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Edited on Sat Nov-27-04 08:44 PM by Lexingtonian
Some people just feel their own apparent powerlessness so exposed that they can't get over the fact that Bush got three million more votes on November 2. They need someone to blame and Kerry's not giving them excuses or explanations or consolations. These folks don't realize how incredibly fragile the Republicans know their hold on power is against Kerry's 57 million voters and how 'wedgeable'/defection-vulnerable the Republican moderates at all levels (voters, activists, up to members of Congress) have become.
A good number of the complainers are people who think the only good politician is one who resembles themselves, who makes decisions the way they would, who thinks what they consider important the only important things, and who talks to them they way they're accustomed. Generally they supported people other than Kerry during the primaries, people who appealed to their individual or group narcissism more strongly. These folks don't realize how the Party is really changing and how it must change and what ways it's not going to for the time being, nor why the details of that isn't going to be explained or their approval asked for it for another year or two. (Most of the rest of the complainers are provocateurs/disruptors staying below the DU banning threshold- note the low post counts- whose purpose is to exploit these other folks' selfimportance in an effort to sabotage Democratic grassroots unity.)
There's a surreal theory both groups subscribe to, which is that if Kerry had run the campaign according to their particular standard of perfection he would necessarily have won. That ignores that (1) no Presidential campaign has ever achieved anything resembling perfection, (2) attacks like the O'Neill group one got polled and focus group tested very extensively by both sides, and the story is that there just are that many Americans who prefer the O'Neill version of explaining Vietnam (because they want to believe the U.S. to be a Messianic society), (3) Kerry simply has a power player and patrician perspective on the game, which was generally superior to their own, and knew the particulars on 'issues' didn't matter too much, (4) like in 2000, Americans voted according to the situation they percieved the country be in and who they are in the society, and all the detail of political positioning didn't do much of anything.
Kerry is a person who represents fairly Modern life and attitudes, as well as classical ones, which is why his appeal is strongest with the youngest generation of voters and the life-affirming oldest ones. It's all the people who can't get over the changes during their lifetime, people whose lives are full of ugly compromises and misunderstandings, who see him representing more problems to their mental comfort rather than resolutions. Kerry forces such people into bizarre contortions of denial, be they Democrats with overt or hidden conservatisms or reactionary Republicans. It's not Kerry the man who provides the problem: he simply represents the pressures of the Modern world that Americans over forty find tests their competence and adaptability in ways that pain them.
People will in time submit, make the effort to learn what they need to, and adapt to the Modern. But they voted for Bush to buy themselves 'a reprieve', to quote Jerry Falwell in an unintended moment of candor. There is a great need to supply the moderate Bush voters with the information and confidence they lack to get over whatever mental hurdle remains between them and leaving the reactionaries behind.
So "Kerry" is simply a lightning rod. The Party grassroots is in a painful lurch toward accepting that it represents the Modern and has to ditch a lot of transitional and narcissistic and selfserving ideas about itself. The Party grassroots has to accept that The People doesn't consider it purged of Old Democrats until it lets go of all exposed principle-deficient and reactionary holds on power: there has to be a brief moment of not clinging, of letting go. The People holds Democrats to a higher standard than its opposition because it is the Party tasked to bring about the Better Future, and expectations of Republicans are only to fully ruin that which is failing in the Present.
I expect it will be January before sanity and constructive effort and careful optimism and political will returns to the norm around these parts. Let 'em all grieve, let 'em all figure out things for themselves as they are able. Kerry's clearly going to be a tacit or overt leader in a major effort to get defecting Republicans over to our side during the next couple of years, no matter what all the naysayers and critics say now. I say: rest up and heal up and prepare for the next incursion on Bush & Co., victory and the end of the war have never been closer.
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