Democrats' Losses Go Far Beyond One Defeat - Big Big Forums

Jolie Rouge · 11-06-2004, 12:46 AM

Democrats' Losses Go Far Beyond One Defeat
Thu Nov 4, 7:55 AM ET
Los Angeles Times
By Ronald Brownstein Times Staff Writer

In the struggle for political power, Democrats now face a stark threat: Under George W. Bush, Republicans are consolidating their control over the culturally conservative regions of the country.

The 2004 elections underscored that the nation's so-called red territories — areas that support the president — are becoming redder. And that threatens to leave Democrats at a long-term disadvantage in future races for the White House and battles for Congress.

Although Bush in Tuesday's vote made some inroads among swing groups such as Latinos and married women, exit polls and voting results in key counties across the nation suggested he won his second term mostly by increasing the GOP strength in places where the party was already strong — especially rural, small-town and fast-growing exurban communities.

Bush successfully defended 29 of the 30 states he won in 2000 — and increased his margin of victory in 19 of those 29. Exit polls showed he dominated among the same groups central to his much narrower win in 2000 — including regular churchgoers, married families and gun owners. And both the exit polls and voting results make clear that he inspired a huge surge of Republican turnout — just as he did in the 2002 midterm elections.

Just as important, his strength helped carry the GOP to substantial gains in congressional races across the red states. All six of the Democratic House seats that Republicans won Tuesday came in red states. (Four of them came in Bush's home state of Texas, where a new redistricting map benefited the GOP.)

Even more dramatically, Republicans captured six Democratic Senate seats in states that Bush carried twice, while losing only one red state seat, for a net pickup of five in those states. With those gains, Republicans now hold 44 of the 58 Senate seats in the 29 states Bush has carried twice, bringing the party to the edge of a majority even before contesting seats in the blue states that voted for Al Gore (news - web sites) and John F. Kerry.

Adding to the concern for Democrats is that the GOP made all these gains even while Kerry reached many of the targets his campaign set. The results suggest this wasn't an election Kerry lost so much as one that Bush won.

Kerry inspired millions of new voters and established a clear advantage among young people, according to exit polls by the Los Angeles Times and Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool. His campaign engineered huge turnouts among minority voters in such key cities as Cleveland and Philadelphia. And he held almost all of the upscale, socially moderate suburban counties in the Northeast and Midwest that shifted from the GOP to the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Yet in the key states — especially Ohio — all of that was overwhelmed by Bush's ability to expand his vote among culturally conservative constituencies, especially rural and exurban voters.

Compounding the problem was Kerry's inability to compete for any Southern state except Florida: That left him with few options for reaching 270 electoral votes, especially after his bid to open a new front in Western states such as Arizona, Nevada and Colorado fell short. "Democrats face this terrible arithmetic in the Electoral College (news - web sites) where if they don't carry any of the 11 Southern states [of the Old Confederacy] they need to win 70% of everything else," says Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University.

The math is just as daunting in the battle for Congress. Republicans will now control 18 of the 22 Senate seats in the states of the Old Confederacy, plus all four in Oklahoma and Kentucky. In the past two election cycles, the two parties have competed for nine open Senate seats in the South; with their sweep of five Democratic-held open seats Tuesday, Republicans have now captured all nine. "The only reason the Democrats dominated [Congress] for as many decades as they did is their advantage came from the South," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who specializes in Southern races. "When the South essentially left the Democratic coalition, that's when we had the national shift [in Congress] to the Republicans."

To many Democratic analysts, the clear message of these results is that even with its growing strength among upscale social moderates, the party will find it virtually impossible to reach a presidential or congressional majority without regaining at least some ground with socially conservative voters. "We've got to close the cultural gap," said Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, a leading centrist party group.

And even as Bush solidified his hold on culturally conservative voters, more social moderates appeared to drift away from him, especially along the two coasts.

According to both the Times and the National Election Pool exit polls, Bush ran only about even or slightly behind with independent voters — making him the first winner since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to lose with that critical swing group. Bush also fell short among voters who called themselves moderates and slipped a step among voters with college degrees, the exit polls found.

To some extent, Bush may be a prisoner of his own success: It won't be easy for him to expand his party's appeal with those sorts of swing voters while meeting the demands of the conservative coalition that powered his victory on issues such as potential appointments to the Supreme Court. "Their coalition is very stable but it's very narrow," said John C. Green, a University of Akron political scientist who specializes in the relationship between religion and politics. "It will be interesting to see if any Republican besides Bush can succeed without finding ways to expand it. There's not much margin of error in this coalition."

Yet Bush's unshakeable hold on his own voters allowed him to challenge for far more Democratic-leaning terrain than Kerry could contest on the Republican side. By the campaign's final days, Kerry was seriously bidding for only three states that Bush carried last time — Florida, Ohio and New Hampshire.

Bush, meanwhile, seriously contested twice that many states won by Gore in 2000.

Although Bush ultimately fell short in at least 18 of the 20 states Gore won in 2000, he reduced the Democratic margin in 13 of them. And although Bush continued to run poorly among socially liberal constituencies such as single women or voters who rarely attend church, the Times exit poll found that he significantly improved his performance among married white women (especially those without a college education) and Latinos.

As in the 2002 midterm elections, Bush demonstrated that he could inspire a remarkable Republican turnout. Both the Times and NEP exit polls showed that Republicans constituted about as large a share of the voters Tuesday as Democrats.

That erased a 4-percentage-point Democratic lead in 2000 — and fulfilled the goal set before the election by Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign's chief strategist. These patterns come into sharp relief looking at Ohio, the state that ultimately decided the presidency more than any other.

Kerry did almost everything he could have hoped in the state. He accumulated a margin of nearly 218,000 votes in Cuyahoga County (including Cleveland), an advantage nearly one-third larger than Gore managed in 2000.

Kerry even carried all three of the classic suburban swing counties that analysts watch closely in the state: Stark (Canton); Montgomery (Dayton) and Franklin (Columbus).

Yet Bush still overcame Kerry with the political equivalent of a death by a thousand cuts. Bush crushed Kerry and expanded his margins from 2000 in the rural and exurban counties that stretched across the state's southern boundary and up its western edge to the Michigan border. Those results point to an ominous possibility for Democrats: that Dowd is right when he argues that white rural and blue-collar Midwestern voters are now committing to the GOP.Kerry's losssuggests that the Democrats may not be able to recapture the White House until they find a nominee who can reverse that current in both regions.

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Times staff writer Richard Rainey and Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus contributed.

Jolie Rouge · 11-06-2004, 12:47 AM

Times national exit poll results

Data from the Los Angeles Times exit poll show how various groups of voters in the nation cast their ballots in the election. The two columns of percentages for Bush and Kerry are read horizontally. For example, of all the men who voted for president, 53% voted for Bush and 46% for Kerry.

Presidential choice % of all voters Bush Kerry
Bush/Cheney 51% 100% --
Kerry/Edwards 48 -- 100%

Other 1 -- --

Gender % of all voters Bush Kerry
Men 49% 53% 46
Women 51 49% 50

Gender and marital status % of all voters Bush Kerry
Married men 31% 59% 40
Single men 16 40% 58

Married women 30 57% 42
Single women 19 35% 64

Age % of all voters Bush Kerry
18-29 20% 43% 55
30-44 32 52% 47
45-64 36 54% 45
65 or older 12 55% 45

Race/ethnicity % of all voters Bush Kerry
White 79% 57% 42
Black 10 14% 86
Latino 5 45% 54
Asian 3 34% 64

Education % of all voters Bush Kerry
Less than college 48% 54% 45
College degree or more 52 49% 50

Income of voter % of all voters Bush Kerry
Less than $20,000 10% 46% 51
$20,000 to $39,999 20 47% 52
$40,000 to $59,999 20 51% 48
$60,000 to $74,999 15 53% 46
$75,000 or more 35 54% 45

Political ideology % of all voters Bush Kerry
Liberal 32% 19% 79
Moderate 29 45% 54
Conservative 39 82% 18

Party affiliation % of all voters Bush Kerry
Democrat 40% 12% 88
Independent 19 48% 49
Republican 39 94% 6

Party ideology % of all voters Bush Kerry
Liberal Democrats 22% 5% 95
Other Democrats 18 19% 81
Other Independents 13 36% 60
Conservative Independents 6 77% 22
Other Republicans 13 89% 11
Conservative Republicans 27 96% 4

When decided presidential vote % of all voters Bush Kerry
Today/yesterday 8% 45% 52
Over the weekend 2 47% 46
Before the weekend 43 37% 62
Always knew 47 65% 34

Military affiliation % of all voters Bush Kerry
Household with a veteran and/or family active in military 46% 54% 45
Not in military, nor a veteran 50 48% 51

Religion % of all voters Bush Kerry
Protestant 51% 61% 38
Catholic 25 55% 44
Jewish 4 26% 74

Attendance at religious services % of all voters Bush Kerry
Weekly or more 42% 65% 34
Less than that 58 42% 57

Gun ownership % of all voters Bush Kerry
Own guns 36% 65% 34
Don't own any 64 43% 56

Voting status % of all voters Bush Kerry
First-time voter 11% 42% 57
Voted before 89 53% 46

Locality % of all voters Bush Kerry
City 36% 43% 56
Suburb 32 52% 47
Small town 20 58% 41
Rural 12 62% 37

Region % of all voters Bush Kerry
East 24% 42% 57
Midwest 24 54% 45
South 32 57% 42
West 20 49% 50

Union household % of all voters Bush Kerry
Union households 27% 43% 56
Non-union households 73 54% 45

Sexuality % of all voters Bush Kerry
Heterosexual 96% 53% 46
Gay/lesbian/ bisexual 4 17% 81

Do you think the country is on the right or wrong track? % of all voters Bush Kerry
Right track 51% 89% 11
Wrong track 49 11% 87

Do you think the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, or not? % of all voters Bush Kerry
Worth it 50% 88% 12
Not worth it 50 14% 84

Note: numbers may not add up to 100% where some answer categories are not shown.

How the poll was conducted: The Los Angeles Times Poll interviewed 5,154 voters who cast ballots in the general election Tuesday as they exited 136 polling places across the nation, including 3,357 California voters as they exited 50 polling places across the state. Precincts were chosen based on the pattern of turnout in past primary elections. The survey was a self-administered, confidential questionnaire, in English and in Spanish. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all voters, including California voters. For some subgroups, the error margin may be somewhat higher. Fieldwork provided by Schlesinger Associates of Edison, N.J. and Davis Research of Calabasas.

*

Source: Times Poll

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...donedefeat&e=4

Jolie Rouge · 11-06-2004, 12:48 AM

Stung, party begins asking `hard questions'
Thu Nov 4,12:12 PM ET
Chicago Tribune
By Mike Dorning Washington Bureau

Even before John Kerry conceded defeat Wednesday, Democratic strategists, activists and party leaders already were beginning a difficult self-examination of the party's failure to connect with voters, spurred on by a deeply disappointing performance in the election.

The debate over the future of the Democrats will play out in the weeks and months ahead, probably continuing until the party has settled on a new presidential nominee four years hence. And the parameters of the discourse are still emerging. "This will be an important choice," said former Bill Clinton (news - web sites) aide Paul Begala. "The Democrats will ask hard questions about our party and our future."

Some themes already were clear Wednesday, as party insiders traded condolences and activists took to Web logs to express their frustration. Some in the liberal wing of the party suggested that John Kerry had failed to present a sufficiently coherent and clear alternative to President Bush and the Republican Party's policies. In particular, they criticized him for sounding an uncertain trumpet against the war in Iraq, which Kerry voted to authorize.

But, in the initial hours after the defeat, much of the discussion among political professionals touched on how the Democratic Party could draw a closer connection to moderate and rural voters on issues of values and culture. "If we don't step back, take a good hard look and address these issues, we're going to be in the back seat for many years to come," Sen. Christopher Dodd (news, bio, voting record) (D-Conn.) told CNN.

Exit polls showed 22 percent of voters were most concerned about "moral issues," ahead of any other concerns, including Iraq, terrorism or the economy. President Bush, a born-again Christian who embraced religion in a midlife struggle against alcohol, comfortably includes regular references to faith in his political speech.

Spreading the word

On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was citing the the Bible, particularly the Gospel of St. Matthew, as inspiration for her political beliefs during a CNN interview. "On some of the social issues, the Democrats did not connect well enough with the country. Certainly, we are faith-filled. We love our country," Pelosi said.

Not only did the Democrats lose the race for the White House but Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) suffered a humiliating defeat and the party lost seats in both chambers of Congress. Democratic candidates lost every contested Senate election in the South.

And, unlike the presidential election four years ago, when the political significance of the Democratic loss was clouded because Al Gore won the popular vote and Florida's pivotal electoral votes were disputed, the election results Tuesday showed a clear victory for President Bush.

1st majority vote since '88

Though Bush's 51 percent majority is not overwhelming, it is the first time a presidential candidate has gained a majority of the vote since 1988. And the results in the congressional contests strengthened the sense that Democrats are becoming uncompetitive in places like the South and rural America.

"One thing's very clear: What Democrats are selling, people aren't buying in large parts of the country," said Jim Kessler, a Democratic strategist who recently joined the staff of a centrist party organization, The Third Way.

The struggle over the future of the party will play out as a new leadership emerges. Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe is almost certainly out of a job, said party strategists and office-holders. For the time being, Kerry remains the Democrats' most prominent spokesman. But vice presidential nominee Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a senator from New York, may become increasingly prominent as they consider potential presidential bids.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson also may take on a larger public role as the party fights to retain its appeal to Hispanic voters, which defected to Bush in significant numbers Tuesday. And Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) could have a larger role as Democrats wrestle with how to become more competitive in rural America.

Sen.-elect Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is expected to be one of the party's new stars as the Senate's only African-American and a charismatic and articulate speaker who even before his election was tapped to give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.

Senate Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is widely considered the most likely replacement for Daschle as Democratic leader. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is considered a potential successor to Reid.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...dquestions&e=5

Jolie Rouge · 11-06-2004, 12:51 AM

The value of selling values grew
Fri Nov 5, 6:34 AM ET

The value of selling values grew On Election Day, 36% of John Kerry's supporters told exit pollsters that they weren't so much voting for their guy as voting against President Bush. In contrast, only about 14% of Bush's backers said the same of Kerry.

Nothing better explains what went wrong for the Democratic candidate: Kerry was unable to communicate why people should vote for him.

The exit polls, and much post-election spin, offered a ready explanation for this. Twenty-two percent of voters listed "moral values" as their No. 1 concern, ahead of the economy, terrorism and Iraq. These voters turned out in huge numbers, and they voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Election over.

The polls also show that those who attend church regularly vote Republican. So, the reasoning goes, the Democrats are out of touch with the nation's values.

The interpretation is easily overdone. Not coincidentally, 23% in exit polls also identified themselves as white evangelical or born-again Christians, a core Republican constituency that isn't going to switch parties.

But Kerry and other Democrats are lacking a compelling message to serve as an alternative to Bush's platform of faith at home and resolution abroad. They have policies on issues ranging from health care to welfare that have a moral component. But they don't spend much effort explaining that dimension of those values, which are the bedrock of their policies.

As Democrats regroup after their punishing loss, they will no doubt debate how they can win back churchgoers, Southerners and other voters who see values lacking in the Democratic message.

They won't find the answer in a fight to prove which party is more religious, much less which side God is on. But defining core values and communicating them clearly is a different matter. People want to vote out of inspiration, not anger, and they didn't find enough in Kerry to attract their votes.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...lingvaluesgrew

Jolie Rouge · 11-06-2004, 12:58 AM

The Democrat Failure
George Will

"I think the Union army had something to do with it."
-- Gen. George Pickett, years afterward, on why his charge at Gettysburg failed.

WASHINGTON -- John Kerry's liberalism had something to do with his defeat. Hence so didthis: By Jan. 20, 2009, all the elected presidents for 44 consecutive years will have come from three Southern states -- Texas, Arkansas, Georgia -- and Southern California.

Kerry ran a high-risk "biography candidacy" based on a four-month period 35 years ago. His contrasting silence about his 20 Senate years echoed. He was an anomalous kind of challenger. The most important changes he promised would be either restorations or resistances. That is, he campaigned as the candidate of complacency, albeit a curdled, backward-looking complacency. Regarding foreign policy, he promised to turn the clock back, to the alliance-centered foreign policy prior to the intrusion of the "nuisance" of terrorism. Regarding domestic policy, he promised to stop the clock, preventing any forward movement on entitlement reform to cope with the baby boomers' retirements.

Never in this marathon did Kerry himself do anything to change the campaign's dynamics. He counted on events in Iraq, and on the power of his party's unconcealed belief that Bush is an imbecile. But Democrats cannot disguise from the country their bewilderment about how to appeal to a country that is so backward, they think, that it finds Bush appealing.

Democrats, notoriously cold toward losing candidates they have improvidently nominated, resemble Dallas fans as described by quarterback Roger Staubach: "Cowboy fans love you, win or tie." They should rethink their compressed nominating calendar -- Kerry was effectively selected by the 135,000 who voted for him in Iowa and New Hampshire -- and the fetish of allowing those two states, rather than, say, Michigan, to dominate the process.

As part of its penance for nominating a senator -- it is 44 years since one was elected president -- and one more liberal (according to the liberal Americans for Democratic Action) than Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party should purge its Michael Moore faction. Moore, the vulgarian who made the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," is unhinged by his loathing of Bush -- and of the country that has now re-elected him. Moore and the hordes of his enthusiasts are a stain on the party -- as are those Democratic senators and representatives who last June made a merry festival of the movie's Washington premiere. Moore illustrates the fact that the Republican Party benefits -- it is energized by resentment -- when the entertainment industry and major journalistic institutions (e.g., The New York Times, CBS News) enlist as appendages of the Democratic Party's advocacy apparatus.

Never have Americans felt less affinity with Europe, but never have their politics been more European, meaning organized around ideologically homogenous parties. Just 25 years ago there were many liberals and conservatives in both parties. On Tuesday, four moderate-to-conservative Texas Democratic congressmen were defeated, the result of a second redistricting since the 2000 census. A conservative Georgia Republican won a Senate seat vacated by a conservative Democrat and a conservative Louisiana Republican won a seat vacated by a moderate Democrat. This continues -- and very nearly completes -- the process of producing a perfect overlap of America's ideological and party parameters.

Unlike the two most recent incumbent presidents re-elected, Bush did not run on rhetorical froth -- "Morning Again in America" (1984), "A Bridge to the 21st Century" (1996). He will feel vindicated in his foreign policy and empowered for his well-advertised domestic agenda of tax cuts, tort reform, entitlement reform and conservative judicial nominees.

In the 37 elections since 1860 -- the first won by a Republican -- Democrats have won only 14. Only twice in 15 post-World War II elections has the Democratic nominee achieved 50 percent of the vote. American politics has known many oscillations; some scholars have discerned an almost metronomic regularity in its political cycles. Now, however, there is an astonishing stasis, immune even to the winds of war.

Since 2000, the issues driving civic discourse have changed radically but the electoral map has changed negligibly. The only 2000 red state that turned blue this year -- New Hampshire -- made the Northeast, from Pennsylvania and New Jersey to Maine, monochrome. New Mexico, a 2000 blue state that turned red (or seems to have, as this is written Wednesday morning), completes a red swath from California's southeastern border to the Atlantic.

The nation's population center did not cross the Mississippi until the 1980 census. Today it is in Phelps County, Mo., heading southwest, away from the Democratic Party with its apparently metabolic impulse to ignore such realities.

Jolie Rouge · 11-06-2004, 01:28 AM

Democrats Have Bad Case of the Blues
By TOM RAUM

WASHINGTON (AP) - After losing back-to-back presidential elections, Democratic leaders are trying to figure out how to make the party more relevant to mainstream Americans and keep it from slipping into perpetual minority-party status.

And the task is daunting, many Democratic consultants and leaders agree.

Republicans have cut deeply into formerly Democratic areas in rural America, the Sunbelt, and among Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing minority group. They have made gains on ``family values'' issues, winning over social conservatives who previously voted Democratic on economic issues, while keeping their advantage on national defense. ``We were on a tough playing field,'' said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggesting Republicans had made inroads among socially conservative former Democrats by emphasizing ``wedge issues'' like gay marriage and abortion.

Ballot measures in 11 states to ban gay marriage also helped boost turnout for Republicans.

Democrats also have no strong leader to pull the party out of the wilderness.
With the defeat of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the party's top two congressional leaders are Pelosi, a San Francisco-area liberal, and Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, now the No. 2 leader, known mostly as a low-key insider.

For 2008, the presumptive leading presidential candidates are New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Northeastern centrist and one of the most polarizing figures in American politics, and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, a trial lawyer and failed vice presidential candidate with little public service besides six years in Congress.

Democrats have a bad case of the blues after seeing so much red.

A look at the 2004 election map with states President Bush won in red and John Kerry's in blue underscores the dilemma.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pag...ctoral.college

Unbroken stretches of red nearly from coast to coast, encompassing most of the heartland, the South, the Great Plains, the desert Southwest and the Rocky Mountain West. Blue states are mostly a fringe along both coasts - the Northeastern seaboard and the West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington - along with some of the industrial states bordering the Great Lakes.

Democrats suffer from a chronic geographical and ideological predilection: They nominate candidates from the political left who have a hard time appealing to those in the middle. ``My advice to the Democrats is never, never nominate anybody from Massachusetts again,'' said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

The last Northeastern Democrat elected president was John F. Kennedy in 1960. Since then, just three Democrats - all from the South - have served: Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

Once solidly Democratic, the South today is solidly Republican.

Democrats also lost seats in the House and Senate, increasing GOP majorities there. ``I don't think there's any question that we did not get the wind, the uplift that we had expected in this campaign,'' said Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Calif., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ``The red states, after the debates, got redder.''

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said Friday that Democrats were never able to bring economic issues to the fore. ``We run elections in a real world. You can choose to say you wanted to focus on the economy, but Iraq was a powerful story. People were dying. You cannot have Iraq news without a candidate talking about it,'' Greenberg told reporters during a post-mortem session.

Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, said: ``Democrats have started forming their circular firing squads.'' But Borosage urged Democrats not to capitulate, saying polling suggests a majority still supports the Democratic position on many economic and domestic issues like health care and the economy.

Al From, head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which helped put Bill Clinton on the path to the White House in 1992, said Democrats ``have to do a better job with connecting with those people who go to work every day and play by the rules.' We need to compete all over the country. We can't allow ourselves to abandon any region like the South. And we can't cede territory to the Republicans because they'll take every inch we give.''

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant, said the election was closer than Bush's 3.5 million-vote victory makes it seem. She suggested a swing to Kerry of 100,000 votes in Ohio would have given him the presidency. Still, she said, ``I think we can do a better job - and I don't blame this on Kerry, it's just something constitutionally we haven't done - of talking more about our values and love of country.''

Democrats search the dark clouds for signs of light. Republicans could overplay their hand. Democrats still have an edge among Hispanics, which they could exploit. Focusing most of their attention this year on battleground states, they could do more to reach out to voters in other parts of the country, particularly in the Southwest and Mountain States.

Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, said he's seen the Republican party all but written off in the past when Democrats simultaneously ruled the White House and Congress - only to come roaring back. ``Eventually, the party in power is going to screw up,'' Hess said.

House Democratic leader Pelosi put it another way. ``Quite frankly, I think the table is set for us in the next election,'' she said. ``We have lost just about everything that we can lose.''

11/05/04 23:09

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/sto...01.htm&sc=1131

dangerousfem · 11-06-2004, 04:02 PM

Thanks for these.. it just states what has been obvious for a long time...

many years ago.. the Dem party did stand for the common man and comon morals... but they have moved from that.... it use to be that the Reb party was only made up of rich and upper middle class... now you see middle and poor all supporting the Reb party, why? Because they now stand for family values .. the majority of people don't support gay marriage, or abortion, and many other liberal ideas that the dem party now stands for.

Jolie Rouge · 11-19-2004, 04:25 PM

The Liberal Crack-up
Emmett Tyrrell

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- History takes time. To understand the historic decline of the Democratic Party, I have found it useful to reach back to a book I wrote in 1984, "The Liberal Crack-Up". It is a diagnosis of what was then the core philosophy of the Democratic Party, liberalism, and a prognosis of its future. Doctor Tyrrell was not optimistic, but history takes time.

Today, the Democratic Party has lost both houses of Congress, the presidency and many state offices it had controlled for at least two generations. It is about to be outpaced throughout the federal judiciary. The liberal crack-up began with the defeat of that liberal fantastico, Jimmy Carter. It picked up steam during the 1990s, when the Democrats lost the House and the Senate and many state offices -- and the media's legend endures that President Bill Clinton is a political genius.

His genius is in self-promotion. He is a cunning huckster. But the liberal crack-up did not reach the point of no return until Nov. 2, 2004. Then on that glad and glorious morn, that reductio ad absurdum of a liberal presidential candidate, Jean-Francois Kerry, the Democratic elites and all the liberals in the media beheld Victory. It was to be a return to their vicarious lives as Kennedys! Roosevelts! Progressives!

Alas, by Nov. 3, their delusions became very difficult to maintain. Sure there are many who still think they won. Doubtless Jean-Francois, his balmy wife and many in his entourage still feel as morally and intellectually superior as they did in the expectant hours of Nov. 2. Yet clear-headed students of politics today recognize that the Democratic Party has suffered a catastrophic defeat. Some, such as Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, are politely suggesting that their party is in need of a philosophy transplant, something less narcissistic, less out-of-this world, than the troubled philosophy that since the 1960s has been at its core,
namely, liberalism.

Some will say liberalism was the very core of the Democrats' beloved New Deal, but they err. The liberalism of the New Deal was leavened with urban machine politics, Southern conservatism, and that wild and woolly philosophical hybrid, Western populism. The liberalism that became rampant in the Democratic Party beginning in the late 1960s drove out all other intellectual impulses. Yes, a poseur such as Jimmy Carter might make a feint toward fiscal conservatism, but he could not resist his education lobby, his environmentalists or his "minority rights" careerists. And he was most in his element lecturing Americans on their "inordinate fear of communism" and their "malaise." Today, he is just another "blame-America-first" megalomaniac.

Boy Clinton was not a lot different. His 1992 big spending plans (he called it "infrastructure") and health-care colossus were kept in check by the country's growing conservatism manifested most inescapably in the Republican ascendancy on Capitol Hill in 1994. His vaunted balanced budget was achieved at least in part by his stinginess toward the military. His whole egotistic lifestyle was late-20th century liberalism replete with zoo sex in the office and hand-holding with visiting preachers and therapists. Then came Al Gore, and after that the football-throwing, snow-boarding, wind-surfing, bungee-jumping fantasist whose self-important huffiness over being called "French-looking" made teasing him such a delight.

At the heart of the liberal crack-up, which I first diagnosed in 1984, is the impulse to politicize everything from food to sex to happenstance -- and to moralize. The liberal of the liberal crack-up is a free-floating moralizer. Such liberals are also dramatists of the most adolescent variety. No human experience is beyond their melodrama. There is no misfortune that they will not exploit for votes. Their politics is built on a world of extremes.
The conservatism of President George W. Bush, a conservatism that has been governing America for most of the past 24 years, remains to these liberals shocking, dangerous or "extremist," as they say.

The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable. Thus in the last election, the perfectly sensible and tolerant solution for stable homosexual couples' legal difficulties, namely, civil unions, was not sufficient.

No conscientious liberal of 2004 will be content until the Nation adopts homosexual marriage. Nor will the good liberal accept such limitations on abortion as parental consent for minors. Naturally, the good liberal will only accept the most extreme criticism of the Iraqi war. The good liberal increasingly sees politics as a realm dominated by conspiracies and lies.

The inflamed drama of liberal politics has become too much for ordinary Americans to endure. The liberal crack-up is beyond therapy. It is history.

Jolie Rouge · 11-19-2004, 06:50 PM

CONFESSIONS OF A CULTURAL ELITIST
Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters
Tue Nov 9, 8:03 PM ET
By TED RALL -- UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

NEW YORK--Democratic hand wringing is surrealy out of hand. No one is criticizing the morally incongruous Kerry for running against a war he voted for while insisting that he would have voted for it again. Party leaders have yet to consider that NAFTA, signed into law under Clinton, may have cost them high-unemployment Ohio. No, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, darling of the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, blames something else: the perception "in the heartland" that Democrats are a "bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives."

Firstly, living in the sticks doesn't make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban--they're irrelevant. San Francisco's predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there's a reason.

We do, and all the more so after this election.

I spent my childhood in fly-over country, in a decidedly Republican town in southwest Ohio. It was a decent place to grow up, with well-funded public schools and only the occasional marauding serial killer to worry about. The only ethnic restaurant sold something called "Mandarin Chinese," Midwestese for cold noodles slathered with sugary sauce. The county had three major employers: the Air Force, Mead Paper, and National Cash Register--and NCR was constantly laying people off. Folks were nice, but depressingly closed-minded. "Well," they'd grimace when confronted with a new musical genre or fashion trend, "that's different." My suburb was racially insular, culturally bland and intellectually unstimulating. Its people were knee-jerk conformists. Faced with the prospect of spending my life underemployed, bored and soused, I did what anyone with a bit of ambition would do. I went to college in a big city and stayed there.

Mine is a common story. Every day in America, hundreds of our most talented young men and women flee the suburbs and rural communities for big cities, especially those on the West and East Coasts. Their youthful vigor fuels these metropolises--the cultural capitals of the blue states. These oases of liberal thinking--New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Boston--are homes to our best-educated people, most vibrant popular culture and most innovative and productive businesses. There are exceptions--some smart people move from cities to the countryside--but the best and brightest gravitate to places where liberalism rules.

Maps showing Kerry's blue states appended to the "United States of Canada" separated from Bush's red "Jesusland" are circulating by email. Though there is a religious component to the election results, the biggest red-blue divide is intellectual. "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" asked the headline of the Daily Mirror in Great Britain, and the underlying assumption is undeniable. By any objective standard, you had to be spectacularly stupid to support Bush.

72 percent who cast votes for George W. Bush, according to a University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks poll, believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or active WMD programs. 75 percent think that a Saddam-Al Qaeda link has been proven, and 20 percent say Saddam ordered 9/11. Of course, none of this was true.

Kerry voters were less than half as idiotic: 26 percent of Democrats bought into Bush-Cheney's WMD lies, and 30 percent into Saddam-Al Qaeda.

Would Bush's supporters have voted for him even if they had known he was a serial liar? Perhaps their hatred of homosexuals and slutty abortion vixens would have prompted them to make the same choice--an idiotic perversion of priorities. As things stand, they cast their ballots relying on assumptions that were demonstrably false.

Educational achievement doesn't necessarily equal intelligence. After all, Bush holds a Harvard MBA. Still, it bears noting that Democrats are better educated than Republicans. You are 25 percent more likely to hold a college degree if you live in the Democratic northeast than in the red state south. Blue state voters are 25 percent more likely, therefore, to understand the historical and cultural ramifications of Bush's brand of bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.

Inland Americans face a bigger challenge than coastal "cultural elitists" when it comes to finding high-quality news coverage. The best newspapers, which routinely win prizes for their in-depth local and national reporting and staffers overseas, line the coasts. So do the cable TV networks with the broadest offerings and most independent radio stations. Bush Country makes do with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity syndicated on one cookie-cutter AM outlet after another. Citizens of the blue states read lackluster dailies stuffed with generic stories cut and pasted from wire services. Given their dismal access to high-quality media, it's a minor miracle that 40 percent of Mississippians turned out for Kerry.

So our guy lost the election. Why shouldn't those of us on the coasts feel superior? We eat better, travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn better salaries, meet more interesting people, listen to better music and know more about what's going on in the world. If you voted for Bush, we accept that we have to share the country with you. We're adjusting to the possibility that there may be more of you than there are of us.

But don't demand our respect.

You lost it on November 2.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ulturalelitist

{{ [i]This is not "tongue-in-cheek"; this is not satire. This guy is stone cold serious. THAT is part of the DNP current problem. [i] ****

janelle · 11-20-2004, 03:45 AM

Just for that Kerry isn't going to tell us his plan. LOL

He never told us anything but vote against Bush. Duh.

Rush Limbaugh said the country has been going conservative for a long time and Rush is right.

The Dems have been hanging onto Predisent Kennedy's tails for years but can't anymore. Most young voters under 30 don't even remember him. News reels just don't get his charisma over.

dangerousfem · 11-20-2004, 09:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

So our guy lost the election. Why shouldn't those of us on the coasts feel superior? We eat better, travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn better salaries, meet more interesting people, listen to better music and know more about what's going on in the world. If you voted for Bush, we accept that we have to share the country with you. We're adjusting to the possibility that there may be more of you than there are of us.

But don't demand our respect.

You lost it on November 2.

And Dems wonder what went wrong for them?? These are the type of poeple they have speaking for them.