Mistakes Always Come Back
Several months ago I sent out an e-mail to my friends. I sent it out in response to a number messages I had received from people I knew who were working very hard for same sex marriage. In that e-mail I made two arguments. First I explained that I feel very strongly that same sex marriage should be legal, and my distaste for the opposition to same sex marriage borders on outrage. Second, I argued that the campaign for same section marriage was a very very bad idea because it would create backlash and play directly into the hands of the conservative strategy. My friends generally disagreed with me, and let me know that the left must constantly continue to charge forward and not be cowed by the right’s agenda.Volokh very smartly postulates that a same sex marriage ban (politicized by the media frenzy over a few dozen weddings in San Francisco) may have made the difference in getting out the conservative vote in Ohio. In other words it may have been the single issue that put Bush in the Whitehouse by turning out the entire religious right, even those who feel betrayed by the Bush administration.[1]
Even if this isn’t true, it certainly helped. And now several more states (by overwhelming majorities) have specifically banned same sex marriage. In my mind this is a giant step backwards for gays and lesbians.
In this world if we are unwilling to make compromises, to toil to build a workable model that energizes voters, the left will continue to lose ground as it has basically throughout my entire lifetime. The red states are not going to go away. We have to learn how to win in them. Defeats can be victories in the long run if we learn from them. Let’s try to take something away form this one.
1: For some reason liberals have a hard time believing that there are people to Bush’s right. Believe me, they exist. The religious right has not managed to ban abortion. They didn’t manage to ban gay marriage at the federal level. In fact they made very little progress at all. They hope Bush will help them, but they needed to be energized to actually bother to go vote (just as leftists need to be energized to vote for Democrats). I think gay marriage helped them do this. It didn’t change peoples minds, it changed their willingness to drive to the polls.
posted by Michael Benson @ 6:58 PM
5 Comments:
"For some reason liberals have a hard time believing that there are people to Bush’s right. Believe me, they exist."An important point, and anyone who's feeling rotten about Bush's victory can go look at, say for example, the amazingly wretched American Renaissance magazine, the consistently vicious V-DARE, or Michelle Malkin's vile little website.
It could be, knock on wood, a lot worse. Bush got hammered from his right, and a lot of self-defined conservatives don't regard him as conservative.
The red states are not going to go away. We have to learn how to win in them.Democrats already knew how to win in many of the red states; support segregation and reject equal rights. That worked for decades for them in the South. I for one am glad that they eventually rejected that and chose not to return to that kind of pandering to the worst impulses of voters just to win. There are worse things than losing an election.
Mojo
Mojo:
Sure, some things are worth fighting for. Civil rights was even worth dying for. But I think there are two things to keep in mind:
a) Passionately as I feel I don't think same sex marriage reaches the level of importance that civil rights did. It could if a similar level of violence and poltical manipulation were directed twoards denying gays and lesbians their basic constitutional rights. But that's not happening right now.
b) Civil rights would never have been passed if people had not been elected who were willing to pass them. A highly effective grass roots political organization that was willing to make short term compromises for long term gain was absolutely essential to winning civil rights.
Democrats are able to win in some of the red states by doing some very simple things we have been too stupid to do in the last two elections, and it is time to have heads roll in the leadership council because of it.
We have tried, three times, to run someone from Mass. for President. Only Kennedy won, in the closest election this century, in terms of the popular vote, and then only just barely. And that was with the Dixie-crat vote. In order to be able to win, the dems need to run southerners for President, with strong christian backgrounds (hi Jimmy Carter!), and have them attack the living hell out of the christian right. We also need to start our own attack media. More of Air America, more people investigating scandals in the military, in churches, and politcal scandals. Only if we assassinate their character the way they have ours, and boil down our issues REALLY simply so the average person understands, can we possibly win.
-Ben
The very last thing we need is a Democratic Party that descends into vicious character attacks. Is that how Clinton won? My strong suspicion is that the batshit screeching of Michael Moore and MoveOn helped significantly to cost the Democrats an election that they needed to win. The vitriol couldn't be uglier and more sustaiend than it was in the election we just finished: Bushitler! Draft dodger draft dodger draft dodger! Enough of that shit, already.
Given that the Republican leadership is already dropping gleeful hints about how neat it is that we can start pumping oil in the Alaskan Wilderness Preserve, I would bet that the Republicans are about to overplay their hand. A Democratic Party that can calmly demonstrate a commitment to rationality and to carefully articulated policy can win the next election; people seek balance in their government. Clinton talked about reinventing government; he said that the era of big government was over; he spoke in the language of shared values.
He did not look for ways to generate his own Willie Horton moments, thank god.
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