This is what a lot of conservatives are going to be telling themselves after election day: That Obama cheated, that the media cheated, that McCain wasn't a conservative anyway, and that the only reason Sarah Palin wasn't a hit with swing voters is that the press - with an assist from conservative quislings like Frum and Brooks and Parker and Noonan - poisoned the well. And in such thinking lies the seeds of years or even decades of defeat.
I took a lot of flack from my own side in late 2004 (or was it early 2005?) when I purged this site of those I called "fraudsters" -- people who blamed our 2004 loss on voting machines and other Republican trickery. While there was systemic disenfranchisement of our voters in key states (like Ken Blackwell's Ohio), no Diebold trickery was needed to steal that election. Yet the obsession on those conspiracy theories by too many detracted from the true reform our party needed to undertake before it could win again.
My take? This is hatchet-think when we need a scalpel. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Plus, Howard Dean was going to launch his 50-state strategy, with or without the help of 50 or 100 or 200 DKos diarists and their commenters and readers.
More fundamentally, the issues raised by the majority of "fraudsters" (myself among them) were not limited to claims that Kerry won, but touched on a variety of issues that even now have yet to be robustly addressed. Indeed, some never even claimed that Kerry won at all. Other issues included voters rights, election integrity, Democrats standing up to GOP bullying and criminality, and Kerry breaking his word about fighting to see that every vote would be counted. Georgia10 did a marvelous job of continually summarizing developments and articulating concerns, and her work alone was sufficient to demonstrate the complexity that Kos's mischaracterization seeks to erase. Additionally, I wrote a diary "OHIO & Lakoff: The Right Wing Power Grab Frame" in which I wrote:
What matters to me most about Ohio are 3 things: (1) Racism. (2) Voter Suppression. (3) The Right Wing Power Grab.
(a) This was a battle of the bases, and the GOP won because it had a bigger base:...
(b) To level the playing field, we must grow the number of self-identified liberals and shrink the number of self-identified conservatives....
(c) This is not about the argument of whether the party should move left or right.... It is about strengthening the party's brand-a brand it has been running away from for almost 30 years, but can never escape....
(d) We have a major recruiting opportunity on the issue of political reform.
Here is that section of my diary, reproduced in full:
(2) The Bowers Analysis.
In the wake of the 2004 election, Chris Bowers went on an analytic tear, beginning with some very serious nitty-gritting number crunching, and then moving on to a broader analysis of what it all meant. Four points that he developed are relevant here:
(a) This was a battle of the bases, and the GOP won because it had a bigger base: There are more self-identified conservatives than self-identified liberals. Self-identified conservatives vote heavily for the GOP, self-identified liberals vote heavily for the Dems. This means that Dems always have to win self-identified moderates by a significant margin.
In all of my post-election analysis, when all of the tactical ideas are put aside, I keep coming back to a single, basic idea: conservatives are the enemy, and conservatism as an ideology is our main roadblock to electoral success.
We have long since left the era when the two parties could accurately be considered regional and ethnic coalitions rather than ideological coalitions. There are no longer any more conservative Democrats than there are liberal Republicans. A few of each kind manage to hang on, but the ideological vote in this election was clear:
Bush Kerry Margin Conservative 84 15 69 Liberal 13 85 72
Bowers also presented a state-by-state demonstration of what this meant in his storyWhere Is Liberalism?. The only states in which liberals outnumber conservatives are DC, MA, VT, RI, HI, NY, CT, and NJ. And, he commented in a followup story, "The difference between the number of liberals and the number of conservatives is so great in this country, that only in states worth 275 electoral votes is the liberal vote, plus a double-digit lead among moderates, enough to pull out a victory."
(c) This is not about the argument of whether the party should move left or right, Bowers argued, particularly in stories such as "Moving and Moving, Part Two: If The Question is Wrong, The Answer Will Follow. It is about strengthening the party's brand-a brand it has been running away from for almost 30 years, but can never escape. To clarify: Democrats have to defend liberalism, whether or not they personally identify as liberals. This only seems hard or even contradictory because Democrats have been in denial and on the defensive for so long. Moderate Republicans do this sort of thing all the time with conservatism, which is a much harder sell.
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform....
Our future success is not predicated upon moving to the left or the right, but rather in our ability to move from the inside to the outside in the national political frame. This is something we succeeded in doing in the past . This is something that Republicans learned immediately following the Perot movement of 1992, and executed so brilliantly in their 1994 "Contract with America," campaign. The Contract With America was filled almost entirely with reformist, rather than conservative, legislative proposals. Conservatives won, and are currently in power, because they swung the reformer vote their way, even though our coalition is a more natural fit for such voters. We can change this and set things right. Howard Dean as DNC chair is a darn good place to start.
While we've made enormous strides since I wrote that diary on January 04, 2005, we have yet to make the issue of political reform central to our work, and as a direct result, demonstably criminal elements of the GOP are mounting an attack on us the Democratic Party base of progressives and minorities, with a focal point on ACORN, the largest community-based organization in the country.
Our failure to come together decisively around this issue before this election has given the right an opening to attempt a re-run of their 1990s full-time campaign to delegitimize the Clinton Administration. This time, the stakes are much, much higher. It's not at all clear if our country, and the very idea of modern civilization will survive.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. In fact, we have no choice.
