My First Reactions

My, what an election! I've been reticent to weigh in with an immediate post-election reaction, because I figured a few days to cool off and sort things out would do me some good. And, I'm feeling better now. Some reflections on Tuesday's elections:

1. Congratulations, President Bush: I have to hand it to him. He won, and he won well. Over the last few days I've had to spend quite some time trying to wean despondent liberals away from the comforting illusion that this election was marred by some secret fraud. I've looked at the numbers, and I have to say that Bush won this election the hard way - by doing better than before almost everywhere. The Democrats incontestibly put on the best election of their life. We got within 100 thousand votes of the brass ring in Ohio, and Kerry netted 4 million more votes than Gore. And both of those candidates put Clinton's two election numbers to shame (he never did win a majority, I might remind you...). But Bush just turned it on at an even higher level. I'm obviously dejected that the wrong guy won. But at least he won the right way - by winning without technicalities. As I told one friend, it just doesn't pay to pretend against all evidence that a secret majority backs your point of view. That's what Communists do... and who wants to end up like that?
   
   
2. Congratulations, Senator Kerry: As you can see, Slate's already posed the question, "Why does America hate Democrats?" The question is inherently unfair. We won 48%, the President 51%. This was a vigorous and well-fought election. What's more, Kerry won more votes than even Ronald Reagan did in 1984. 55.9 million votes. We may have been defeated, but we didn't lose. This was the best Democratic campaign of my lifetime. It just wasn't good enough. Of course, we'll need to ask why we lost. And, more importantly, we'll need to ask how to win the next one. But we shouldn't let our defeat obscure our vision of just how well we did in this election.
   
   
3. Welcome to the Opposition: I find myself hoping that the Democrats will now come to terms with the outsideness of our new outsider status. More importantly than the Presidency, we got trounced in the Senate. The time has come to stop running on dire warnings of horrors to come, and start running as an opposition to what is. The Republicans have all the power, and as Democrats would do well to remember from their own time in power, with power comes corruption. A fiery Newt Gingrich began his party's reascendance by going after the ethical lapses of a House Majority leader. As the opposition, our party will be doing the nation a disservice if it doesn't ferret out abuses of power by the governing party and bring a spotlight to bear upon them. So, memo to Republican congressmen... be very scrupulous with those postage stamps.
   
   
4. The Republican Coalition: They've got a narrow but winning coalition right now. I disagree with Saletan that the way back to the big time is simply a matter of framing. It's also a matter of policy. The Democratic Party is going to need new policies, hopefully the kind of innovative policies that have always been the prerogative of the outsider party. More importantly, our goal shouldn't be to blunder into a majority by confusing a few befuddled suckers. That Republican juggernaut isn't invincible. There's a core Republican constituency that the Democratic Party can't have and shouldn't want - it's clear that there is in fact a values gulf dividing the "two Americas" and there's a moral hazard inherent in chasing the wrong demographic. But in the Republican tent, some folks are more equal than others. The trick is to identify ambivalent constituencies that have buoyed the Republican Party and to win them over, through genuine change, without sacrificing our core principles and beliefs. I'd pick Catholics and libertarians as the most vulnerable elements of their coalition, but I'll dwell on that at another time.
   
   
5. Hello, Federalism: It's clear that there's not just an ideological divide in America. There's a geographic one as well. Democrats would do well to push for a looser union. California just upped its top-tier income tax, we've committed to funding stem cell research, and we've proven an openness (through referendum, no less) to a wide variety of liberal-minded experiments. With newcomers to the Senate like DeMintt and Coburn, we should start pressing hard to let live and be let alone. We may be one country, but the best way to stay that way is to press ahead with multiple systems. I worry what a more autonomous South might decide to do, from my perspective of universal human rights, if the states were given a longer leash... but I worry more what a "Big Red Fed" is gonna' do to my beloved California.
   
   
6. Anti-Government: Liberals, take a deep breath and repeat after me - "It's their government." Are you counting on the judiciary to protect your rights from legislative encroachment? Give it up, now. That's a pipe dream. Roe v. Wade is doomed. If you want a consolation prize, consider a post Roe union with 30 states preserving a woman's right, and NARAL turning into a Greyhound travel agency. Gays like me? Don't look to the courts - we can hope for stare decisis to keep Lawrence in place for another 20 years. But in the meantime, we got to change some hearts and minds and get some laws passed. If we can't do it, then the writing's on the wall. The Democratic Party has gotten sucker-punched by issues delivered through the back-door of the democratic process. As for the laws we may or may not see in the next few years that will strike some of us as restricting essential liberties... I've got one mantra for you to keep chanting - "we seek the consent of the governed, not just their compliance."
   
   
7. Suffrage: On Election Night, I spoke with a friend of mine who lives in Ohio. He had gotten to his polling place at 7am, and waited in line for an hour and a half before having to give up and go to his job. He came back later and waited in line for another 5 and 1/2 hours. Reports came in from all across the country of people waiting in 6 or 7 hour lines just to vote. Elsewhere in this country, the entire process didn't take longer than twenty minutes. I'm willing to concede that those who abandoned the line probably didn't make a decisive difference to the race's outcome. But it's simply unacceptable to have people waiting in six-hour lines on a work day. I won't demand a particular solution. Perhaps it's expanded early voting. Perhaps it's an election-day holiday. Perhaps it's precincts equipped to deal with maximum turnout rather than anticipated turnout. But I hope we can all agree that no American citizen should be unable to cast their vote by a failure of the process.
   
   
8. E-voting: I still think this is a very bad idea (though I vote this manner myself). The paper trail would ameliorate it. But as a man who works professionally with computers, I think it's a fool's errand to entrust our nation's electoral process to them.
   
   
9. George W. Bush: My opinions of him should be well known, but just in case the aren't, I've hated him and thought he didn't deserve to be President. Morally, that may still be true, but he clearly earned the Presidency this time, whether deserving or no. I'm willing to give him a small "grace period." My private hope? That a second term will set him free from concern for his re-election and we'll find him a very different President than he's been. I've heard Ashcroft is retiring, which strikes me as good news. There's likely a Supreme Court appointment coming. Powell may be replaced. Rumsfeld should be. I'm not expecting a second term to be much different from the first, in which case I expect I'll soon be back to where I was. But, as long as I find the man a moral mediocrity, I can certainly hope that he's been a complete hypocrite all this time, and the second term will show a new man, beholden to noone and guided by some inner light less dim than what we've beheld...
   
   
10. Gay Marriage: We gays got a long road ahead of us. I don't believe our rights will mean a thing until they've been democratically ratified through the legislative or referendum process. I simply don't want my essential freedoms to hang upon the hooks of a judge's cloakroom. So, I figure I have a lifetime of hard work ahead of me persuading people that reciprocal love and reciprocal commitment are to be cherished wherever they're found. And, in that work, bitterness and resentment aren't going to help me one bit. But I hope you'll understand if I allow myself just one little burst of animosity: Fuck Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah. And, more broadly, fuck all the voters who's primary rationale for voting Bush was fear of gay marriage. If there was some reason to think that gays already had the right to get married, I could understand this kind of thing. But a look at the generation under 30 shows me that the day is coming, and sliding constitutional padlocks onto the door of that emerging consensus really frustrates me. But, now that I've got that emotional reaction out of my system, we can revisit the issue's merits... as I'm sure I'll be doing for as many years as I'll be drawing breath...