sharktacos's Blog

"What's the Matter with Kansas?"

2006-02-05T05:22:41Z

I’ve been gone for awhile, but, as I understand it, Kansas essentially has three political parties now—the moderate Republicans, the social conservative Republicans, and the Democrats. Clearly, the moderate Republicans present an opportunity for Democrats—they think more like us than like their party compatriots—and we’ve occasionally won elections in Kansas because of it.

You wonder: Why do the moderates stay Republican? Simple inertia may be one reason. (An object at rest tends to stay at rest.) Another reason is history. Kansas came into the Union as part of one of the truly great political movements in American history—the coalescing of anti-slavery sentiment into a political movement which formed the then new Republican Party.

The “slave power” tried hard to win Kansas, but eventually had to give way to the free-staters (many from Massachusetts) who moved to Kansas precisely in order to vote out the pro-slavery “Missouri ruffians” who had seized power in the state. Kansas would be pro-union and anti-slavery, and the Republican Party—Lincoln’s Republican Party—would become its political bedrock.

Since the beginning of the United States, there has always been a “southern party” and a “northern party.” From 1800 to 1964, the Democrats were the southern party and the Federalists, then the Whigs, then the Republicans were the northern party. When the Democrats rejected segregation in 1964, the GOP picked it up, and the south began to shift Republican. In the 1970’s, the northeast, upper midwest and far west began to shift Democratic so that now, today, the Democrats are the northern party and the Republicans are the party of Jeff Davis. For Kansas, the “southern party” now holds sway in a state that once shed its blood for the cause of slavery abolition. Ah, the little ironies of history!

Frank is less persuasive when he says that the “culture war” voters don’t have anything to show for their efforts. I’d say they’ve gotten quite a lot—a raft of revanchist judges all through the judiciary, and social conservatives seeded throughout the bureaucracy. (The gift shop at the Grand Canyon, with the approval of the National Park Service, is now selling Grand Canyon: A Different View, which argues that the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah’s flood and that the earth is only about 10,000 years old.)

He correctly identifies one of the main contradictions in the electorate however—the GOP coalition of moneyed capitalists and the religious right, possibly the strangest political bedfellows since FDR got the black vote and the racist vote. The religious right thinks “loony liberals” have somehow, against everybody’s will, foisted their immoral values—sex, in other words—on the rest of society. (Janet Jackson’s booby popped out because liberals wanted it to.) What they seem incapable of seeing is that our society is the way it is because of capitalism.

Sex attracts an audience and sells product. That’s just the way it is. The right-wingers’ beef is not really with liberals, but with capitalists, especially those who run their favorite network, Fox, which is one of the worst offenders. (I had to laugh about the NFL flap. Monday Night Football’s audience share is down about 3% since last year. Naturally, they turned to sex to try to juice up their ratings. Somehow, as per usual, the liberals are to blame for that nice white girl dropping her towel in the locker room. Don’t we all know that pro football, with its Coors twins and bump-and-grind cheerleaders, is a “family show”?)

It’s all a money deal. The reason the religious right won’t see this is because they can’t. To do so would upend their whole theology. They are battling for the Lord, or so they think, and the Wall Street crowd, their electoral allies, must be—have to be—on the side of the angels along with themselves.

Moral Values

2006-02-05T05:20:01Z

Silver lining department: Everybody is saying that the religious right and “moral values” won the election for Bush and now he owes them all his Supreme Court appointments, and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to boot. Good. Let them think that.

If he does it, and Roe v. Wade is overturned, that could well work to our electoral advantage. We Democrats have paid a huge price for Roe. It peeled off 4-5% of the vote from one of our strongest constituencies—Catholics—and allowed the conservatives to claim the moral high ground. (They can wax eloquent about the “unborn,” but don’t seem to care much for the “born.”) If he doesn’t do it, even after controlling Congress and packing the Court, the religious right can’t help but be somewhat de-energized and deflated.

Besides, conservatives actually have a point. Abortion should have been argued and debated publicly, and, at some point, people who had actually been elected to office should have voted on it. If Roe is overturned, we will have that public discussion in the state legislatures, and conservatives will discover that most people want abortion to be, as Bill Clinton put it, “safe, legal, and rare.” (The number of abortions declined every year of Clinton’s presidency, and has risen every year in Bush’s.)

On the principle of “if you could pick your enemies,” we could hardly do better than to have the religious right as our opponents. Sure, they’re a big voting block—about a third—but the other two-thirds can’t stand them. They were strong enough to get Clinton impeached, but not strong enough to remove him from office. (A good portion of Clinton’s high level of public support was reaction against his opponents. They didn’t like him particularly, but they thought his opponents were nuts.)

This is why the Bush campaign kept conservative evangelical efforts somewhat out of sight. Most of the religious right organizing was done “under the radar” through mailings, the internet, and person-to-person contact. Five days before the election, for example, I received a CD from some outfit in Colorado Springs titled: “Faith in the White House.” If I got one, they must have been sending them out to everybody.

November, 2004 Post-Mortem

2006-02-05T05:19:59Z

Secondly, Bush’s “give the millionaires more money” domestic policies resulted in his carrying over 60% of the vote of people who have over $100,000 in yearly income. Take them out, and Kerry wins by 3%. (Remember when Bush looked out on revelers at a white-tie gala and said, “Some people call you the elite. I call you my base”? He was right.)

I think the Catholic bishops had some effect as well. Gore carried the Catholic vote 50-46. Kerry lost it 52-47—a nine point swing. Some Catholics may well have been influenced by the bishops’ obvious promotion of Bush. (In a very challenging time for this inherently conservative group, they seem not to have been enamored with the idea of a liberal Catholic as President.) Unfortunately, American Catholics are apparently unaware that the Bush administration is not at all popular in the Vatican these days, primarily because of Iraq. (I wonder if Kerry should have jabbed at the bishops a bit. Many American Catholics have a kind of rebellious streak and might have liked it. Plus, the bishops are quite a bit more un-popular, overall, than they are popular. A lot of people—OK, me—would have thought they had it coming.)

Finally, we should not discount the effect of out-and-out brazen lying on the part of the Bush campaign. (Personal favorite: Dick Cheney saying he’d never said there was a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Runner-up: Dick Cheney saying, “Vote for Kerry. Get nuked.”)

This should have been expected. Bush campaigns are always this way. (Just ask Dukakis, Richards, McCain, Dole, or Gore.) This is why Kerry’s biggest mistake was not knocking down the swift boat ads back in August. He had said “bring it on,” and when they did, he wasn’t ready.

We Democrats should have gotten absolutely apoplectic about this—red faced, veins popping out, fists pounding on the table—and then fired a salvo about something like the Bush family’s involvement in BCCI.** We should have shoved it back in their faces, and let them know there was more to come if that was the route they were going to take in the campaign. But we didn’t.

I’m not dissing Kerry. Overall, he ran a good campaign and he’s a stellar person and he won three debates and I don’t want to say anything bad about him. Still, the swift boat lies had the campaign reeling for about two weeks and everything after that felt like trudging uphill.

*assuming he did