New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | November 11, 2004

Brian Doherty tries to cheer up the left.

Comments

|11.11.04 @ 2:50PM|#

My mother is convinced that Bush's victory means that Social Security will be eliminated. I tried to point out that Bush signed the Medicare prescription drug bill, the largest expansion of entitlements for the elderly since the 1960's. She wasn't impressed.

I guess the impending end of the world under Bush is just an article of faith for Kerry supporters.

|11.11.04 @ 2:51PM|#

Gimme that old time warp and woof of life, yessir!

|11.11.04 @ 2:56PM|#

Brian and I are non-voters, so we'd still be delirious if Lyndon LaRouche were elected by a landslide.
Did you notice the alliteration?

|11.11.04 @ 2:57PM|#

Hey, Reason editors, I've got a brilliant idea for you. Since all the the articles posted at reason.com end up being the subject of a thread at Hit and Run, when you start the thread you should put a link from the article's page directly to that particular thread (as opposed to Hit and Run in general).

You can write me at the e-mail address below to discuss payment for my brilliant idea. If possible, I would like it in bananas. (And don't try to give me that bullshit about how you have no bananas today!)

M1EK|11.11.04 @ 3:04PM|#

"(The evidence does show that a convincing third party run with significant appeal to Republicans is money in the bank for Democrats�Perot was invaluable to Clinton.)"

Perhaps the reason this particular nonaligned voter is most distressed is the increasing prevalence of Orwellianishly malleable history, demonstrated by unidentified individuals such as the one who made the quote above, and always being reshaped in ways that support the Republican version of events.

According to the best polling available at the time, Perot took more voters from Clinton than from Bush I. He took my vote that way, for sure.

|11.11.04 @ 3:16PM|#

M1EK: unidentified? I thought Brian Doherty wrote it.

|11.11.04 @ 3:16PM|#

Thanks for a great piece. That last paragraph beautifully expresses what I've been thinking. If I had any kind of Internet presence, I would try to circulate those sentiments around blogs and inboxes, instead of some hateful anti-American crap I currently see. (Yes, some of it really is anti-American. Unlike Republican pundits, I use that term rarely, but when clearly evident.)

I follow the news. I vote. I make some financial and time contributions to candidates and issues I like. But beyond that, every hour I spend getting pissed off about politics, is fruitless and permanently lost.

|11.11.04 @ 3:21PM|#

Recounts driven by Cobb and Nader?

Nader = Nixon?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

|11.11.04 @ 3:35PM|#

Brian: An excellent epistle from the Party of Life. Thanks.

I can understand the carthartic effect of a good wallow-n-wail. (I'm no stranger toself-inflicted pain myself, as I've recently spent some time surfing for babes at www.sorryeverbody.com.) But I hope people lighten up soon. I have to admit (after only a week) that listening to the ignorant, hysterical, self-parodying wails of Lefty Drama Queens (tm) isn't nearly as much fun as I thought it would be.

|11.11.04 @ 3:38PM|#

I meant www.sorryeverybody.com -- and I did preview! Dam these tipos!

|11.11.04 @ 3:44PM|#

Nice article. I got a pick up out of it, and I wasn't even depressed to begin with.

|11.11.04 @ 3:46PM|#

It is surprising that Democrats are so much more despondent about an election that they lost by only three percent than they were after losing in 1980 by ten points, in 1984 by eighteen, or in 1988 by eight. I think the difference is that this time they really expected to win. One thing that they should have remembered is that barring a scandal of Watergate dimensions (1976), a major recession (like that of 1991, which may technically have been over by 1992 but the unemployment situation was still bad, much worse than in 2004) or a war with 50,000 US deaths (not 1,000) it is pretty hard to defeat an incumbent US president--especially when the 9/11 "rally around the president" effect was by no means *totally* dissipated. That as flawed a candidate as John Kerry came so close to winning is proof that the Democrats are far from dead. Under Roy Fair's economic model, Bush should have won with 57%!

BTW, exit polls in 1992 (and they were pretty accurate that year, unlike this...) showed that Perot voters were about equally divided between those who would otherwise have supported Clinton, those who otherwise would have supported Bush, and those who would not have voted at all without Perot on the ballot (turnout was up in 1992, largely due to new voters who supported Perot).

|11.11.04 @ 3:47PM|#

"listening to the ignorant, hysterical, self-parodying wails of Lefty Drama Queens (tm) isn't nearly as much fun as I thought it would be."

a hearty yea verily to that.

it's fucking annoying after a while.

plus i feel bad for all of my friends, so i have to lighten up for many of them anyway. maybe the article will make them feel better.

|11.11.04 @ 3:50PM|#

You know what's funny about this? In the eight or nine months leading up to the election, the left was making endless appeals to small government types that Kerry would be no worse than Bush on their issues.

Now that Kerry has lost, suddenly libertarians are supposed to rejoice at the collapse of Social Security?

fyodor|11.11.04 @ 4:04PM|#

It is surprising that Democrats are so much more despondent about an election that they lost by only three percent than they were after losing in 1980 by ten points, in 1984 by eighteen, or in 1988 by eight. I think the difference is that this time they really expected to win.

Good observation! Ditto in reverse for the Republicans acting like this election was practically a landslide!

BTW, I also seem to distinctly recall that exit polls showed that Perot drew evenly from both sides, but Doherty's not the only one who's been saying otherwise in years hence. Anyone have a link to backup either view?

|11.11.04 @ 4:10PM|#

" For example, consider my own post-election ritual. I went on tour with an absurdist touring cabaret, 25 or so of us in a converted Green Tortoise bus going from San Francisco to Portland and Seattle and back. Once, at a gas station off the 5 somewhere north of San Fran, a small town cop circled us for a while suspiciously while we gassed up, but we were otherwise unhassled. No internal passports, no one asked for our papers. We entered freely into deals with sellers of diesel, lodging, sandwiches, and beer."

Shame on you for not using bio-diesel! Some hippies you are...

|11.11.04 @ 4:29PM|#

"Now that Kerry has lost, suddenly libertarians are supposed to rejoice at the collapse of Social Security?"

Shouldn't we rejoice at the collapse of Social Security regardless of who wins or loses?

|11.11.04 @ 4:41PM|#

Excellent, Brian. That was really great.

M1EK|11.11.04 @ 4:43PM|#

xray:

That was a joke.

|11.11.04 @ 5:01PM|#

Fyodor:

http://www.michaelbarone.com/almanac/blog/000012.php "Perot voters, polls showed, were about equally split between Clinton and Bush as their second choice."

See http://www.fairvote.org/plurality/perot.htm for a more detailed analysis of the Perot effect on the 1992 election. It finds it plausible that Perot cost Bush some closely contested states, but finds that even if Bush had carried all of them, Clinton would still have won.

One thing to remember about 1992 is that while Perot did strongly in "conservative" western states he also did well in "liberal" New England ones. See http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1992.txt So it is possible that while Perot hurt both Bush and Clinton equally in terms of the *popular* vote, Perot hurt Bush more in the *electoral* vote since such strong Perot states as Rhode Island and Massachusetts would have gone Democratic with or without Perot, whereas Montana and Colorado would probably have gone GOP without Perot as they did in elections before and after 1992. But again, even if Perot hurt Bush in the Electoral College, he did not do so sufficiently to acount for Clinton's victory.

And there is a more complicated version of the Perot-helped-Clinton argument. The point is that Perot helped keep Bush-bashing alive in early to mid-1992 while Clinton was struggling. Some of the people convinced by Perot that Bush was bad may then have gone on to vote for Clinton.

So all in all the question of Perot's effect in 1992 is complicated, but it is certainly less favorable for Clinton than is thought by people who naively assume that all Perot voters would otherwise have gone for Bush.

|11.11.04 @ 5:57PM|#

I think there's a very obvious reason for Democrats being surprised/depressed that is totally overlooked by the statistics. They didn't just lose. They lost to THAT guy. To most of my friends on the left, Bush was so overtly dispicable and a failure in every way that a Democrat would pay attention to, that they truly believed they could run Mickey Mouse and beat the bastard.

And it's true, he hardly lived up to any of the old Republican ideals. Small government? Curbing the welfare state? Pshaw. And even most Republicans agreed that his attempt at a military solution to the world's ills left much to be desired.

The parts invisible to most Democrats (which basically boils down to a surplus of cocksure personality and unappologetic this-is-how-I-am-ness) just didn't seem to register.

And in the heat of political flag-waving and rooting for your candidate, any Kerry supporter had to semi-consciously ignore these aspects if he wanted to get behind and even get excited about his limpy lukewarm noodle of a presidential hopeful.

|11.11.04 @ 6:11PM|#

Frankly I hoped Kerry would win so I wouldn't have to listen to 4 more years of my mother and her friends telling me how uniquely evil GWB is.

Maybe the Dems could have run Mickey Mouse and won but instead they ran Goofy.

Robert G|11.11.04 @ 6:13PM|#

The Democrats were foolish to nominate a senator from Massachusettes. Almost anyone else could have beaten Bush.

|11.11.04 @ 6:24PM|#

Including an ex-governor from Vermont?

|11.11.04 @ 6:33PM|#

thoreau:

"...Bush signed the Medicare prescription drug bill, the largest expansion of entitlements for the elderly since the 1960's."

The Kerry supporters and thoreau's Mother are right for all the wrong reasons. We might well be doomed unless we can get congress to impose some spending restraint on Bush and thwart his big government agenda.

|11.11.04 @ 7:37PM|#

Very well done, and largely what I was already thinking. At my ISP, the orthodox view is that Bushitler the Cowboy Chimp (to use LGF's phrase) is the Worst. President. Ever. (I seriously want to ask everyone who uses that phrase to list every president for me and describe their relative quality, just to shove their own ignorance in their face) and the nation is going to be utterly destroyed (including the environment!) and if you disagree, then you are just as much a part of the problem as Bush himself. I actually tried to be encouraging to the depressed, saying, yes, he's bad, but we've survived bad presidents before, and when you talk about leaving, you only play into the hands of your opponents, etc. And for my troubles, I was attacked as "glib" and failing to see the problem. Well, screw you, leftists. I don't like Bush either, but throwing your common sense out the window isn't going to help. That's the problem with today's left, IMO: they've endlessly ratcheted up the rhetorical intensity, and then they got suckered in by their own propaganda. Enjoy your tar baby, leftists. About the only bright spot is that the Democratic leadership doesn't seem as loopy as its followers.

|11.11.04 @ 7:46PM|#

One more quick comment - the Democrats have always loved to portray themselves as the party of the people, and interested in everybody's welfare...but when the people turn them away...hoo boy, do the knives come out! Thus do the supposedly warm and fuzzy liberals display what they really think of America. (Sorry, there doesn't seem to be a way to link to a particular column by a particular author.) At least he admits to being an elitist. Oh, and I've been watching Ted Rall since his first days getting published in the Columbia Spectator: I can tell you that neither his artistic abilities nor his politics have changed since he was 18.

And check out this one from Sorry Everybody!
http://www.sorryeverybody.com/upload_files/se3854.jpeg
She's sorry she couldn't force everybody's hand?! I don't really think that's what she meant, but you know, those Freudian slips...

|11.11.04 @ 7:50PM|#

Rick-

I'm inclined to believe that Social Security and Medicare will remain with us in some form or other as long as the proclivity to vote increases with age. Factor in a graying population, and there's no way these things will be abolished.

Even if these programs are unsustainable in their current form, the most likely "reform" is something akin to a few more incentives to invest in 401k plans and IRAs. That's not exactly a step in the wrong direction, but it's hardly a drastic change either. Then, when demographic doom is upon us in 10 or 20 years, a hike in the payroll tax and small cut in benefits.

|11.11.04 @ 8:35PM|#

Whenever a candidate loses--especially if it's fairly close--it's tempting to say "if only his party nominated X instead, they would have been sure to win." But I'm not sure that's true in this case. Edwards looks too young and would be criticized for not having enough national security experience. (And let's not forget that of the four debates, Edwards' was the only one that polls showed the Demcorats *lost*...) Dean would be portrauyed as crazy (the Scream), etc.

|11.11.04 @ 9:35PM|#

JD -- thanks for linking to the Ted Rall piece. It made me feel 10 times better about the outcome of the election. :)

|11.11.04 @ 9:46PM|#

... but not in the way Rall intends, of course.

|11.12.04 @ 7:57AM|#

Consider this:

The Bush administration went to
war based on awful misinformation
and has run the war incompentently.

There are plausible fears that this
is just step one and that Iran or
Syria are next.

Anti-American terrorism by those
more directly impacted and general
opposition to the U.S. by other
major powers could develop.

And why did the Americans vote
to reward this disaster?

They couldn't stomach gay marriage
because they are bigots.

How depressing.

That approach is most plausible to me.

An alternative approach is that promises
to have the government take care of the
middle class while cutting their taxes,
all paid for by tax hikes on the rich,
didn't work.

Why? They couldn't stomach gay marriage,
they are bigots.

How depressing. The grand coalition of the
oppressed--gays, women, blacks, latinos, the
poor--isn't going to get expanded into the
middle class. Where does that leave one's
political vision?

How depressing.

|11.12.04 @ 10:07AM|#

I take comfort in the fact that the Republicans are certain to doom themselves by overreaching. See Gingrich Congress. The only question is, what will be this year's "Kill Big Bird?"

|11.12.04 @ 12:29PM|#

Bill, the importance of gay marriage has been vastly overstated. Bush actually lost ground among rural and small town voters, while picking up support in cities and among those who never attend church. His 3.1% margin is entirely attributable to people who didn't want to change horses in mid-stream.

The Religious Right is going loco trying to claim that they won this election. If faith is defined as belief in the absence of proof, then their interpretation of this election as a mandate for theocracy shows them to be real men of faith.