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Yes, I know what you mean about the wind. I got used to the
sound of crickets chirping `electability', `electability,'
whenever I would speak about it.
I think Rove probably was more worried about Dean. I
don't buy the idea that's been put around that the Rovians
were all salivating at the prospect of a Dean candidacy. I
think we can draw that conclusion from the job that, in the
end, the MSM helped to do on Dean. Now, of course, the
Democratic party had front loaded the primaries ... all of
that was true. A lot were undoubtedly not happy with the
idea of a Dean candidacy.
It's exactly what allowed the `electability' meme to catch
on so well, and it's what they wanted, a quick choice of a
winning candidate. But the loss in Iowa was still a much
bigger setback than it should have been, because of the
unbelievably ridiculous airplay that was given to the
`scream'. I mean, what the hell was supposed to be
wrong with it anyway?
Incidentally, most of the Kerry supporters I was talking to
at the time who bothered to find out what had actually
happened did not tell me there was any real problem with the
`scream.' They were all already talking to me about
`electability.'
Kerry was, in comparison to Dean, a known quantity ... all
the attacks that would be made on him could basically be
plotted out in advance. The reappearance of the swifties and
their ancient calumnies shouldn't have come as any surprise
to anyone who knew anything about Kerry. All the stuff about
his minimal accomplishments in the Senate, all of that was
pure boilerplate which had been used on John F. Kennedy,
before. The flip-flopper thing was also easy to anticipate.
The thing about Dean, which I best liked, was his quickness;
his unpredictability in debates and on the stump, his open
opposition to the war and to GOP policies. He had a proposal
with the words universal health care (people under 25) in
it, I remember.
So the way I saw it, Kerry and Dean were both going to be
attacked for being too liberal. I mean, if we had put up Bob
Graham ... better yet, if we had picked Zell Miller,
then even he would have been called a little bit pink
around the edges ;->
Liberal has become basically just a curse word, it actually
doesn't need to be supported in order to be used with
effect. You don't have to prove, now, that someone has a
liberal ideology to make the label stick. Most `red' people
that I talk to around here actually have no idea what
liberalism is or what it has actually accomplished in the
nation's history, even when it comes to liberal policies
that directly benefit them.
I think liberal means roughly what `goddamn red', or, in
more polite company, `fellow traveller' used to mean, back
in the heyday of the HUAC, and it's being applied more or
less indiscriminately. It's ironic that the word `red' has
finally come full circle in this election.
So the worry about Kerry being labelled as a Massachusetts
liberal was not the deciding one for me.
I basically just thought that shrub had to be made publically to
appear to be the incompetent boob that he is. Dean had real
fire when he went after shrub. I thought he had the best chance
to really put shrub away in the debates, to make everyone see
that junior was just standing there buck naked. I wanted
essentially to see him crying up there, for his mummy Hughes,
and his daddy Cheney to come help him out. I think that with a
sufficiently vicious attack, that might have been accomplished.
For me, the main issues were energy policy, health care, the
initiation and conduct of the war in Iraq, the associated
failure of the so-called `war on terrorism,' shrub's fiscal
irresponsibility, the full scale GOP attack on the
accomplishments of the New Deal Democrats and their
political descendents, and finally, the most worrying to me
personally of the non-economic issues, the evangelical
attack on enlightenment values.
If I didn't know the answer, I might wonder whether some of
the new crop of avid wingnut Christians have ever read
The Wealth of Nations. Why don't they all know that
the man who basically invented their God, I mean: the man
who invented laissez-faire free-market capitalism, was a
humanist of the Scottish enlightenment, an anti-monopolist,
and believed that our ability to judge right and wrong comes
about because we are trained to be able to sympathize
with other people. I mean, Adam Smith is someone you
could actually call a liberal in America today, and you
could do it with some justification.
But back to the point. Dean, it seemed to me, was capable of
mounting an all out attack on shrub's conduct of the war: he had
no problematic baggage on that issue since he had opposed
the war outright, while Kerry had voted to authorize shrub, with
the qualifications that we are all aware of.
I was certain at the time of that vote, despite that it was
sold by the GOP as a vote merely to enable shrub to demand
stronger enforcement of inspections at the UN, that if the
joint resolution went through there would in fact be a
war. And it was clear that after the war started, the GOP
would simply say, well look, you: you Democrats who voted
for war, how dare you even make a peep now, you
hypocritical, backstabbing, flip-flopping ... liberals.
I mean, Senator Byrd as much as told them that that
was what would happen, and that it wouldn't help them
in the midterm election either.
Kerry was on that list. So for me, it seemed that Kerry was
all but certain to have a great deal of trouble landing a
clean punch on shrub over the war. It unfortunately just
didn't matter that Kerry had actually given a very coherent
justification for his vote.
Now in fact, Kerry did far, far better on these issues than
I ever expected. I think he gave a masterful performance in
the debates, he managed to put shrub very off-balance. He was
overall, very commanding. He had garnered the support of all
of those Generals critical of the war. There was momentum
against shrub after the debates.
Dean probably would not have had so many generals with him
... that was one advantage of Kerry's military service. But
his service, and so many of his strengths were effectively
turned against him that it simply made the election just
that little bit too close. And then I think that the
election probably was stolen in all the ways that we're
seeing documented, including a healthy enough dose of fraud.
I think on the whole it might have been harder to attack
Dean, and I think we would definitely have seen a much
harsher opposition to shrub from the starting line, one that
might have been in some ways harder for the Rovians to
counter. It might have made the difference.
I'm not sure Dean would have won, I don't think we can fool
ourselves about that. It was always going to be a very hard
fight, given the direction the country is heading in.
When I went through the usual post-mortem analyses with a
number of liberal academic co-workers who supported Kerry, I
was absolutely amazed at how many of them were immediately
ready to dump on Kerry and Edwards, two days after the
election. In fact, it made me furious to hear all of them
complaining about all the things Kerry supposedly had done
wrong, that supposedly cost the election.
I told them all of you people, you people who are telling me
now that Kerry blew it because of xyz, you're the same ones
who were telling me just a few months ago that Kerry was
the man, the only one for the job. I said, am I
supposed to take you seriously now? I reminded them that I
had wanted Dean for the job, but I supported Kerry and I had
come to like the man much more than, apparently, any of them
did. I said the truth is that he ran a good campaign, and I
was totally uninterested in hearing all of this BS about
what was supposedly wrong with Kerry. Then I told them they
should all give it up and start pouring all their anger on
shrub.
After I delivered the little tirade above, there was a dead
silence in the room for about four or five beats. The only
one who responded to me was a man who had voted for shrub in
2000 in order to get the fat tax cut, though he wouldn't
admit that that was the real reason. He said it was only
because shrub would be good for science. In 2000 I had
laughed in his face when he told me this was why he was
voting for shrub. I told him then I thought shrub was
evidently a first class idiot who could not care less about
science. You can imagine how that was received at the
time. So finally this fellow pipes up and says: But Dean
would have lost, just like McGovern did. I said: Yeah, sure,
you've put your finger on the heart of the matter. And
you're probably going to tell me that shrub is going to be
very good for science now, in his second term, isn't that
right?
All the same people I'm talking about, the left-wingers
who were dumping on Kerry, also did exactly
the exact same thing with respect to Gore in 2000.
This kind of carping doesn't really start only after
elections are lost, that's the thing, it starts during the
campaign itself. It's a sickness of some on the American
left wing, I think, which I don't completely understand.
I don't mind reasonable constructive criticism, but some
people I talked to, who were supposedly going to vote for
Kerry were really openly contemptuous of him. They took
delight in pouring vitriol on the man, and in suggesting
he should do things that were obviously equivalent to
committing political suicide.
OK, maybe I've written a bit much here, but I hope I
answered your question somewhere in there, at least :)
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