After a few hours sleep

It's sort of hard to believe the Election is actually over, both because of the realization that Bush has won but also because...what are we going to pay attention to for the next three years? It hurts because I feel like Karl Rove is laughing at me. And it hurts because I believed the exit polls that said we were winning. The statistical reason Kerry lost is that he didn't maximize his advantages in the friendly parts of Ohio. The people whose top issues were terrorism and conservative Christian (Note the use of this term as we will not be using "moral" of any of its synonyms in relation to how the South votes) values voted for Bush in a far greater ratio than people whose top issues were Iraq and the economy voted for Kerry.

I have nothing bad to say about Kerry. I think the fact he didn't excite some on the left (I'm looking at you New Republic, Slate and Joel Haas) had more to do with the divisions within the left that were supposedly put aside in this election. We on the left are too adept at internecine warfare to truly believe "Anybody but Bush." And, frankly, we're not very convincing when many of us are saying that we're picking the most "electable" candidate. I liked Kerry a lot and was excited to vote for him Tuesday morning. I think he would have made a great president. If he remains in the Senate maybe he should be the new minority leader. After all, it's his party until the Democrats pick a new nominee in 2008. Plus, based on the debates, I think he intimidates Bush.

The question is, now what? Moping around, doing everything halfheartedly for the next couple of days is pretty much a given. But then it's about figuring out how to fight for the next four years. GOP fuckers can talk of mandate because their party has made steady gains since 1994, controls the entire federal government, got states like Oregon to pass anti-gay marriage ballot measures, and turned the South redder than Eastern Europe circa 1962.

So we have to find a way to resist Bush's extreme right-wing impulses. And that's the crazy thing about this administration. They've governed to the fringes yet were able to, with some success, define the Democrats as outside mainstream. Some will blame the mainstream media for this, but fuck that. The Democratic party failed because for decades it has focused on tactics rather than strategy. The far right has had the same strategy since 1964: organize and remain intractable. Democrats, meanwhile, seem to slide along the spectrum depending on the issue. People like me might say this is practical or even responsive. But if you're not predisposed to vote Democratic it can also look weak and unprincipled.

Much of the online chatter in the last few hours has been about the "values" question. Kos of the famous Daily Kos argues that we need to take back language. Meanwhile this piece on Slate offers a more secular, if similar idea, that we need to get back to start digging in for the class war argument, pushing the proposition that the GOP's positions overwhelmingly favor the rich.

But not only do we need to dig on this point, we need to get better at talking about it. We need to fight things like estate tax cuts and dividend tax cuts. We need to draw attention to the fact that Bush's vision for the economy is one where "earned" income, the stuff you work, is taxed but "made" income, the stuff that comes from dead relatives and stocks, is not.

Single-issue religion voters are never going to move. But I think the middle-class voter who is seeing his paycheck become less and less powerful is persuadable. Kerry made this point in the final months of the campaign, but the GOP and the Swift Boat Liars for Mendacity (thanks Jeff'y) defined him in August, the first time anyone really paid attention. When that happened, he didn't have a shorthand message to fall back on. Therefore Kerry came across as equivocal, which is completely insane. The Dems need to spend the next three years pounding the economic issues, showing how Bush's economic decisions are really a world view favoring the wealthy over the working class. We need slogans, we need shorthand and we need to not back down.