Friday, November 5, 2004

Announcement: The Democratic Party is not Broken

Look, I know things kinda suck right now and it's reasonable to take a little time to grieve and to analyze and to reflect. Certainly there was good reason to think that things were going to go better for us in the last election than they did and we do need to figure out why they didn't. But that doesn't mean that the Democratic Party, at least on a national level, is broken.

Think about this for a minute - a "liberal" Senator from Massachusetts got more votes than any Presidential candidate (winner or loser) in any previous election. The party was more united behind a single candidate than at any time that I can remember and managed to make it through the primaries without beating each other bloody (unlike past Democratic Primary seasons and unlike Bush/McCain in 2000). At a time when the United States is at war, we came within 3.5 million votes out of over 116 million cast of unseating a "wartime" president. We came within a few thousand votes in Ohio of winning the Electoral College vote (and I'm not going to speculate on voter fraud here - there are enough other folks from both sides of the spectrum doing that). I know we didn't want to almost win the Presidency and I truly believe that the country will suffer for having re-elected George Bush. The point I'm trying to make is that this election shouldn't be viewed as a massive failure on the part of the Democratic Party or of the candidates at the top of the ticket. It does mean that we've got a lot of work to do.

I don't think this means that we need to somehow silence the folks on the left side of the spectrum, nor do I think that we need to somehow wrest control of the party back from the "Clintonistas" and other more moderate parts of the party. I don't recall Democrats fighting Democrats ever resulting in positives. I learned a couple of things from working in the animal rights movement years ago - the first is that the fringe, by pushing the envelope, moves the center in their direction. The second is that when all you hear is the fringe, it loses its power. The fact that the animal rights movement had any affect at all on society (reduction in animal product testing, reduction in fur sales, more humane food choices) resulted from pushing the envelope - a protest against lobster tanks at Harris-Teeter was pretty far out there, but it made protests against milk-fed veal seem much more reasonable. It's when the people that are closer to the center stop acting and become complacent or move too far towards the center (or the other side) that the fringe voices become ineffective.

Quick history recap - late 1800's "fringe" groups that worked for organizing labor, stopping child labor and sweatshops and establishing workers' rights were all viewed as way out there and unAmerican. They certainly never got everything they wanted (hell, probably not even close). But they made the progressivism of the Roosevelts possible. They were successful in moving the center a bit to the left. Now the right wing fringe (remember how stupid and funny we all thought Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was in the late 70's?) has managed over the last 30 years to move the center back to the right. Not as far to the right as it was in 1896, but further than it was in 1964 or 1972. These things take time to develop and time to counteract and it's going to take the whole party to do it. And frankly the right faces the real danger of silencing the more moderate wing of the party which will hurt them over time (it happened to the Democratic Party in the late 60's).

So what does all that mean? A Democratic Party without the far(ther) left just becomes Republican Lite. A Democratic Party that loses its active center loses its ability to appeal to independents. So everybody needs to stop this crap about seceding or moving to Canada (they don't want us anyway), stop blaming the loss to Bush on the other side of our party and get busy taking our damn country back. We're not that far away!

I'll admit that I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet, but I'm working on it. You need to be, too.

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

It's over.

That doesn't mean that I think the rest of the votes shouldn't be counted in Ohio and other places, but since I'm a firm believer that the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness, the popular vote is clearly in favor of Bush.

So what does that mean? I don't know and don't expect to for awhile but I'm starting to understand something that I haven't really internalized yet. I'm convinced that Bush voters vote from their gut, while Democrats continue to appeal to the brain. That's not exactly a revelation, but sometimes it still surprises me and I think it hasn't sunk in to the rest of the party either, otherwise they wouldn't keep wondering why less-than-rich right-wingers keep voting for people who are running for office in order to fuck them over. If you want to think of it as "values" vs. "issues", that's as good as anything. So when Dems crow about surveys that show that many Bush supporters don't even know what his stances are on a number of issues, they're missing the point. It's not because they're dumb, it's because they don't give a flying fuck! They care that he rides his mountain bike on a "ranch" in Crawford instead of in Copley Plaza. They care that he talks tough about protecting them from Saddam Hussein without bothering them with nuance. They really care that he talks like they do, regardless of how fake it is. The pundits like to talk about this in terms of "evangelical" Christians and rural voters, but it goes MUCH further than that. In the geographic areas where national Democrats are running badly, you're talking about the majority of people. And that holds true in most Southern and Midwestern suburbs just as much as in the small towns. And don't forget that outside of a couple of states, it applies to a large minority of people there too. So attempts to delegate them to fringe-sounding groups like evangelical Christians only serves to hide the fact that they're the majority in the country as a whole. I'm firmly convinced that the biggest issue is that they don't trust people who are not like them - who don't look like them, worship like them, have sex like them, talk like them. And they don't (for some reason) trust people that they suspect might be smarter than them.

I don't know what this portends for the Democratic Party. Certainly there are changes that need to be made, although in terms of the presidential race I've never seen Democrats more united. I don't think Kerry did anything wrong. But I do think that the primary system is not designed to give us a candidate that can win nationally. If you believe what I've said above, you'll squelch any discussion of Hillary Clinton as a potential candidate in the bud. I love her and think she'd make a kick-ass president but she'd make a lousy candidate. I think you have to find a candidate that can appeal to the gut of your average voter while still appealing to the people that actually care about issues. I don't know if that's Edwards or Clark or Obama (although I think all three of those are possibilities).

What might be even more interesting is what happens to the Republican Party. I get a real impression that there were a number of more traditional conservatives that are worried about the budget irresponsibility of the present administration and the invasion into people's personal lives that would not have minded seeing Bush lose so that they could regain some sway in the Republican Party. What do they do now? I know it's a long way away, but I can't see a McCain-style Republican winning the primaries against, say, Jeb Bush (whose name I actually haven't seen bandied about yet today as his brother's successor) or some other more activist Republican. I remarked to a friend in South Carolina today who is from the "Dems out of my back pocket, Repubs out of my bedroom" school that maybe it's time for the return of the Bull Moose Party to give a home to the McCains and Liebermans and the people that would lean Libertarian if the party wasn't run by insane people.

On the other hand, I'm apparently a Republican myself:

I don't know what that means, either...

Finally, go ahead and download as much Internet pr0n as you possibly can before Asscroft and the new Supreme Court shut down your access! ;-)

Monday, November 1, 2004

A good friend of mine passed away last Thursday. It might seem a little odd to refer to someone that I've only seen face-to-face three, maybe four, times a good friend, but I believe that's the nature of the modern workplace and Tony was definitely a good friend. I'll share with you some of the details from his obituary in the Dallas Morning News:

• Born August 6, 1947 in Wewoka, Oklahoma
• Graduated from Kosciusko High School in Kosciusko, Mississippi in 1965
• Attended Mississippi State University
• Joined the US Army in 1968, serving in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 as a Cobra helicopter gunship pilot and was twice awared the Distinguished Flying Cross in addition to other medals
• Earned a BS in Psychology while on active duty in the 70's
• Served in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 as a reservist

What is funny, I guess, is that about all I knew of any of the above is that Tony had been in the military. So I can't claim that Tony was a close friend, but I can damn well claim him as a good one. What I do know is that Tony was one of the warmest, most genuine people I ever had the pleasure of meeting. He had a way of being able to calm nerves and get people's heads into solving the problem at hand, regardless of how much pressure we were under from the higher-ups. I guess after piloting a Cobra through the Southeast Asian jungle, a downed Exchange server with a bunch of executives' e-mail boxes on it just wasn't cause for all that much alarm. Tony and I spent many long nights on the phone during problems like that and he managed to pull the right people together and get the most out of them, without having to coerce or yell or pitch a fit. We had time to chat during those long, dark nights between management updates and I came to know Tony's love of his family, his care for the people that reported to him and worked with him and his love of good red wine!

I know his family is deeply grieving, but all of us who knew Tony, even a little, share at least some of that grief with them. I lost a good friend to cancer last week and the world feels a little colder today.

Sunday, October 31, 2004

I wrote a really nice post late last night right after the win over Miami - really nice. I'm not kidding - you'd have liked it. Then my system rebooted itself before I saved it and I was too drained to recreate it. It's a shame - it really was pretty good.

Halloween has gotten to be a huge deal in Chapel Hill - they estimated 70,000 people downtown last year and they're expecting similar numbers tonight. If I step out onto the front porch, I can probably hear all the way out here the low roar that large crowds of people like that generate. What no one expected was that tonight would be almost anticlimactic after last night victory over Miami - as everyone now knows, the first Carolina football victory over a Top 5 school in the long history of the program. Bits of goalposts are probably still circulating through the crowd on Franklin Street.

It was an even bigger deal to me since my folks were in town for the weekend. Dad and I have watched many Carolina games over the years and despite the success of both the basketball and the football teams, we always seem to jinx the Heels when we see a game together. This one was all the sweeter when Dad said after Carolina's last TD that Miami would score again and UNC would win it on a Connor Barth field goal. Damned if it didn't go down exactly like that. Dad's been a Bunting supporter from the time he was hired, while I've been much in the "prove it to me" camp. I'm not saying that I am suddenly now a John Bunting believer, but I'm a helluva a lot closer to being able to see him as capable of turning things around.

Think about this. Carolina now has a better conference record than NC State. Better than Clemson. Better than Georgia Tech and Maryland. And that's with Wake Forest and Dook left on the schedule. Even with Virginia Tech coming to Chapel Hill next week, we've got a decent shot at a winning record. The challenge now is to keep the team that beat Miami and Georgia Tech and gutted out a win over State on the field and not the bozos that got blown out by Virginia, Louisville and Utah. If they manage to win out - hell, if they make it a close game against Va Tech and beat the Deacs and the Devils - I'll sign up as a believer.