Sure, it’s damned embarrassing that you lost the White House to the most awful president that I can recall in my lifetime. How do you lose a race to a brazen liar who misled our nation into pre-emptively striking a third-world country that posed no threat to our shores, an incorrigible lout who claims to hear godly voices, a mealy mouthpiece for the corporate elite that intends to take us into even more unjust wars that will not only shake the foundations beneath our economic house-of-cards but bequeath our grandchildren an intractable debt?
Buck up! At least you won’t have to scramble to make excuses for a President John Kerry when he did exactly the same!
Katha Pollit cautions readers not to “explain Kerry’s loss with Harry Truman’s quip that voters will always choose the real Republican over the fake Republican.”
Au contraire!
In the very same issue of The Nation that Ms. Pollit’s Mourn appears, there is a piece by John Nichols called Hammered.
In it, Nichols gives readers a run-down of those Democrats who did manage to win their races, and they certainly weren’t Republican-lite.
House Republicans went into the 2004 election cycle with a 227-205 advantage over the Democrats; they’re likely to finish it with a 233-199 advantage. That’s not a big shift, but it does represent a dramatic victory for DeLay, the GOP majority leader, who redrew the political map of Texas in order to increase his grip on the House. Of five Democratic incumbents who had their districts drawn out from under them, four lost. Only Representative Chet Edwards, who in one of the nicer bits of electoral irony represents George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, won re-election. The one other bit of good news was that the Democratic incumbent whom DeLay really wanted to beat, progressive Lloyd Doggett, outsmarted the man they call The Hammer by moving into a new district and building a coalition of working-class Latinos and Austin-area liberals who gave him an easy win–and status as the Lone Star antithesis of DeLay.
A few other races also went against DeLay’s plan. Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney fought her way back from a 2002 defeat and promises to be a welcome thorn in the side of both Republican and Democratic leaders. Colorado Democrat John Salazar, a rancher who ran on the all-but-forgotten theme that Republican policies are bad for rural America, won a GOP seat. The senior Republican in the House, Phil Crane of Illinois, got beaten by Democrat Melissa Bean, whose campaign focused on the need to protect the environment from the right-wing wrecking crew in Congress. Bean will join a number of new women in the House, including such progressives as Pennsylvania’s Allyson Schwartz and Florida’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz, both of whom emphasized the need for real healthcare reform.
Isn’t it obvious? Stick with the Pollits of the world who would have you go even more to the right and lose all of your seats in Congress, or turn your eyes to those ideals on the left, and win on truth, courage, and conviction.
And you won’t have to hold your nose to do it!
On the other hand, if you think going right seems like a logical thing to do, your guys are in total control! Just switch parties!
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to continue my search for a November 3rd group that was going to organise in order to promote spectacular alternatives to this insanity. Where are they hiding? Are they depressed, too?
I hope they’re not hanging out with this fellow of a think tank I’ve come to trust as a real “Institute for the Rest of Us”, who is promoting Barack “Oh Bomb Iran”, as a “progressive” champion.