THE MEANING OF DEFEAT
Comment The Meaning of Defeat How agonizing it was to see George Bush gloat. Agonizing, no doubt, for John Kerry on a personal level, but profoundly more agonizing for his supporters and those on...
...In each one, the referendum to ban same-sex marriage won by a lopsided margin...
...Kerry never let his supporters down during the campaign so much as he did at his concession speech...
...Nowhere does it say to beat ploughshares into swords...
...Amazingly, he failed to learn the lesson of the Dukakis campaign, which was to fire back immediately upon being attacked...
...In a pivotal election like this one, the candidate owes his supporters more discipline and more toughness...
...In the mainstream media, it is long past time for a progressive TV network to go toe to toe against Fox...
...But no one is rolling over dead...
...That is why he came out for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and why Rove helped engineer referendums in eleven states on the issue...
...These issues were a great distraction from the issues of the Iraq War and the economy...
...In fact, there is a seriousness of purpose, an urgency to gain power, that is amazing to behold...
...That's why virtually the entire left half of the spectrum—from DLC Democrats to radical intellectuals, from Joe Lieberman to Noam Chomsky—sided with Kerry...
...This diet of misinformation was not good for the brain...
...It was always about the hope of establishing a semblance of sanity in our foreign policy, decency in social policy, and respect for the basic tenets of our democracy...
...Moral values" are not the preserve of rightwing evangelicals...
...Bush and Rove did everything they could to make Election Day a religious occasion...
...Nader, as predicted here, was an asterisk of an asterisk...
...On the Iraq War, his position was incoherent and disingenuous...
...While he had a good final month and performed well in the debates, he was a weak candidate overall...
...That is why, in one of the debates, Bush signaled (with a mention of the Dred Scott case) that he would appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court...
...You can bet the farm and all of Old McDonald's animals that Karl Rove would not have let such opportunities slide by...
...Leftists who supported Kerry are going to do everything they can not to "bridge the partisan divide," as Kerry also admonished, but to mobilize opposition to Bush every step of the way...
...This is the American superiority complex, a profound affliction that distorts our perceptions and enables manipulative Presidents to give the marching orders...
...Democracy Now...
...Agonizing, no doubt, for John Kerry on a personal level, but profoundly more agonizing for his supporters and those on the left who threw in their lot with him in hopes of ridding the White House of the gang of reactionaries who took it over these last four years...
...He won 51-48, hardly a landslide...
...Instead, Kerry for weeks failed to answer the slanders of the Swift Boaters...
...He essentially told them to cave, to act like good little boys and girls and eat their spinach and work with George Bush...
...Not until the last sixty days did he discover the argument he needed most: that the war on Iraq was making us less safe...
...We will not give in to paralytic depression...
...By contrast, the Kerry forces and the 527s tried to parachute organizers in, just as Howard Dean attempted in Iowa...
...Even still, Bush prevailed, and we must examine why...
...How dare he tell them now to support it...
...These are all moral values...
...We believe in truth and justice and peace and equality and a preserved environment...
...Part of the answer rests with Kerry himself...
...Then he delivered a huge present to the Bush campaign by making the ludicrous comment about being both for and against the $87 billion appropriation for the war...
...Most unforgivably, Kerry said, "We must stand together and succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror...
...And that's for the good of the country...
...And media activism is at an all-time high, with a new mass movement tugging at the trunks of the conglomerates...
...There is a grand coalition—unionists, civil rights groups, environmentalists, 527s, activists of all stripes, from the old school and from the Internet...
...We can now exchange our messages on websites like Common Dreams and Buzzflash and Truthout and MoveOn...
...He's been behaving so for four years, actually, even before he claimed a majority of the popular vote...
...Bush did not win by a huge margin, however...
...Progressives now have the capacity not only to communicate instantaneously but to organize that way, as well...
...We will not sulk...
...The churches played a huge role in driving their followers to the polls...
...On the cultural front, an insurrection is under way: from Michael Moore to John Sayles, from Margaret Cho to Jon Stewart, from Bruce Springsteen to Eminem to Ani DiFranco and the Dixie Chicks...
...And little wonder...
...This is the moment for our friends like Jim Wallis of Sojourners and the editors of Commonweal, The Christian Century, and the National Catholic Reporter, who are trying valiantly to persuade others that there is more to the Bible than homophobia and sexism...
...In addition, the alternative media is stronger than ever before...
...People know the stakes, and will keep pulling together...
...And those on the left who are people of faith must speak to their fellow believers in a language they understand...
...Almost everyone is rowing in the same direction for once...
...Compounding that, he squandered precious time after winning the nomination and foolishly flaunted his elitist credentials by going snowboarding in Utah and windsurfing off of Nantucket...
...Such comments suggest we are entering the dusk of the Age of Reason...
...and Air America are reaching tens of millions of citizens...
...God has given us a reprieve," said James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family...
...Some leftwing groups such as Free Speech TV, have taken pioneering strides...
...At the Democratic Convention, he and other leading Democrats barely mentioned Bush's name at all...
...Plus, America is a deeply religious place, and Bush's messianic militarism has fallen on receptive ears...
...He never explained adequately why he voted to authorize Bush to go to war in the first place, and for some baffling reason, he said he would still have done it again even knowing that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction...
...This is what the Republicans did so effectively...
...Remote in manner, convoluted in speech, he had anything but a common touch...
...In this election, the churches did everything they could to impose their will on the general populace...
...And after 9/11, Bush proved better at reciting the myths of America, including the John Wayne myth of the tough guy...
...But people are less likely to be persuaded by total strangers than they are by their neighbors...
...Without anger or rancor...
...But the financing to compete against Fox is not there yet...
...As Americans, Kerry intoned, we all have an "obligation...
...But he is already behaving as though he had one...
...Spare us the talk of a mandate...
...The defeat in November demands extra measures, however...
...We will not leave the country...
...And as we do so, we—and well-meaning people the world over—may once again recite the line from Neruda, "America, I do not call your name without hope...
...We are required now to work together for the good of the country...
...Deep in the psyche of the American mind is the myth of exceptionalism: that we are the greatest country on Earth, a shining beacon on a hill, placed here by God himself...
...And when people weren't getting the message in church, they were fed it intravenously by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV and by talk radio...
...We practice kindness and compassion...
...A whopping 87 percent of Kerry voters oppose the war in Iraq...
...In this election, 23 percent of the electorate was made up of white evangelicals, and 78 percent of them voted for Bush...
...Or Cheney's, or Rumsfeld's, or Wolfowitz's, or Ashcroft's...
...Nowhere in the Bible does it say to give alms to the rich and bread to the gluttons...
...Black Tuesday was a sobering day...
...We will stay and fight...
...Look back forty-four years to JFK's famous speech about religion and politics, and notice how far the nation has slid since then: "I believe in an America where the separation ofchurch and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...
...In Ohio, Bush prevailed in the county with the greatest unemployment, even though his policies contributed to that unemployment...
...But to blame the defeat solely on Kerry himself would be to miss some of the larger forces at play and would lead to foolish options next time around...
...And so it is the task of the progressive movement to be an effective force of resistance by demonstrating in large numbers against his policies, by pressuring liberal legislators to hold the line, and by regrouping to fight another day...
...And how dare he blur the line between the Iraq War and the war on terror...
...Nor are they the preserve of believers...
...I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish, where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source, where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials...
...And we must stand up and claim them...
...Those of us on the secular left must insist that we are as moral as anyone in Focus on the Family...
...As far as organizing goes, progressives must reinvigorate efforts locally: door to door, in the community, by people who reside there...
...No sale...
...About 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as born-again Christians...
...In the days ahead, we must find common cause, we must join in the common effort, without remorse or recrimination, without anger or rancor...
...Some rightwing evangelicals claimed that God paved the way for Bush in the White House...
...And the Kerry campaign never took Bush down two notches for being asleep at the wheel before 9/11...
...Fortunately, the broadly defined liberal and leftwing community in America is more impassioned, determined, organized, and united than any time in six decades...
...To a large extent on November 2, not reason but doctrine prevailed...
...Kerry also played too nice...
...This was never about John Kerry...
...Common cause with George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld...
Vol. 68 • December 2004 • No. 12
