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.
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