Presidential mad libs

Our Journey Is Not Done

The voters hand _____ a historic victory but send a message, not a mandate: work with the _____

(TIME, November 6, ____) -- A nation born of a distrust of kings won't easily forgive a President who behaves too much like one. And so every four years, the people give a test: first we hand someone the most powerful job in the world. Then we demand that he not be too proud of himself for having it, too desperate to keep it or too sure that he alone knows what to do with it. And then we sit back and watch, until it's time to decide whether to re-elect him.

In four years _____ learned that it is not enough to be smart or charming or plump with vision. His triumph on Tuesday night, for all the records it broke, was a victory for studied modesty; for a willingness to swallow his pride to preserve his power, embrace his enemies to steal their ideas and march into history as the first two-term _____ since _____, not with great leaps forward but one baby step at a time.

The President in question is Bill Clinton, and the year was 1996. Clinton defeated Dole by 8 percent - "NOT A MANDATE". The year is now 2004. Bush's margin of victory is less than 3 percent. I'm curious to read what TIME will write next week. We already know what Bush thinks. How does less than half of a non-mandate equal a mandate? Easily, when you hold a degree in fuzzy math.

And the day after that

My last thoughts on Tuesday. Well, just stuff collated from daily newspapers. Good stuff.

In The Day the Enlightenment Went Out, Garry Wills calls it William Jennings Bryan's revenge for the Scopes Trial:

This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz collates a few more post-mortems (of democracy?) in Media Notes. Most of them aren't very insightful. Kurtz summarizes the New York Times editorialas saying that Bush is a uniter in "part of the country". That's like saying a someone is partly male. Either you're a uniter or a divider! Thwe LA Times reports that Democratic strategists and political analysts (quoting oneself, eh?) claimed that the Kerry campaign lacked one thing: "a boldly rendered portrayal of himself and his vision for the country." Well, for one thing, that's two things. And the first is not accurate. Kerry did have a boldly rendered portrayal of himself, as a man dedicated to service and country all his adult life, and committed to making American safer at home and respected in the world. The second part could have used more fleshing out. He needed to be more aggressive about the Bush administration's character flaws. Not personal flaws, though many they may be. But the administration's pathology, its refusal to listen to other voices (be they other countries or others in the administration itself), and connect that with the failures of intelligence. When you believe something ideologically, it's that much harder to consider the evidence impartially. Unfortunately, that's also a flaw of many Americans - "faith-based intelligence" is not an insult to them. Or at least not the same kind of insult. The Chicago Tribune notes that the war and poor economy made people cling even more to Bush. This sidestepping of reason I can understand better - fear is a evolutionary motivator. I just find it ironic that we are rewarding someone for putting us at risk both at home and abroad. What are we, scared yet dependent 16-year-old child brides in polygamous marriages? Such thinking does not become citizens in a democracy, only subjects in an authoritarian regime. I can be patient for regime change. Four years, or even forty - then all the militant fundamentalists whether in America or abroad will be dead. But global warming, nuclear proliferation, and imminent challenges of social justice require attention today.

Harold Meyerson writes in The American Prospect:

"The Democrats' America looks increasingly like a discontinuous ghetto -- the Northeast, the Pacific Coast, the industrial and upper Midwest, minus (it seems) Ohio. These states are home to the interesting, and promising, demographic changes in the U.S. They are the focus of much Latino immigration, and it's to these states that college-educated young professionals tend to move. Unfortunately, though these developments may make blue states bluer but they also make red states redder."

Aside from the terminology ("discontinous ghetto" is an oxymoron, and in fact ghetto better describes the red state folk, the half of America who live within 50 miles of their birthplace), I think Meyerson alludes to an important point. Many educated people are fleeing the red states, which only makes them less cultured and less amenable to change. But blue states are not inherently blue - "blueness" instead is the result of migration, immigration, the interaction, toleration, and education that is a glad consequence of such movement. And that is a climate change I'm proud of.

Some morning after thoughts

Atrios says "Move On-ward":

People tend to take a loss like this as "proof" that their personal pet peeve about the campaign was correct, and too much discussion of it reinforces the tendency to try to keep trying to fight the last campaign. Elections are not deterministic things, and the binary nature of their outcomes tends to obscure the underlying complexity. What matters isn't what was done wrong, but what needs to be done right for the '06 elections.

Josh Marshall calls on the president to be a uniter, not a 51% divider:

It would be up to the president...to show concrete signs of a willingness not to govern in the divisive and factional spirit from which he's governed in the last four years.

And then there's this from his comments today: "We've worked hard and gained many new friends, and the result is now clear -- a record voter turnout and a broad, nationwide victory."

This is the touchstone and the sign. A 'broad, nationwide victory'? He must be kidding. Our system is majority rule. And 51% is a win. But he's claiming a mandate.

"A broad, nationwide victory"?

It would almost be comical if it weren't for the seriousness of what it portends. This election cut the nation in two. A single percentage point over 50% is not broad. A victory that carried no states in the Northeast, close to none in the Industrial midwest is not nationwide, and none on the west coast is not nationwide.

And yet he plans to use this narrow victory as though it were a broad mandate, starting right back with the same strategy that has already come near to tearing this country apart.

Margaret Cho takes the, ahem, larger prespective:

Although it might be said that we can't expect change overnight, there really was a very rapid shift in the way we view politics. We have become unafraid of voicing our opinions, using our power, pooling our resources, and allowing our differences to aid us instead of keeping us apart.

These new ways of looking at ourselves politically redefine what it means to be an American. It takes what used to be a very passive identity and turned us all into revolutionaries. In a short time, we activated activism, something that lay dormant in many of us and had not been awakened until now.

The Bush administration will be sorry they won this battle, for they now look forward to losing the war. Ultimately, a government cannot defeat its people

Dante Chinni, who is not seeing red:

some of the party's social moderates - the last holdouts against Democratic realignment such as Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island and both of Maine's senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins- are not happy with direction from the top. Given the Republicans' present course, one can only wonder how much longer they will stay in their party, or how much longer those seats will stay in the GOP column in the Senate.

And then there is the question of what the cultural issues mean to the nation's well-being. If cultural issues are going to be the hallmark of the next four years, it's probably safe to assume the divisions that were there in 2004 are only going to be deeper in 2008. When it comes to dividing a nation, tax cuts have nothing on values.

A Daily Kos reader reveals the so-called "moral values" for what they are:

This is not about Republicans or Democrats.
This is not about the war.
This is not about the economy.
This is not even about counting the votes.

This is the final step in the 20-year creeping coup by the theocrats

And finally, read Katrina vanden Heuvel's incisive affirmation of America's split personality. She quotes John Dos Passos from his USA Trilogy:

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge's bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the power plants
they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

all right we are two nations."

America is in many ways composed of words: a few old documents; certain speeches by Presidents and religious leaders; our neon vernacular of lyrics, showtunes, sales pitches. And common words are imbued with sacred meaning in this land. I am proud of the words that give America its shape and color. But the dark forces in our country have taken the sacred - "family", "moral values", even "America" and made those words as slimy and foul as they are.

Jeb + Jeanne = Florida

So I "miscalculated" the election results. But I am right about Kerry and Bush.