not politically realized yet. American politics will change someday, just not soon.
In the meantime, console yourselves with the fact that Kerry did a lot better than Mondale or McGovern, even did a lot better than I would have expected in March or so. The problem was that Kerry didn't do anything with those trends and focused exclusively on whether you like Dubya or you hate him. 49% is pretty good with that kind of strategy.
Dubya dominates the minds of everyone, left, right, and center -- just as Clinton did. That's why Dubya was always going to be hard to beat. The devil you know, and all that.
Also, it's a documented historical pattern that reelected presidents tend to overreach and have terrible second terms. The Republicans lost badly in '86. These guys, well, they ran the table last night, so we are in for some rough few months... But this whole Iraq mess is not going to go away, and there are a bunch of other more or less insoluble problems waiting around to bite them on the ass. And they would have bitten Kerry on the ass, with a Republican Congress, had he won. This I have said many times.
Okay, so I have limits with silver-lining this thing, but I'm trying, people. I'm trying.
I dunno. You expect nothing, you're never disappointed. That maxim comes in handy sometimes.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 01:22 pm (UTC)I think there's something deeper here, which Clinton and Carville understand but can't change, and that is that conservatives are coherent and focused and ferociously motivated, and liberals are incoherent and unfocused and barely in agreement on anything. Conservatives are able to be subtle to smart people and simple to stupid people, and it gets them 51%. Liberals are caught between statism and antistatism, elitism and populism, and so on.
Another thing that neither of them has much to do with is that Republicans win more local races and that in turn gives them a better field of candidates for the presidency. Kerry was as good as was out there in the primaries this time around. But he's no Clinton -- there are no more Clintons in the Democratic Party, because the Clinton-types can't win southern governorships anymore. The Democrats have to draw from their northeastern base for candidates (can't be a candidate if you've never been elected to anything), and that translates poorly in other parts of the country.
So it's a really hard combination to pick. Presidential elections are the Republicans' to lose, and they usually don't.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 01:27 pm (UTC)I guess it's time for me to join the Canadian Jewish Studies association so I can be clued in to whatever jobs open up in Canada then.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 01:49 pm (UTC)