Gyroscope
A newsletter
for those unmoved by spin.
No. 52, November 8, 2004
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Gyroscope A newsletter
for those unmoved by spin. |
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| by John Nordin |
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Ammo
for the next four years
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| OK, a week has gone by, time to pick ourselves off the mat and start up the resistance movement. But among the things we have to do is get clear on the reality of the situation and stop fooling ourselves, either out of arrogance or despair. Here are some propositions for getting going again. |
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What's
good about this problem: It's Bush's mess, let him clean it up
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| Make fun of Tony Robbins all you like, but he poses a powerful question to ask yourself when things aren't going right: What is good about this problem? What is our advantage from having lost? As some have said, the advantage is clarity: when Iraq falls apart, when the next terror attack comes, when the deaths of our soldiers mount, when the deficit drives up interest rates, its all clear now - it is Bush's fault, not the Democrats. Get out the bumper stickers that say, "Don't blame me, I voted for Kerry." |
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Yes
we did loose
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| Some talk has focused on how just a few votes could have gone the other way and Kerry would have won New Mexico, Ohio and Iowa and be president. Yes, that's true. But Bush is one of the worst, most destructive presidents ever. We should have clobbered him. Imagine if Nixon had been reelected after the Saturday-night Massacre? Would we call that a narrow defeat? We should have gotten 55% of the vote and swept the Democrats into control of at least one house of Congress. We lost. |
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Don't
assume you know why you lost, go find out
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Lots of theories about why we couldn't attract more voters are out there. "Anti gay marriage resolutions brought out the fundamentalists" (Not true, apparently, judging by voter turn out in neighboring states without such resolutions.) "Bush supporters live in their own private reality." (Sure, that is true, but why couldn't we penetrate it?) "The Democrats need to only run southern governors" (Rubbish) "The Democrats are too liberal / too elitist" (Unlike the millionaires who run the Republicans). We need to survey Bush voters - not just by asking dumb questions ("Are values important to you?" "Would you vote for a liberal if he promised not to do anything?" "Are you stupid?") but by asking open-ended questions, listening and then confronting with the facts. An army of trained listeners should be sent across America to ask Bush supporters why they voted for him. Then when the answer comes back, start asking questions that go to the reasons given. If they say they felt Bush loved the troops then remind them about all the undermining of the troops Bush did and then ask why they voted for Bush. If they say morality is a concern then ask why lying and taking money from poor people aren't moral issues. And then listen critically to what you hear. I've only done that on one person. I thought his head was going to explode as he accused me of being a communist who hated America and always blamed America. Then I asked him to tell me when I had done any of that. And he became totally silent. No, I'm being serious here. We have no in-depth idea at all of why people vote for Bush. None. The idea is so incomprehensible to us that we can't wrap our minds around the mind of the Bush supporter. But we really need to do this. I have my thoughts, but I want to hear what comes back. |
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No Kerry
didn't run a good campaign
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| He never connected with the thought processes or ordinary people; he tried to appear "just as tough as Bush"; he never articulated much of a vision; he never explained why conservatives should vote for him; he let the slime against him go on too long without reply; he shied away from the class warfare appeals and he did not emphasize the threat to civil liberties posed by the Bush administration. He did not articulate why America - as a democracy - must reply to terror with something other than force. He lost the war of symbols without much of a fight. |
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Don't
cry "fraud", go find it
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| We all love the X-files, but we don't use it as a guide to daily life. If you think there is fraud don't repeat what you heard third hand, go back to the original sources. It is not proof of fraud that the result disagrees with an exit poll. It is not proof of fraud that someone told you something that they can't repeat in public. Kerry ran very close in many states to what the final poll consensus predicted. I'm sure there is a great deal of sloppiness and some fraud. But find the evidence. |
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Values,
or Christian fundamentalism is like Islamic fundamentalism
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As a Christian, let me be clear: Christian fundamentalism is exactly like Islamic fundamentalism. Both are anti-intellectual rejections of the Enlightenment and all it stands for. Neither is, despite what they claim, the "original" or "true" version of the religion. Nor are either more moral than the alternatives: fundamentalism is rigid, unbending, does not believe in compromise, is unwilling to live with doubt or complexity, does not like diversity and seeks to purify the church of those who do not share the same point of view. The point for the election is that fundamentalism wants to eliminate the distinction between church and state, in fact, they don't think such a distinction can exist. As surely as Islamic fundamentalists want to impose Islamic law, the Christian fundamentalists want to impose some version of Christian law on America. Go into any Christian bookstore not run by a mainline Protestant seminary. You will find a large proportion of the books to be about conservative politics and almost none to represent a moderate or liberal Christian perspective. The movement, as it is reflected in America is utterly hypocritical. Values mean little to them: "us" vs. "them" is what it is about. They never object to the moral failings of their own members. Further, their notion of morals is mostly based on a few selected faith issues not what we'd call ethics. Lying, cheating, talking falsely about your neighbor in the other political party, these are not moral failings to fundamentalists. Christians need to stop apologizing and forthrightly reject fundamentalism in all forms. Secular liberals need to understand the distinction between main stream Christianity and fundamentalism. |
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That
Hillary / Obama ticket will not save us
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Oh My God: a Democrat who can talk in public! Why, let's make him Presidential candidate for life right now. I like Obama as well, but he has run exactly one race that was statewide and that he had a free ride on because his opponents self-destructed. Let the guy develop a record, let him learn the ropes in the Senate. Two years from now give him a minor leadership post. Let him have some accomplishments at the national level first. As for Hillary, has anyone noticed that she isn't a liberal? She is more firmly in the pocket of the Israeli lobby than even Gore or Kerry was. She might win, but would she advance progressive causes? |
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Understand
the rhetorical moves of the Bushies: (1): Don't let them hid behind others,
(2) reject the presidential presumption
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Attack the conduct of the war and a Bushie will shout "Why are you criticizing our troops!" Attack Bush for dodging the war and they will say "Why are you attacking the National Guard!" Attack Bush for anything and he runs and hides. Here is what Kerry should have said: "I notice that whenever Bush is attacked he runs and hides. I talk about the war in Iraq and he runs behind the skirts and trousers of our troops and says that we are being mean to him. I'm not criticizing the troops [turns to Bush] I'm criticizing you. Be a man, stand up take responsibility for your own actions and defend them." The second rhetorical move is to claim that "in a time of war" we couldn't possibly criticize the president, or that to do so is to be "filled with hatred." So, ask if that's how they treated Clinton? Oh, no, they didn't respect him, now did they? Well, here would be my reply in a debate to the "in time of war" move: "If in 1943, two years after Pearl Harbor, the president had responded to the Japanese attack by invading China, if he had failed to build defenses on the west coast to stop invasion, if he had put up roadblocks all over America to search anyone traveling on a bus but hadn't called up troops to build an army, then you can be darn sure that people would have been criticizing him. In past wars, we've tended to have presidents that brought all groups into the government and led pretty well this nation to respond to the attacks. We don't have that now." |
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Don't
forget civil liberties if you want to reach to old line conservatives
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| "Do you want a small government or a government that keeps you under surveillance? Do you want a balanced budget or a huge deficit? Do you want a government limited by the rule of law or one that claims the right to do whatever it wants? Do you want a government that claims the right to lock you in jail and not let a court hear your case? This Bush regime is not conservative in any meaning of the word that Dwight Eisenhower would recognize, not conservative in any way Barry Goldwater would accept. They've turned their back on fiscal responsibility, on limited government on respect for law. And you should turn your back on them." |
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Stop
apologizing; attack the arrogance of the Bush supporters
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| Oh, maybe if we smiled more. Maybe if we pretended to go to church. Maybe if we got an American flag and said that we are patriotic too. Baloney. Stop implicitly accepting the world view of the right wing nuts. They don't love America's constitution, they despise most things that made this country great. They reject argument and logic itself, often enough. Stop trying to be nice, declare war. |
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Attack
the media
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| Yes, the media had an impact on the election: Swift boats, Bush National Guard service, Kerry as French, Kerry as flip-flopper and on and on. And this was allowed to go unattacked. A war room should have been calling this stuff every time it happened. Ads in the NYT should have been taken out every week describing all the rubbish. |
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Don't
agree to be "unified"
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| When the Republicans talk about unity what they mean is that you can't object to their ideas. If you do, you are being "divisive." So let's get out there first, tell Bush what he should do to 'unify' the nation. |
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Well, that's enough for now. Fight on! |
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So,
could you tell by 4:30?
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Last week, I gave some analysis about how you could tell by 4:30 who was going to win. How accurate was I? Here is the data.
So, what this said was that maybe there was some cause for optimism for Kerry supporters. Looking back, I can see what I missed - that in some states data collection would take place so slowly that a state that should be called for Bush couldn't be done so because of lack of data. CNN made a big pitch about the difference between "not enough data" and "too close to call" - a useful distinction, but they didn't use this in any meaningful way over the course of the night. This became a problem because most of my indicators would use indicision as a sign of Kerry doing well. I needed more states where indicision would indicate Bush doing well, but that isn't how the states layed out. What about the second set of data:
These results were pretty accurate indicators. The election was going to be close, but it didn't suggest that Kerry was going to do any better than he in fact did. |