ROGER SIMON COLUMN
NOVEMBER 8, 2004
WASHINGTON - - Through Boston’s Copley Square, the young man marched on the day after the votes had been counted. Against a canopy of yellow and red leaves, his hand-lettered black-on-white protest sign stood out starkly: “This Democracy Doesn’t Work!”
The bad news for him and other John Kerry supporters, however, was that this democracy worked only too well.
George W. Bush had been re-elected with a decisive majority of more than three and a half million votes, the first president to receive a popular vote majority since his father did it in 1988.
And the president achieved re-election in the face of a low approval rating (only 48 percent on election eve) and with many voters clearly dismayed with the direction of the country, the economy and the war in Iraq.
So how did Bush do it? First and foremost, he effectively portrayed himself as a war-time president protecting the homeland. Today, as in the past, Americans were reluctant to swap horses in mid-stream. But other forces were also at work.
Bush put it simply in the final days of the campaign. “You can vote for a committed liberal,” he told crowds, “or you can vote for a compassionate conservative.” While liberals would debate the degree of Bush’s actual compassion, he is certainly a conservative on many social issues.
So a campaign that started out as being about “jobs, jobs, jobs” and then became about “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” in the end was about “values, values, values” - - whatever that word might mean. And it clearly means different things to different people.
But if you described yourself as a conservative, or were a married couple, or owned a gun or lived in a rural area or went to church regularly, you tended to vote for George Bush and in sufficient numbers that the electoral map of America was once again a swath of red, with a few blue eruptions along the coasts and in the upper Midwest.
Bush’s chief political guru, Karl Rove, earned his pay by sticking to a simple plan (the same simple plan hit upon by Howard Dean, though to less effect): Forget about the voters in the middle and woo the base.
This, coupled with a genuinely impressive get out the vote effort that Republicans have been scientifically testing for years (I first wrote about it April 12, 2002), did the job.
And today, Democrats feel a job has been done on them. The Kerry campaign in particular and Democrats in general emerged from Election Day in a state of shock.
“Our internal polling told us for the last month that we were going to win,” Steve Elmendorf, Kerry’s deputy campaign manager, told me. “People here were devastated. There was the sense that this election was really important for the country and now the country will suffer because we lost. But the voters made their decision.”
On Election Night, Kerry was convinced by faulty exit polls that he had won the election. But all night long the actual vote totals grew grimmer and grimmer and it became clear the winner would be decided by Ohio.
The Kerry political team and legal team huddled and asked some basic questions: Could they prevent the networks from calling Ohio for Bush? Could they win Ohio through the counting of provisional (i.e. disputed) ballots?
By about 4:30 a.m. they came to the conclusion that it was hopeless and called Kerry’s Beacon Hill home to tell him. But the phone just rang and rang. The candidate had gone to bed. Only in the morning light did he get the bad news and decide to concede.
While some are urging the party to avoid the usual recriminations, navel-gazing and a much-predicted “bloodbath,” others say that unless the Democrats learn from this defeat, they will make future defeats inevitable.
Said Doug Sosnik, a senior Kerry adviser, “We just had an election where we had a hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot of people on the street and we lost pretty big. If all we do is sit around and say that we need more money and we need more people on the street, nothing will get solved. This is a very tough defeat for us. We are formally out of political power.”
Some also point to the bedrock institutions of the party as being partly to blame. “The Democratic National Committee, the Young Democrats, the NAACP National Voter Fund, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, these form the old, post-sixties Democratic liberal establishment,” one party stalwart said. “That is where the energy used to be. Now, some of these institutions are old and tired and irrelevant and we need an overhaul.”
Such analysis, however, ignores the fact that every now and then presidential campaigns are actually about the candidates and while staff and strategies and get-out-the-vote efforts can be important, you still need somebody at the top of the ticket who can sell his program and himself to the American people.
Bush was simply better at connecting with voters. Though Kerry has no reason to be ashamed of his campaign and though he did an excellent job in his three debates, he simply was unable to connect with voters on an emotional level.
Only in his concession speech, after he told the crowd, “I wish that I could just wrap you up in my arms and embrace each and every one of you” did his voice break, leaving some to wonder why he could show human emotion only in defeat and not during his campaign.
Though the matter is subjective, one could argue that in every presidential election from Ronald Reagan to the present, the more likable presidential candidate has won.
And while some might consider likeability or connecting with voters trivial, it probably sustained Bush through a virtually unprecedented drumbeat of bad news in the weeks before Election Day: the rising death toll in Iraq, reminders of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the shortage of flu vaccine, high gasoline prices, allegations about missing Iraqi explosives, and three badly-reviewed debate performances. The list could probably go on, but the point is that Bush won anyway.
It worries the Democrats. “Take a look at the electoral map,” said Sosnik. “It is a lot more red than blue and that has something to do with values. The evidence is pretty clear: If you are married, you tend to be a Republican. If you have a family, you tend to be a Republican. If you go to church, you tend to be a Republican.”
He then added dryly, “I am starting to get to the point that I think we have a problem.”
ROGER SIMON COLUMN
NOVEMBER 3, 2004
BOSTON - - Eight quick thoughts on the recent election:
1. With the re-election of George W. Bush and the illness of Chief Justice William Rehnquist there has been a lot of talk, especially in the media, about how Bush now has a chance to make the court more conservative.
But it’s not that easy. Rehnquist is very conservative - - he was one of two justices to vote against Roe v. Wade - - but replacing him with another conservative would not change the political make-up of the court. In fact, it might be hard for Bush to get a nominee as conservative as Rehnquist through the U.S. Senate.
What Bush needs to make the court more conservative is for moderate or liberal justices to resign - - John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance - - and replace them with conservatives.
Otherwise, the court is unlikely to change much.
2. But does Bush really want change that favors conservatives or does he want to “reach out” and “heal” the nation?
Well, I wouldn’t take this healing talk too seriously. Bush was elected by conservatives who expect to be rewarded with conservative legislation, conservative judicial appointments and conservative Constitutional amendments.
3. John Kerry gave a very gracious concession speech Wednesday and he even choked up at one point. When he did, a thought struck me, however: Now he shows some human emotion? In his concession speech? Maybe he should have shown a little human emotion over the last year or so.
4. I have said it before and will say it again: Voters almost always choose the more likeable (or more likeable seeming) candidate for president. This election was no exception.
5. Rarely has an incumbent president received more bad news before an election:
Fatalities in Iraq, shortage of flu vaccine, high gasoline prices, the Abu Graib scandal, the Halliburton investigation, three badly reviewed debate performances…the list could go on and on. But George W. Bush won anyway. Why? Two reasons: We don’t change presidents in the middle of a war and values, values, values. His values were more in tune with voters than were John Kerry’s.
What can the Democrats do about this? Well, I suppose they could try to amend the Constitution so Bill Clinton could run again. Or they could try to find a candidate who can appeal to moderate as well as liberal voters. Sure, if Kerry had won Florida, he could have been president without winning a single other southern state, but wouldn’t it be nice for the Democrats if they could find a candidate who was even slightly viable in the South?
6. One lesson of 2004 may be this: As both John Kerry and Howard Dean learned, building a coalition that depends on a high turn-out of first-time and young voters is a very dicey proposition.
7. Once again, a legislator has lost his bid for the presidency. Only three times in our history has a member of the House or Senate been elected directly to the presidency: James Garfield, Warren Harding and John Kennedy. (All three died in office, but that is a coincidence.) Why is it so hard for Senators and members of the House to win? It may be that legislators have to compromise so much and have to defend so many votes, that they get torn apart in the general election. Governor’s don’t have that problem.
8. I know some people are very happy, some are very sad and some are very angry. But keep in mind that the Republic always does survive. Often, it even prospers.
And remember: The next presidential election campaign has already begun.