I am nearly constantly amazed by the lack of analytical ability displayed by the liberals in this country. After the election defeat in 2000, when Al Gore lost the electoral vote but clung to a miniscule half a percent of the popular vote, the absurd attempt to dispute the electoral tally in specific Florida counties was defended by every liberal as though the rules did not apply to them. Upon losing the legal attempt to use the courts to gain what the electoral college did not provide, the silly argument that Bush 'stole' the election became the new liberal mantra. Despite every 'audit' of Florida showing the Democrat run counties were completely incompetent but that Bush still clearly won the election no matter how many times or ways you counted the votes, liberals cling to the idea that the voters did not reject them in 2000.
The conventional liberal wisdom became that Gore was just not liberal enough, he allowed Nader to steal his liberal votes. It was all Gore's fault for not embracing Clinton. The Democrats shifted further left based upon this faulty understanding. The 2002 mid-term elections were fought as an anti-Bush, anti-big business diatribe. Bush was in league with Enron and despite the fact that the crimes were committed under the Clinton administration and prosecuted under the Bush administration, Bush was responsible for the criminal acts of Enron, Tyco, MCI/Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, etc... Liberals again got hammered and lost the Senate. The solution...still not liberal enough.
Nancy Pelosi took over the minority leadership of the House. She is the most liberal member of the House of Representatives from a very liberal district of California. This set the stage for the most liberal primary in the parties history. During the Democratic primary the candidates were rated on who could bash Bush the most. They rarely challenged each other during the 20 or so 'debates' the primary candidates had. These debates were a contest to see whose rhetoric could be the most anti-war and anti-Bush. Joe Lieberman, one of the few moderate Democrats with national standing was marginalized as the party lurched further left. Kerry won the nomination because he was less 'liberal' than Howard Dean, for most moderate voters this is a scary thought. The hilarious explanation was that he was the most electable...he would beat Bush.
The reality was that their nominee for President was one of the most liberal members of the Senate with a voting record and history which was unpalatable to many moderates. This election, Kerry lost the popular vote by nearly 3.5 million votes and yet the opinion of many liberals was that he should still be fighting for Ohio, which he lost by over 130,000 votes, not counting the overseas ballots which are expected to break 4 to 1 for Bush. Needless to say, Florida, at 500 or so votes in 2000, was just a tad closer (Never mind the arguments about Gore actually winning the popular vote in 2000).
So what do the liberal analysts think their party should do now? You are not going to believe it. They think the party needs to move further left of course.
What is at work here is total disbelief that the voters could have so utterly rejected the liberal message. It would be amusing if it were not so disgusting to see liberals flailing around trying to comprehend why voters rejected a liberal candidate who they see as 'right' about every issue. The explanations given are a combination of degrading and infuriating. One theory is that Kerry was not 'clear' enough and that voters did not understand his message. They insult the intelligence of the voters by claiming that they could not see that Kerry was the better candidate. In other words, Kerry is a fault for not dumbing down his message. Failing in that explanation the liberals have descended into stereotyping an ignorant religious conservative voter who can barely read let alone comprehend the difficult reasoning needed to pick Kerry for President. Many of these same liberals are some of the poorest informed most ignorant people in the country. They inhabit liberal 'hives' which provide only a single source of interpretation and appear to have lost the ability to reason on their own. Yet these enlightened 'intelligensia' believe that conservative voters are ignorant.
On MSNBC's Hardball one of the guests predictably lamented the election results but his analysis was amusing but infuriating. He reminded the panel of 'experts' that these voters were not 'like them'. They did not dress nice, think the way they did, share their values or act like they did. Speaking just for myself, I can barely raise the club I carry around the caves hereabouts. Yup...I am one of those conservatives who think this entire idea of descending from the trees was a mistake. Lets stop this evolution stuff and return to the lifestyles of our ancestors. Maybe if they used smaller words...or here is a great idea, how about not assuming that everyone who lives outside of a city is an ignorant shit kicker. That might work! I hear people don't like it when liberals pretend that they are smarter than eveyone else.
The Democrats today look at the 'blue' states and see that some states are 'liberal' and take false comfort in that. Many fail to understand, they lack analytical ability perhaps, what the clear message from the electorate is. They should look a little deeper. If you look at the election based upon county not statewide data, the extent of the liberal delusion becomes clear (map is from USA Today click for a larger version).
It is important to note that a national party can not rely only upon a few counties of influence, high population counties to be sure, and hope to represent an entire country. If you think this hurts during the Presidential elections, imagine what will gradually happen to those parts of government that are more representative! Think about the long term implications for the House of Represenatives and the Senate. There is no longer a second party in this country that can compete on a national basis. This map proves it. The composition of the House and Senate are gradually going to come to represent what this map indicates. Think about the judiciary, the judiciary is also going to come to represent this map. Governorships, local legislatures, and the list goes on. The Democratic party outspent the Republicans through the 527 groups and every other means imaginable to drive up voter turnout. This is only the second election that Republicans tried to do this and only in a few targeted areas. Imagine what is going to happen when this is done on the next midterm elections, but nationwide by the Republicans.
As the continued liberal electoral failures continue to be misdiagnosed, the desperation has created a very unhealthy situation. It has become clear to anyone not blinded by bias that many liberals are not driven by any moral compass, they are entirely motivated by power and many are perfectly comfortable backfilling the necessary moral justification for abhorent behavior, after whatever direction to obtain that power is selected. Imagine what this election would look like if there were no enforcement of laws that prevent illegal voting, multiple voting or other fraudulent voting. Even with the modest enforcement that we have today, thousands of illegal voter registrations and attempted illegal votes were uncovered in Ohio this year. It is not surprising to me that 100% of these illegal attempts were liberal zealots that somehow justified this immoral behavior because they desired the 'right' outcome.
When you couple that with the liberal claims that verifying voter identity is 'intimidation', it just makes my skin crawl. Do they not realize how extremely dishonest they sound to most of the country? There are small slivers of partisans at the extremes of both parties that engage in outrageous behavior. It may be my imagination but this last election looked like the extreme fringes of the Democratic party were far too close to the management and operation of the Kerry campaign. The political office break-ins, illegal voter registrations, campaign finance law violations, coordinated use of 527 organizations, propaganda films and clear mainstream media bias all created not so much an election as a political cold war. Yet election loss after loss the Democrat's solution is to lurch further left, toward that fringe.
The irony is that the two candidates on paper claimed to disagree about such little piddly things. The Iraq war was an issue not because of what either candidate would do, but because Kerry wanted to claim he would never have got us into the war, his vote not withstanding. Yet much of his comments and on-the-record discussion appeared to indicate that he might have done exactly that had Bill Clinton asked for that authority or had Kerry himself had to make the decision knowing what Bush knew when he knew it. That was the sum total of the disagreement. Partisan rhetoric aside, Kerry supported the Iraq war right up to the moment he was running for President and on occaision even while he was running for President and it suited him. Kerry could not honestly describe what he would do different from Bush going forward and his campaign was so clearly hoping for bad news out of Iraq, death of U.S. service men, and continued violence that at times his surrogate's comments bordered on treasonous. It may have shocked some liberals to hear bin Laden on his videotape making the same statements that they themselves were making. Here is clue for those liberals, when you agree with bin Laden, you have left the main stream of society pretty far behind.
Another area of disagreement was tax policy, Kerry favored rolling back tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 which includes every small corporation in this country. Bush opposed this because it includes nearly every small corporation in this country. What neither candidate would say is that they favored a tax rate exception for small corporations that file at the individual tax rates. Of course most wealthy people would immediately become 'corporations' but leave that asside for the time being. This is really not a huge disagreement! We are talking about only $90 billion a year in more federal revenue by adjusting that tax rate. Hardly justification for the extreme nature of the liberal anti-Bush rhetoric.
Perhaps the most contentious social issue today is the issue of gay marriage. This only became an election issue because of the rather brilliant decision by liberals to force the issue through the use of the Massachusetts courts. When you add to that the mind numbingly stupid decision by the mayor of San Francisco to offer gay marriage licenses in violation of California law, you force the public and the politicians to address the issue during an election year. This more than any other decision should provide all of the evidence needed for liberals to questions their own intelligence. Is anyone looking back on what the Massachusetts court and the San Francisco mayor have now caused to happen? Kerry was forced to oppose same sex marriage and now eleven states have constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage. Even the liberal state of Oregon amended their constitution. Has anyone thanked the liberal advocates for their brilliant timing yet? Yet liberals still think they are more intelligent than the rest of us...sure they are.
The only real areas of disagreement between the candidates they rarely ever talked about. Bush wants to create private health savings accounts, Kerry wants to use the joint buying power of every uninsured citizen to create a Federal health insurance fund which people could opt into if they wanted to. Both of these ideas have good things about them, but neither of them address the problem, which is the rate of increase in health care costs. Passing the cost off to a federally funded insurance entity does not lower the health care costs, neither does eliminating taxes on funds used to pay for health care expenses. The truth is that this is a problem without a Government solution. If the public wants to continue enjoying the tremendous advances we are making in health care, they must be willing to pay the cost of those advances. The only proposal that had any impact upon health care costs themselves was tort reform legislation and that impact would likely be rather modest.
The other area of real disagreement was Social Security reform. Bush proposed a radical change in the dying program, Kerry refused to address it except to criticize Bush's proposal. It is likely that something will have to be done to keep the program solvent much into this century. Perhaps Bush now has the political power to fix the program.
In none of these issues are there differences which justify the extreme anti-Bush rhetoric of the Democrats.
So what do I think happened this election?
Frankly my confidence in the voters of this country is heartened by the rejection of the Kerry candidacy. There was no way that a candidate as flawed as John Kerry should have been the Democratic nominee. As skeleton after skeleton came rattling out of Kerry's closet, his candidacy was hurt but not necessarily doomed. It was his inability to explain what he would do as President about the most serious issues of the day coupled with his need to satisfy a party dominated by the leftward fringe that doomed him. It was the uncompromising liberal ideologue supporters which forced him to straddle, flip flop and backpedal to try and appeal to voters who do not share the beliefs of the radical fringe left.
His long track record as a very liberal Senator provided voters a means of measuring his future decision making on issues and portrayed, in a rather unflattering fashion, the candidate himself contradicting his own past pronouncements about various issues.
Let me start by saying that there is absolutely nothing wrong with a wealthy candidate running for President. But here is an interesting fact: John Kerry is the wealthiest candidate to ever run for the Presidency in the history of this country. In fact John Kerry is the wealthiest candidate to ever run for the head of state for any country in the history of the world. Maybe in today's dollars King Tut was close but he was not elected. Still, I would assert that there is nothing wrong with that. It only gets wrong when that candidate decides to run as a populist, a champion of the people, a little guy who will take care of his own. The absurdity of this can not be parodied, it mocks itself. The Democratic party and the Kerry campaign should have known better.
One final flaw was his refusal to the end to release his complete military record or his wife's tax returns. When you run for the Presidency you must relinquish your privacy. Claiming that medical, military and financial records are off limits is inappropriate and the country should heave a sigh of relief that Kerry did not win after refusing to disclose them. That would have set a precedent that would have resulted in disaster some day.
Despite all of these flaws Kerry still might have had a chance, that is a measure of how weak a candidate Bush actual is, but I believe he was done in by the 'assistance' he received from the liberal mainstream media. His 'friends' in the media acted in such a ham handed obviously biased fashion that they could no longer be counted on by the public as an independent source of information. With their partisan bias being questioned by the public, even accurate reporting became suspect. The media has so destroyed the public trust that stories designed to hurt Bush probably hurt Kerry more. If Dan Rather does not like the election result, he should consider his role in making it happen. If ABC News had not written a memo instructing reporters to be biased, maybe their anti-Bush stories would be taken more seriously. If the New York Times behaved less partisan, their opinion might matter more. If the Washington Post was still viewed as impartial, maybe the stories about the mess in Iraq would be taken more seriously. Nearly every big media outlet failed in its duty to provide honest reporting throughout the two years of this current campaign. What else explains the need for a 527 organization to research and demonstrate the flimsy war stories that made up Kerry's biography. Bush's biography was researched by the media but it took a 527 organization engaging in a national media campaign to even get the national media to look at Kerry's Vietnam biography. This was the case even when the candidate was initially basing his entire campaign on it.
The continued irrelevance of the Democratic party can not be good. A one party state really worries me. So what can be done? The marginal fringe nature of the current party leadership requires cleaning out from top to bottom. There is a place in this country for a center-left party but huge changes to the Democratic party will be required before it can operate as that organization. That party must be willing to eliminate the radical elements and look to the backbone of this country for support, not to the fringes. Do not rely upon the unemployed welfare moochers and special interest groups that have radicalized the left, but the honest citizens that provide a days work for a days wages, even if those wages are upper middle class wages. Working for a living and trying to succeed financially must be viewed as a virtue, not a betrayal of values. The Democratic party must recognize that the strength of this nation is that every citizen can find a means of financial success. The Democratic party must embrace hard work and a work ethic. Successful people should be admired, not reviled. Immigrants come to this country because of the opportunity to succeed financially. Supporting policies that impede individual financial success should not be supported by a party of the people.
As I said, it will take substantial changes for the Democratic party in its current condition to be the party I just described.
A pretty fair assessment of what has taken place.
Just a comment on health care... I noticed in Kerry's concession speech, he spoke of health care and he characterized it as a right, not a privilege.
I'm not really comfortable with that characterization.
I certainly feel that keeping the health of it's citizens is within the government's best interest. I'm not a fan of big government programs, so I lean towards Bush's approach to ease that burden, as an effort to promote that government interest of having healthy citizens.
But in the end, I think you're right... good health care, with all the latest technical advancements, simply costs money.
With the health care industry, regardless of how noble the calling or intention of those administering health care, we should be honest and assess it as an industry, a business model. Patients are customers, health care is a service, and health care administrators (doctors, nurses, etc) are service providors.
(I realize many in that industry may take offence to my characterization, but unless they're willing to provide their services for free, or in exchange for room and board and a modest stipend for miscelaneous living expenses, your "life's calling" becomes a service you perform in exchange for a fee, ie a business enterprise.)
In any other service industry, along with quality of work, cost is a deciding factor for a customer in choosing the service providor.
With health care, we are essentially captive customers, particularly in emergency cases... we take the service nearest to us and pay whatever they demand after the fact.
I'm not saying that we are necessarily being scalped by the health care industry, or that doctors are overpaid, etc. They study and practice long and hard for their vocation and should receive a competitive wage for their field.
But it's the only service industry that I can think of that seems to be much more exempt from all the typical constraints or demands of a free market, such as competition, etc. Which in other market areas, tends to drive quality up and costs down. Government subsidization and socialization, on the other hand, tends to drive quality down and costs up-- which would be reflected in our taxes. Americans have one of the smallest tax-to-income ratios in the world. The larger the ratio, the greater the socialism. The greater the socialism, the greater infringement of rights and freedom.
Therefore, declaring health care as a "right" and then starting a big government socialist program to address that "right" increases our tax-to-income ratio and decreases our freedoms. Healthy people who take care of themselves then bear the health tax burden of those who inflict illness on themselves... obesity, dietary diabetes, dietary heart and blood pressure diseases, smoking, alcoholism, etc.
I realize that I'm a rarity, but the last time I visited a hospital for my own health care was for my delivery into the world. I'm sure that will change as I start to have kids... but the point remains:
Why should I have to pay for everyone else's health care through my taxes?
I don't believe that quality health care is a constitutionally defended right, nor should it be. It is a necessary service that is in all our best interest to be cost-effective, but it is not a right.
Posted by: Kevin B. | November 04, 2004 at 04:58 PM
Greeting. Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
I am from Algeria and also now teach English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: "The passing caused special in europe, where genetic psychobilly told to make."
With best wishes 8-), Shing.
Posted by: Shing | September 05, 2009 at 01:23 AM