I know the election is ancient history at this point, and that all the Democratic griping and navel-gazing has gotten tedious in the weeks since. Nevertheless, I have some things I want to say about the way things turned out, and given that blogs are essentially an exercise in self-absorption — uh, self-expression, I mean — I’m going to ask that you bear with me. Or don’t. I can’t make you stick around if you don’t feel like reading anymore on this subject. It’s not like I have a remote-controlled rifle pointed at you. If you’re absolutely sick of politics or don’t have time to read a long post, I invite you to come back in a day or two.

First of all, let’s step back and gain a little perspective, shall we? People on both sides of the political fence have been talking as if this election was the worst rout since the redcoats slaughtered the Highlanders at Culloden. It wasn’t.

George W. Bush won the election fair and square, but he didn’t win it by much. He won by only three percent of the popular vote. Three percent. That’s not much, statistically speaking. Three percent is like a last-second throw just as the buzzer goes off, the ball that somehow manages to reach the basket and win the game. It’s a win, yes, but it doesn’t mean that one team is vastly superior to the other. It means, in fact, that the teams are pretty evenly matched and one of them just managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

The Republicans don’t like hearing this kind of talk. They would prefer that the defeated Democrats simply acquiesce to the inevitable fact of their supremacy. I think if they could, they’d have all of us blue-staters kneel down, kiss their rings, and pledge fealty to our betters. When we refuse to acknowledge their greatness, their usual response is, “you lost, get over it.” Nevertheless I keep railing on this point because I think the triumphalism of the other side — not to mention the defeatism I’m hearing from my own side — needs to be tempered with a dose of reality. For example, a couple weeks ago on one of the Sunday-morning talking-head shows, I heard NBC’s Chris Matthews make reference to the Bush team’s “overwhelming victory.” I so wanted to tell him to cut the crap. An overwhelming victory is what happened in the Reagan-Carter election in 1980, when poor Jimmy earned only 49 electoral votes to Reagan’s 489, which divides out to only about 10% of the electorate. (I don’t know what the actual popular vote count was in that election, so my figure is based on the electoral percentages.) That isn’t what happened to John Kerry, no matter what kind of hyperbole the GOP spin-machines are churning out. As Walter Shapiro pointed out in a column for USA Today, “George W. Bush’s 286-252 victory in the Electoral College was the third-narrowest finish in more than a century. For all the glib talk about Bush’s mandate, the president’s 51%-48% victory in the popular vote represented a smaller winning margin than in 23 of the 28 elections dating back to 1896.”

In short, the Bush team does NOT have the sort of universal approval they’re claiming, and liberals are not as marginalized as we’ve been feeling. The term “mandate” implies that the vast majority of the population supports the president’s way of doing things. In fact, only half the country likes the way he runs things, and in truth it’s only half of those who bothered to vote. There’s 100 million people out there who didn’t vote, for whatever reason, and we don’t know how those folks feel about things. (The fact that so many people couldn’t be bothered to pry their fat asses out of the Laz-E-Boys and go do their civic duty is a rant for another time.) As far as I’m concerned, any talk of a mandate or “political capital” is supreme arrogance under these circumstances, and that sort of arrogance is a large part of why I don’t care for this president or those who work for him. They act more like kings than elected officials, ordinary human beings who believe themselves endowed with special privelege by none other than God himself. Two hundred years ago, we fought a revolution against such a leader. Now we’ve got talk-radio personalities telling us that this is the way things ought to be. (Incidentally, I’d be calling Kerry arrogant, too, if he’d won by such a narrow margin and was talking like the right-wingers have been. If he’d won by anything short of 70%, in my opinion, he’d be obligated to work very hard toward compromise and finding a way to satisfy both sides of the divide. President Bush talks about unity, but so far I’ve seen no sign that he or the Republicans in Congress intend to make any such efforts. Their idea of a unified country is one in which the opposition just shuts up and lets them do whatever the hell they want.)

None of my defiance, however, changes the fact that my side lost this one, and we lost decisively, if not massively. The popular wisdom that seems to have crystallized over the past weeks is that we lost either because (a) the Democrats are out of touch with the voters on “moral values,” or (b) John Kerry sucks. I believe both explanations are somewhat correct, but only up to a point, and only from a certain perspective.

(Quick tangent: there is a fringe element out there who are convinced the Dems didn’t really lose at all, that the Repubs somehow stole the election and Kerry conceded too soon, before the wrongdoing could be brought to light. From what I’ve seen, these tin-foil-hat theories mostly revolve around the new electronic voting machines that do not produce any verifiable paper trail. While I have my own doubts about the wisdom of all-electronic voting, I’ve seen nothing that I would consider substantial evidence in support of these claims, so I discount them as wishful thinking, angry ranting, and blind mistrust. The Dems had reason to question Bush’s legitimacy in 2000. I don’t think they do now, and the sooner the left puts this conspiracy crap behind us, the sooner we can start thinking about the things that really did — and do — matter.)

So, getting, at long last, to the point, I believe that John Kerry had definite liabilities as a candidate and that those liabilities are largely to blame for his defeat, but I don’t think he was as bad as everyone is now saying. After all, if Bush won by a mere three percent, that means that Kerry lost by the same slim margin, and it wouldn’t have been so close if he’d been running an absolutely piss-poor campaign. There are those who say that Kerry only scored as much as he did because of anti-Bush sentiment. While I’m sure that the utter revulsion many feel toward the man from Crawford played a large part in Kerry’s percentages, I don’t believe that hatred alone could have driven the Democratic numbers so high. The people who voted for Kerry, at least some of them, must have seen something in him besides the fact that he wasn’t George W. Bush.

Personally, I had a lot of reservations about Mr. Kerry when he was first nominated. A long career in the Senate has made him into a stiff, rambling speaker, and I knew that his anti-war activities in the ’70s and his history of re-evaluating his positions were going to be used against him. However, I gradually became more enthusiastic about John Kerry after the debates and in the final weeks leading up to Election Day. He is an intelligent, thoughtful man and there is fire within him when he finally manages to get it stoked up. I think he would’ve made a good president, I really do. Unfortunately, it took him far too long to get up to speed in his campaign, and many people feared he would’ve been equally sluggish as president. I can’t fault them for that.

Kerry should have come out of the Democratic Convention swinging for the fences, hammering hard on President Bush’s dismal record every chance he got. Instead, he just sort of dithered around until September or so, when he finally started making his criticisms count following the debates. When the Swift Boat worms came crawling out of the woodwork, he should’ve slapped them down immediately instead of letting the story play for a couple of weeks. The press finally got around to debunking their claims, but by then a lot of people had stopped following the story. The damage was done. (The Swift Boat thing really frustrated me, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I thought it was a sleazy and obvious smear campaign. But I was also unhappy with Kerry’s lack of response, which allowed doubts to rise in the minds of the public. There was no good reason for Kerry not to have had a strong counterattack ready to go, since the leader of the SBVs, John O’Neill, has been dogging him with these same accusations for decades. Briefly, O’Neill was groomed by Richard Nixon himself to be a clean-cut, pro-Establishment counterweight for the anti-war veterans movement led by Kerry. Kerry and O’Neill debated on the old Dick Cavett Show, and Kerry mopped the floor with his opponent. I believe that he has nursed a big-time grudge ever since then and he was only too happy to let the GOP use him and his hatred as a cudgel. I think Kerry — or at least his campaign managers — should’ve expected O’Neill to turn up as soon as the nomination was announced, but they apparently believed that this ancient blood-feud would just go away, or that it wouldn’t be that damaging. Surprise, on both counts.)

Kerry also should’ve had a clear and powerful response to his votes on the Iraq War, a.k.a., the charges of “flip-flopping.” If you take the time to read the speeches and resolutions that led up to the War, Kerry actually has been quite consistent in his position, despite what the spin-meisters claim. Kerry bought into the concerns that Iraq had WMDs, but resisted the Bush Administration’s insistence that an immediate, all-out invasion was the only way to handle the situation. In the simplest language (which, I’m willing to concede, Kerry often seems incapable of using), Kerry voted to give the president authority to go to war but only as a last resort. The idea was to give the president a big stick with which to intimidate Saddam into backing down. In his own words, Kerry said:

“Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies.

In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days–to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out.” (Emphasis mine)

Voting for the authorization was probably a mistake on Kerry’s part — he seriously miscalculated the president’s intentions. It seems clear that Bush had made up his mind to invade, period, regardless of any outside opinions that it really wasn’t necessary (or the fact that we were already busy fighting an enemy who had no connection to the one that Bush really wanted to get). And so he chose to interpret the vote giving him the authority to wage war as approval to wage war — they’re not the same thing at all. (Incidentally, Kerry — and any other Congressional Democrat who would’ve pursued the presidency — was in a damned-if-you-do situation when it came to that Iraq vote. The GOP would’ve used it against the candidate regardless of which way they actually voted.)

The authorization vote was only half of Kerry’s problem on this flip-flop issue, though. The other half came from voting against an $87 billion war appropriations bill. Again, Kerry had a perfectly reasonable explanation, if you take the trouble to search out the evidence. He voted against it because Bush wanted to put the money onto the already-massive deficit, in essence charging the war expenses to a credit card that would have to be paid off by future generations, and Kerry thought that was wrong. His solution was to immediately fund the bill by rolling back some of the tax cuts on Bush’s upper-class pals. But Kerry seemed incapable of getting that point across. He needed to be more plain-spoken, but he just kept talking until people thought he was trying to talk his way out of something.

I believe he also should have outright condemned the war instead of trying to simultaneously criticize Bush’s managing of it and justify his apparent vote for it. I know he was confronted with a delicate balancing act — he had to please both the Howard Dean anti-war crowd and the liberal warhawks (yes, they do exist), as well as the security-minded swing voters — but if he’d taken a definite stand he would’ve defused much of the criticism that he can’t make up his mind on anything. Instead, he made that boneheaded remark that he would’ve still voted for the authorization even knowing what we now know. That was a huge tactical error. It alienated the hard-core anti-war Democrats (who possibly didn’t turn out to vote because of this) and it gave the Bushies one more weapon to use against him. I understand why Kerry said it (or at least why I think he said it): he didn’t want to say that he did something wrong by voting the give the president a bargaining chip. But on that particular issue, for God’s sake, he should’ve flipped. He should’ve said, “I was wrong. We were all wrong. I’m willing to admit it, the president isn’t. Who would you rather have in charge?”

All of these issues I’ve discussed so far are matters of how Kerry reacted to various things. But reactions are only part of the equation when we’re looking for a president. I think what voters find far more appealing is how a candidate acts to begin with. To be more specific, Kerry spent all of his campaign either criticizing the president or responding to charges made against himself. Important things, yes, but while he grabbed the headlines with those matters, he utterly failed to get out the message about what he himself intended to do as president that would be any different. What were his ideas to fix the mess in Iraq? Or the economy? How would he have handled the hunt for Osama bin Laden? That information was out there if you were motivated to visit his website or lucky enough to hear a complete speech instead of the sound bytes on the nightly news. But how many average voters bother to seek out that stuff? I’ll talk more about this when I get to what I think the Democrats need to do for future elections, but for now, I’ll just say that short, simple messaging has been a real problem for my party for years. The public perception of Democrats is that they don’t act, they react, and no one knows for sure exactly what the Democrats stand for, aside from not being Republicans. That must change, and I wish this had been the election year when it did change. But, as they say on my planet, c’est la vie.

[Ed. note: in the next entry, I’ll discuss this whole “moral values” thing and my ideas for what the Democrats need to do over the next few years.]