The teacher told of an exercise wherein he read from both the Bush and Kerry websites.  He read where each of the candidates..." />

Our Identity Crisis

Thu Sep 23 2004

Anomalous Data - “It’s OK. Don’t think about it too much, and it will be OK”:

The teacher told of an exercise wherein he read from both the Bush and Kerry websites.  He read where each of the candidates stood on the main issues of the campaign.  He didn’t say who was who…just “this is what candidate one says, this is what candidate two says”.

The kids made tally marks about each thing they agreed with from each candidate.

Then the kids voted on the issues.

Four kids voted for Bush.  26 kids voted for Kerry.

And this was in Eden Prairie, MN, which is a Bush/GOP stronghold. So kids and parents alike were understandably upset to learn that in a blind taste test, the other guy’s soda pop tasted sweeter.

In other news from the state of Michigan, everyone’s favorite rabble-rouser Michael Moore is sick and tired of liberals who now say Kerry can’t win.

Look at us — what a bunch of crybabies. Bush gets a bounce after his convention and you would have thought the Germans had run through Poland again. The Bushies are coming, the Bushies are coming! Yes, they caught Kerry asleep on the Swift Boat thing. Yes, they found the frequency in Dan Rather and ran with it. Suddenly it’s like, “THE END IS NEAR! THE SKY IS FALLING!”

No, it is not. If I hear one more person tell me how lousy a candidate Kerry is and how he can’t win… Dammit, of COURSE he’s a lousy candidate — he’s a Democrat, for heavens sake! … Yes, OF COURSE any of us would have run a better, smarter, kick-ass campaign. Of course we would have smacked each and every one of those phony swifty boaty bastards down. But WE are not running for president — Kerry is. So quit complaining and work with what we have.

It’s a good sentiment…except that one of the things that makes the Republicans so much more powerful than the Democrats is their talent for turning innocuous comments by activists into signifiers of some reason why the opposition can’t be trusted. “Look at that!” they’ll say. “Even Michael Moore says Kerry’s a lousy candidate!”

Moore goes on to point out that the polls are wrong, that Kerry (unlike Gore) is accepting help from former President Clinton’s political machine, that Iraq is an undeniably Vietnamesque disaster, that the TV is lying to you. The thing is that while all of these things are true, it may not matter, because highlighting the Democrats’ opportunity to capitalize on Bush’s biggest weaknesses assumes two things: that the Dems will in fact take the offensive in the six weeks left until the election, and that the Administration doesn’t have a million other dirty tricks up its sleeve.

Everything Moore lists is a suggestion that, yes, could have won the election for Kerry had his campaign been acting on it months ago. To be going over things like this now, at the end of September, is like when I have $3 in my savings account but go into Excel and figure out how I could have three grand in there by the end of the year assuming that my income remains steady and I curtail my spending.

The Kerry campaign has failed to turn the disaffection for Bush into enthusiasm for Kerry, and the assumption all along has been that this was going to be another 2000 in the sense that the Democratic candidate would be waging an uphill war where the object is not to obtain a decisive victory, but to take it away from Bush. In other words, no matter what anyone says, the assumption has been that the 2004 election was Bush’s to lose in spite of the fact that he’s done everything he possibly could in the past four years to lose it.

What Moore’s saying is that we should lose our fear of Bush (and in the case of Democratic pundits and operators, our raging self-interest) and focus on the real-world, practical steps that can still be taken to topple him. But that fear is quite likely the reason why once again, the election is Bush’s to lose.

And the other anecdote, about the community of Bush supporters shocked to learn they supported Kerry over Bush in a blind test on the issues, is also telling about why Bush has the upper hand. The GOP is now, more than ever, a fiercely nationalistic party, and the booing in Michigan is emblematic of how strongly some people identify with the neocons for their pro-America, fuck-everyone-else worldview. Why, it’s almost religious: the Democrats are telling us how the country should be run, but the Republicans are telling us who we should be.

The Democrats would say (rightly) that it’s none of our business whether Saddam Hussein is a murdering bastard who terrorizes his own people. For Bush and the neocons, demonizing him plays into Americans’ belief in themselves as the most morally righteous, powerful good guys the world has ever seen. The Democrats would say that it is a tragedy that the rest of the world hates us, while the Republicans would say that the very attitudes that make the world hate us are what make us American.

The Democratic mistake is in forgetting to pay homage to the American mythology, and acting surprised when they find themselves on the losing side of a quasi-religious debate over our national character. Back in the day, do you think that an opposition candidate in the Roman republican state could win office while questioning all the things that made Rome glorious in the eyes of its citizens?

This line of thinking about our political system is depressing, for while Kerry would clearly win in a test of the issues, American nationalism isn’t going away and the GOP will always have a greater talent for turning even petty policy debates into a religious argument.