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Nice But Not Enough
by Christine Smallwood
November 2004
My sharp, brilliant, world-travelling mother, who broke gender barriers as an executive in the boys' clubs of the corporate world in the 1970s, isn't interested in popularity. She watches MTV, sometimes, to see what the kids are up to, but when it comes right down to it, she couldn't care less about what's cool. She doesn't have time to be pandered to, and she's not interested in a politician feeling her pain. Like actor Ron Silver, who made waves in Hollywood when he spoke at this year's GOP convention, she thinks it's important to stand out from and up to your peers. And like Ron, she cast her vote this year for George W. Bush.
When I asked her why Bush won, why groups like America Coming Together and MoveOn and Downtown for Democracy and IndyVoter and Music for America and Vote or Die and Vote for Change and Rock the Vote didn't save us, she said that the Democrats had a bad attitude. And not in a good, James Dean way. In an obnoxious, condescending way. Apparently, my mom—who, in September, was this close to voting for Kerry—got so tired of Democrats acting like anyone who voted for Bush must be an ignorant, provincial, flat-earth fool, that she just stopped paying attention. She's usually gregarious, fiesty, and up for any debate, but she eventually refused to discuss politics with her co-workers and acquaintances. And, she suspects—and I'm inclined to agree with her—that thousands across the country did the same. They're not the secret Republicans who talk liberal but, all alone in the booth with the ghosts of shoe bombers, vote Bush; she and her kin will tell you their opinions, if you ask them nicely. They're not trying to hide. But they do feel a little persecuted. A senior staff member of MoveOn PAC told me that it is precisely this attitude problem among Kerry supporters that cost them the opportunity to reach Republicans.
“It's easy to think you're smarter,” she said. “But [name calling] is the anti-strategy; it's the lazy strategy. It's the way to feel good about sitting in a coffeeshop. It's a legitimizer for your inactivity.”
Democrats have always been good at inactivity, and good at losing. They have their industries of dissent to maintain, their Harper's magazines to cry into and their punk rock protests to attend with other punk rockers. They have their always increasing quota of self-abuse to meet, in articles like this one.
“Liberals are afraid to have power,” the MoveOn staffer said. “And this is what power is: power is working your butt off to gain every single scrap of ground that you gain on your agenda.”
Attacking other Americans personally; insulting their intelligence and their faith; employing outdated stereotypes about who chooses to live in the exurbs and suburbs of the country's midsection; ignoring the fact that when you get real close to the electoral map, the vote in the red and blue states is closer than it looks—these are all, ultimately, losing strategies. They're also gigantic wastes of time.
The same MoveOn staffer also said that she had never expected Kerry to win.
“Once you get out of the myopia [of a heavily pro-Kerry city] and you start to look at the big picture, then you see the reality is that people support Bush.”
MoveOn worked by setting up a shadow system of voter registration. After signing up voters, MoveOn members solicited pledges, or commitments to vote, from them. On November 2, they kept track of who voted, and the same neighbors who had first met the voters rounded up the negligent.
MoveOn was the most hierarchically structured of the many groups that were both building the progressive community and competing for its attention this fall. It's so organized, in fact, that the precinct leader who I spent election day with had her watch synchronized to her next in command's; she called HQ every hour, on the thirty-third minute, to report her totals before promptly hanging up, no time for pleasantries. But as tight a ship as they ran, MoveOn (like other liberal groups) was legally prohibited from collaborating with the Kerry campaign, and my senior MoveOn source said this split was yet another one of the challenges her organization faced. Groups that catered specifically to the youth vote were even less aligned with the party, embracing the decentralized, anti-authoritarian ideals of their constituents. These autonomous clusters of like-minded people weren't just legally separated from Kerry's strategy (unlike the Republican camp, where Karl Rove and Ralph Reed chatted on conference calls). They were also, in many ways, ideologically opposed to the Democratic Party itself.
This fracturing of fronts, coupled with the party's move to the right—its pandering to conservatives and alienating of radicals that satisfies no one—prevented cooperation between D.C. and outsider efforts, perpetuating the perception of a desperate, “anyone but Bush” tack—a myth that wounded Kerry, who was, in reality, a fine candidate and perfectly qualified to hold the nation's highest office.
Among the sea of youth-oriented groups was New York-based Downtown for Democracy (D4D), one built, like many others, on a system of pledge-gathering and election day head-counting. D4D raised money for Democratic candidates, combining marketing and promotions with political field operations to reach out to youth in urban areas. They held an art auction, sponsored a reading featuring Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and Jhumpa Lahiri, organized a John Sayles film screening, and threw concerts and parties in swing states.
There's no question that D4D and its fellow youth-focused activists did their best to energize and recharge young progressives. Indeed, Music for America (MfA), which sponsored concerts and voter-registration efforts nationwide, reported that nearly fifty-two percent of registered voters between 18 and 26 years of age came out to vote this year, as opposed to thirty percent in 2000; in swing states, sixty-four percent did. And unlike in 2000, when Bush and Gore split that demographic, young voters went for Kerry over Bush by ten percentage points. Of course, that increase in participation was matched by an increase in voter participation across the board.
D4D succeeded not only in turning out a reported 100 percent of their pledges in Dayton, Ohio, but in bringing some life to the party. Karthik Pandian, who produced the Creative Control tour (which brought the English band Bloc Party to Philadelphia in October), said that the tour was extremely well received.
“In Dayton and Toledo they're starving for stuff like this,” said Pandian. “Nobody's ever done something like this before.”
Powered by an East Coast cultural elite, D4D was a niche project with niche appeal. But in their own way, they did their best to mix things up.
“It was a priority for us to engage in different subcultures,” Pandian explained, “so I made sure that whenever we were throwing parties in the same city, that each night was a different genre. We had a hip-hop night, a house night … ” No one can say what the youth vote would have been like without these groups, and leaders like MfA's Mike Connery stress the long-term goal of building a sustainable progressive community over the short-term disappointment of November 3. But as far as tools for producing that short-term victory go, something is clearly lacking. To get to the point: sustainability is great, but I wanted Kerry to win.
Republicans, it has been said, have positioned themselves in a place to maximize their alignment with existing majority opinion. In order for Democrats to tip the balance in their favor, they must bear the burden of changing the majority opinion.
Quite simply, digging up nonvoting Democrats in urban centers isn't good enough. Building a progressive coalition of the like-minded isn't good enough. Nor is driving the liberal message on a celebrity bus tour through the heartland. People do not have to be belittled or marketed to, they have to be persuaded, and that does not happen by sponsoring a rock concert or handing out designer T-shirts. I think it might happen when you talk to someone, one on one, for many hours, to build alliances, slowly—the same strategy that Christians use to build churches—but I'm not sure. After all, I've been talking to my mom for many hours for many years now, and it hasn't done much good.
Laura Dawn, event and cultural director for MoveOn, relayed the story of meeting students at the Vote for Change tour, which brought star power like Michael Stipe and the Dixie Chicks together to spread the we're-not-saying-Kerry's-name-but-don't-vote-for-Bush gospel.
“I asked them how they were going to vote, and they said they were just there to see Dave Matthews,” she recalled. “They were going to vote for Bush.”
“D4D's success is difficult to measure; it's just not quantifiable in numbers,” Pandian said. “The Creative Control tour was all about energizing and mobilizing the creative communities of these cities. It's not just hard numbers.”
It's only natural that artists make art and party planners plan parties and that, in an election year, they do those things with political intent. But I'm tired of being energized and I'm tired of being mobilized and I'm tired of losing. The hard numbers do count, and I'm tired of them coming up short. I'm tired of the Democratic Party paying lip service to the left and moving its positions to the right and ignoring socially-minded people of faith. And most of all, I'm tired of easy solutions to a hard problem, which is that some people fundamentally disagree on the best way to run a nation, and until enough of those somebodies switch sides, we don't have a chance. Our task is not simply to build up from within, it's to branch out; it's to be evangelical about our politics.
No number of music festivals or fashion shows or celebrity spokespeople or antagonism and name-calling is going to get to the heart of the matter, which is the dire necessity for those on the left to kindly, calmly, and thoughtfully persuade those on the right of the worth of our plans and the value of our visions. Of course Republicans say “liberal” like it's “leper;” of course they're smug and infuriating and rude. But when your guy got fewer votes, “he started it” is a pretty lame excuse. It's the logic of whiners and losers.
So enough with the gimmicks and the giveaways and the superiority complex. If liberals are serious about winning, if we are serious about being in power, then it's time to forget about Bruce Springsteen and Marc Jacobs and it's time to stop talking to each other. Start talking to them. And before talking, start listening. That's what my mom said we should do, and I believe her.
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