Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 23, 2009
A Kerry volunteer says Dems aren't latte-drinking snobs -- and they don't need to "reach out" to red state reactionaries.
Nov 4, 2004 | I have never been more ashamed for my country, or more afraid for it. I ran into a friend on the train the morning after the election, and she started talking about what a nightmare the whole thing had been, and I had to ask her to please stop because I didn't want to start crying again. It's like when there's a death in your family, and somehow even being comforted unravels you all the more.
After going to sleep around 2 in the morning, I kept waking up, thinking of one more horrible thing this election means. The courts. And not just the Supreme Court, God help us, but the federal circuit courts, like the one that decided on Election Day that it was just ducky for the Ohio GOP to send mobs -- mobs in suits, but still mobs -- into largely African-American polling places to "challenge" voters. Fortunately there were enough Democratic poll watchers assigned there to intimidate the intimidators -- but is that what it's come to?
So it's the courts. And jobs. And healthcare. And any chance that minimum-wage workers might see a raise after struggling through on the same lousy pay since the mid-1990s. And the sanctity of a woman's right to make her own healthcare choices. And any sense of feeling secure, of feeling like there are people in Washington working late into the night to keep us safe, the way Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke did when Clinton was president. As I lay there thinking, one more thing, and then another, kept coming to me, like a steady drip of reminders of things lost. It's like when your pocketbook is stolen, and you keep thinking of another thing that was in there. You knew your wallet was gone, and your keys, but then you remember the photos you just had developed were in there. Damn. And oh, Christ, the ring you were getting resized, the one your aunt had left you.
By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality -- and their own best economic and national-security interests -- and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of '04, she's the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the "heartland" has foisted on the rest of us.
"Reach out" to these voters? Yeah. Then boil your hand till it's sterilized.
So what are their issues, anyway? They're "cultural and moral values," we keep hearing. Well, they voted in a president who ran up the largest deficits in history, saddling our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt to pay for a tax cut that largely skewed to the wealthiest Americans; underfunded his own education initiative by $9 billion; threw more than a million more families into poverty; lost more jobs than any president since Hoover; saw 5 million Americans lose their healthcare on his watch; demoted the office of counterterrorism and ignored months' worth of dire warnings about an attack in the months running up to 9/11, and after 9/11, fought the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, fought the formation of the 9/11 Commission, and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops away from the war on terror to fight a war of choice in Iraq, where we've lost more than 1,000 young Americans. Those soldiers who are lucky enough to make it home face cuts in their benefits and combat pay, as well as veterans' hospital closures.
Oh, and on a personal note, Bush and Vice President Cheney have been convicted of drunken driving three times between them, and both evaded the draft while hawkishly supporting the Vietnam War; huge questions still remain about Bush's National Guard tenure, while Cheney's story -- five deferments -- is a bit neater and more straightforward. But they do oppose gay marriage, affirmative action and a woman's right to choose. Ah -- now we're getting somewhere on what these "cultural and moral issues" are out in the "heartland." Bush and Cheney hate and fear the same people they do.
