After a brief spell of post-election sobriety, the Democratic
rank-and-file have once more reverted to angry type. They bemoan
the idiocy of the American electorate. They forecast the downward
spiral presently in store for our doomed republic. They curse the
muddled masses for spurning the totality of wisdom as embodied by
the Democratic platform. All this by way of making the larger
point. To wit, that Bush supporters are, to the moron, nutty
fundamentalists impervious to reason.
What these excitable folks need is a refresher course in
clarity. Start with the explanations they’ve produced to account
for the fact that a certain senator is not currently reporting for
duty. It was those wicked Swift Boat vets. No, no, it was that
confounded Kerry. Scratch that. It was those Jesus freaks, consumed with
“ignorance and bloodlust.”
I submit that it was all and none of the above. Certainly Kerry
had his weaknesses, an evident lack of conviction being arguably
the most fatal. Meantime, the Swift Boat veterans’ offensive,
though substantively suspect at times, served to raise legitimate
questions about Kerry’s shameless claim that his leadership in
Vietnam — a war he famously indicted as misguided — was
concurrently evidence that he defended his country against an
existential enemy. And, as exit polls confirm, the religious
faithful clearly rallied to the president’s cause.
Yet such easy explanations miss a central fact. None of the
above would have mattered had Kerry appealed to more conservative
and Republican voters. Seen with the benefit of hindsight, however,
Kerry’s campaign reveals just how divorced it was from the concerns
of the president’s core constituency.
That constituency, as studies have long showed, consists largely
of the solid middle and the upper-middle class. Whether a liberal
Democrat from Massachusetts could ever have chipped away at the
GOP’s bedrock base is a debatable proposition. What seems clear is
that Kerry’s pitch to the GOP’s was altogether misdirected.
ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT he emerged as the frontrunner for the
Democratic nomination, Kerry began repulsing the right. For months
on end, Kerry invoked the specter of a “middle class squeeze.” “Our
great middle class is shrinking,” Kerry glumly insisted at the
Democratic National Convention. He echoed that theme on the stump,
conjuring up bleak visions of spent middle-class kin who are
slaving away at “two jobs, three jobs, and they’re still not
getting ahead.” The wages of this appeal was that a majority in
every income bracket from $50,000 to $200,000 went for Bush.
How to account for this breakdown? In part, it has to do with
the fact that, Kerry’s fear-mongering notwithstanding, the middle
class is not actually being squeezed. But it also hints at what was
arguably the far greater weakness of Kerry’s campaign: Its utter
inability to speak to conservatives.
Take the economy. With an eye to manufacturing job losses in
battleground states, Kerry opted for a protectionist posture. He
inveighed against outsourcing. He vowed to “close the tax loopholes
that reward companies for shipping our jobs overseas.” And he
didn’t stop there. Taking a page out of Michael Moore’s book, Kerry
claimed that the Bush administration was a tool of corporate
interests. “I will have a Vice President who will not conduct
secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws,”
Kerry said, following this up with, “You don’t value families by
kicking kids out of after school programs and taking cops off our
streets, so that Enron can get another tax break.” John Edwards was
summarily dispatched to turn the vice presidential debate into a
referendum on the evils of Halliburton.
Kerry’s caricature proved his undoing. For one thing, what was
accurate (outsourcing) was not new, and what was new (Halliburton,
secret meetings with polluters) was not accurate. Worse for Kerry,
his anti-corporate speechifying dashed any hope he may have had of
wooing Republicans. What seemed to Democratic activists as a bold
declaration against outsize interests played very differently
across the political aisle. There Kerry appeared as a protectionist
out to stifle free trade. Or, alternatively, he was just another
tax-and-spend liberal waiting in the hard-left wings. Kerry’s
mistake was in assuming that conservative-leaning middle-class
voters, even those who had experienced economic hardship,
sympathized with either one of these positions. A look at the exit
polls suggests they did not: 94 percent of Bush supporters believed the president pays more attention to
ordinary Americans than to large corporations.
LESS COMPELLING STILL still was Kerry’s call for expanded
government. “Help is on the way!” Kerry intoned at the Democratic
National Convention. It was an unfortunate choice of slogan. Even
as it roused the Democratic faithful, it confirmed conservatives’
in their worst suspicions: Kerry was a big government liberal.
Thus, despite much pre-election grumbling about ballooning
government during the first Bush term, supporters of smaller
government still threw in their lot with the GOP. Among those who
believed government should not do more to solve problems, 70
percent voted for Bush.
Arguably Kerry’s most forceful bid for conservative support was
his insistence on making morality a key pillar of his campaign.
Operating under the flawed assumption that repetition equals
conviction, Kerry went on a values spree. Every campaign stop was
an excuse for Kerry to broadcast his “values.” Airy dictums like
“Values are not just words” earned the senator a shower of
encomiums from a sympathetic commentariat. To conservatives,
however, Kerry’s vaunted values seemed like just that. What was it,
if not the arrant absence of values, that induced Kerry to tailor
his views on pressing issues like Iraq to suit fluctuating public
opinion? Again, the exit polls are a testament to these doubts: Of
the 22 percent of the electorate that considered moral values the
most important issue, 80 went for Bush.
In reflecting on this election, Democrats ought to consider the
Kerry campaign’s failure to connect to conservatives and
Republicans. That they did in fact fail is borne out by the polls,
which indicate that 84 percent of conservatives and 93 percent of
Republicans backed the president.
For embittered Kerry-supporters, the temptation to write off
these voters as blanket religious fanatics is perhaps
understandable. However, inasmuch as it avoids grappling with the
fact that the GOP succeeded in loosening the Democratic grasp on
formerly solid Blue States like New Jersey, it is ultimately
self-defeating: To deride a vast swath of the electorate is to
abandon any hope of winning conservative and Republican support,
and to consign the Democratic Party to the losers’ column for the
long term. That holds especially true for the Red States. So long
as angry Democrats are bent on seeing the world in black and white,
they’ll never see Red.
