Kerry will win
I’m calling the election for Kerry. He will take Ohio, as well as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. I am aware I may be wrong.
I base this prediction not on insights about polling and the horserace, but on my gut feelings about human nature. The Midwest still believes deeply that it is a place where education matters and the competence (“know how”) to get things done properly is the foundation of decent society.
More importantly, the recent reminders of Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib remind them that Bush’s “whatever it takes” takes them where they don’t want to go. If the war on terrorism is a war on hatred, and we have some chance to win it by bringing democracy, human decency and freedom, then it is hypocritical and fatally short-sided to sacrifice these values in the name of promoting them. A certain decent hypocrisy is accepted and understood in the Midwest, but not if it shows that your pretense to “core values” is a scam. Only the South has the neurotic love of being defrauded that it takes to buy this crew.
I am angry at Kerry for not making these points in simple terms that will grab people. Maybe his focus groups suggested it was too risky. I think it is just a lack of gut instinct for fighting on these grounds. His sense of ideals is too elevated, because he is a liberal, and he lacks Clinton’s practice at putting the hay down where the horses are. He found some themes to appeal to the center, but they have remained fundamentally criticisms of his opponent, and his own heart is in extending medical care coverage and taxing fairly.
But I want to re-iterate my bigger prediction. The Republicans are going down. They have become the party of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove – of manipulating to grab power, not so they can promote a rabid neo-con agenda (I could forgive them that, especially since it is a loser, as Newt showed), but simply so they can reward the ones who pay them.
This elegant equation ties them in knots. It is not just because they have to be able to think about these ideas in the real world, but cannot speak about them on TV in a way that recognizes the claims of logical coherence. Politicians of all stripes have long since mastered that process. The problem for the Republicans is that they have staked out the swamps of ignorance as their home turf. Those are the ones you can sucker. If you are going to win elections with money, rather than with minds (the decision they made in 1982 when they bought into Reaganism) then weak minds are your base. They are the NASCAR voters who don’t want to be bothered with complexity or the burdens of broad-mindedness.
All the Democrats have to do is be fiscally responsible. When the thinking Republicans of the suburbs can feel the appeal of humanism without feeling it sneaking into their wallets, they automatically feel the revulsion of the defrauded and the manipulated. If the battle for the suburbs is not won in this election, by the Democrates, it will be in one of the next two.
And I keep coming back to the question of integrity. There are obviously plenty of Republicans who believe in ideals and have a sense that their party stands for something of value. But the more they live with the system created by people like Rove and Tom DeLay, the more they will feel dissonance between their ideals and the party they are with. In the end, only the Gingrichian true believers will stay in the fold, feeling that the agenda of the rich is the agenda of genuine self-interest and the trickling down of economic success.
You have to ask yourself, can a political party soldier on if its core thinking is unacceptable to most of its clientele? I believe they can continue to dupe the hordes of ignorance, though if not for the supposed threat of terrorism (from Iraq!), this would not even be enough to keep them competitive in 2004. What I can’t believe is that they can capture enough of the educated center to maintain power when the Democrats only have to come across as reasonable to deflate the extremist, wedge-issue approach these guys rely on. Because to hold that center, your thinking has to be guided by common principles the average person can make sense of. When your behavior so obviously strays into territory where your justifications cannot follow, the structure must surely fall apart.
I have made this point before. Let me raise the next one now. The real cleavage is between the cosmopolitan culture that runs things and the rooted culture that remains a majority. Much of the rooted culture aspires to be cosmopolitan, but cosmopolitanism requires a high level of education to maintain itself with integrity, and that will not be within economic reach of the majority for several generations, unless economic trends change. So on both right and left, the cosmopolitan leaders face a schizoid life. This has taken a heavy personal toll, on Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, and indeed George W. Bush. (Draft evasion is the symbol that captures this dilemma most perfectly).
But Republicans, in capitalizing too eagerly on the hubris of the Democrats, have steadily undermined the foundations of their own position. They have bought into short-term wedge issues that activate people (especially the ill-informed) in a crisis, but that do not seem important 10 years later. The real genius of Bill Clinton was deep thinking. He was able not only to listen to reality and respond with common sense, but also to recognize where the true foundations of his principles lay. His abandonment of bottom-up political strategy, with the push for universal health care, was a misjudgment created by the mistakes of a new team and the difficulties of taking office. But I still maintain that his party lost the battle in Congress, and that if they had shared his ability to think deeply, they could have won it and staved off the disaster of 1994.
What Clinton did was show the way. Not so much triangulation and sticking to the center. Even “W” can do a reasonable facsimile of those. Rather, the problem of the cosmopolitans is solved politically by building coalitions. Values that people share can be shown to correspond to plans and programs that will work. If the cosmopolitan claim to leadership has any legitimacy, it is by thus doing public service. As long as it allows itself to be used by ideologues of the left or the right, it will undermine its legitimacy. And that is where the Democrats were in 1983, and where the Republicans are now.
I base this prediction not on insights about polling and the horserace, but on my gut feelings about human nature. The Midwest still believes deeply that it is a place where education matters and the competence (“know how”) to get things done properly is the foundation of decent society.
More importantly, the recent reminders of Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib remind them that Bush’s “whatever it takes” takes them where they don’t want to go. If the war on terrorism is a war on hatred, and we have some chance to win it by bringing democracy, human decency and freedom, then it is hypocritical and fatally short-sided to sacrifice these values in the name of promoting them. A certain decent hypocrisy is accepted and understood in the Midwest, but not if it shows that your pretense to “core values” is a scam. Only the South has the neurotic love of being defrauded that it takes to buy this crew.
I am angry at Kerry for not making these points in simple terms that will grab people. Maybe his focus groups suggested it was too risky. I think it is just a lack of gut instinct for fighting on these grounds. His sense of ideals is too elevated, because he is a liberal, and he lacks Clinton’s practice at putting the hay down where the horses are. He found some themes to appeal to the center, but they have remained fundamentally criticisms of his opponent, and his own heart is in extending medical care coverage and taxing fairly.
But I want to re-iterate my bigger prediction. The Republicans are going down. They have become the party of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove – of manipulating to grab power, not so they can promote a rabid neo-con agenda (I could forgive them that, especially since it is a loser, as Newt showed), but simply so they can reward the ones who pay them.
This elegant equation ties them in knots. It is not just because they have to be able to think about these ideas in the real world, but cannot speak about them on TV in a way that recognizes the claims of logical coherence. Politicians of all stripes have long since mastered that process. The problem for the Republicans is that they have staked out the swamps of ignorance as their home turf. Those are the ones you can sucker. If you are going to win elections with money, rather than with minds (the decision they made in 1982 when they bought into Reaganism) then weak minds are your base. They are the NASCAR voters who don’t want to be bothered with complexity or the burdens of broad-mindedness.
All the Democrats have to do is be fiscally responsible. When the thinking Republicans of the suburbs can feel the appeal of humanism without feeling it sneaking into their wallets, they automatically feel the revulsion of the defrauded and the manipulated. If the battle for the suburbs is not won in this election, by the Democrates, it will be in one of the next two.
And I keep coming back to the question of integrity. There are obviously plenty of Republicans who believe in ideals and have a sense that their party stands for something of value. But the more they live with the system created by people like Rove and Tom DeLay, the more they will feel dissonance between their ideals and the party they are with. In the end, only the Gingrichian true believers will stay in the fold, feeling that the agenda of the rich is the agenda of genuine self-interest and the trickling down of economic success.
You have to ask yourself, can a political party soldier on if its core thinking is unacceptable to most of its clientele? I believe they can continue to dupe the hordes of ignorance, though if not for the supposed threat of terrorism (from Iraq!), this would not even be enough to keep them competitive in 2004. What I can’t believe is that they can capture enough of the educated center to maintain power when the Democrats only have to come across as reasonable to deflate the extremist, wedge-issue approach these guys rely on. Because to hold that center, your thinking has to be guided by common principles the average person can make sense of. When your behavior so obviously strays into territory where your justifications cannot follow, the structure must surely fall apart.
I have made this point before. Let me raise the next one now. The real cleavage is between the cosmopolitan culture that runs things and the rooted culture that remains a majority. Much of the rooted culture aspires to be cosmopolitan, but cosmopolitanism requires a high level of education to maintain itself with integrity, and that will not be within economic reach of the majority for several generations, unless economic trends change. So on both right and left, the cosmopolitan leaders face a schizoid life. This has taken a heavy personal toll, on Clinton, Rush Limbaugh, and indeed George W. Bush. (Draft evasion is the symbol that captures this dilemma most perfectly).
But Republicans, in capitalizing too eagerly on the hubris of the Democrats, have steadily undermined the foundations of their own position. They have bought into short-term wedge issues that activate people (especially the ill-informed) in a crisis, but that do not seem important 10 years later. The real genius of Bill Clinton was deep thinking. He was able not only to listen to reality and respond with common sense, but also to recognize where the true foundations of his principles lay. His abandonment of bottom-up political strategy, with the push for universal health care, was a misjudgment created by the mistakes of a new team and the difficulties of taking office. But I still maintain that his party lost the battle in Congress, and that if they had shared his ability to think deeply, they could have won it and staved off the disaster of 1994.
What Clinton did was show the way. Not so much triangulation and sticking to the center. Even “W” can do a reasonable facsimile of those. Rather, the problem of the cosmopolitans is solved politically by building coalitions. Values that people share can be shown to correspond to plans and programs that will work. If the cosmopolitan claim to leadership has any legitimacy, it is by thus doing public service. As long as it allows itself to be used by ideologues of the left or the right, it will undermine its legitimacy. And that is where the Democrats were in 1983, and where the Republicans are now.
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