the new sad america

if you find someone (ie bush) that unappealing, then don't vote for him. congratulations on selling out everything that you actually believe in because his playground taunts were more effective than those of his opponent. have fun over the next four years, kiddo.

If Kerry had just said that he believes little old ladies should be sodomized, there would be no need for this thread. Darn.

It reads like one gigantic troll, though.

OTM, I think.

OTM

Exactly. People like this make me sick.

Broken record out.

"new media" should be "newsmedia". I'm not complaining about the state of the Interweb.

OTM. "I didn't want to vote for Bush, but you liberals made me do it." It's like a crazy person in front of a crowd with a gun to their head - "Don't make me shoot!" I don't buy it.

And since the South prides itself on "civility" and all that (which is a myth, believe me), the lady expresses herself well on why folks perceived that Moore and the "liberals" were "going too far." But shit, Bush is so radical that to criticize his policies means taking some pretty hard-core positions. And you know, I can't think of a single responsible thinking person who doesn't recognize that Bush's policies are brutal and that he wants to get rid of government itself and replace it with corporate shit. It's blatantly obvious. When you let guys like Bush define the debate you've lost it right there. And I have no patience with this Jesus shit either--OK, you believe in the Son of God or whatever, fine. What that has to do with anything else I don't see and will never see. But that's your middle-class southern "common sense" and all that, and you just can't reason with those people.

I feel like her attitudes toward sept 11th are pretty widely held, and it was pretty fucking difficult for kerry to persuade people that we DONT need to go invade the middle east and kill a bunch of brown people because that was most people's gut reaction. I think Kerry's position would have been very effective at getting at the roots of the 'war on terror' since this conflict definately isnt about actors on the state level.. but he couldnt communicate this, and in the sound bite political climate we live in, its almost impossible.

Her comments about 'Im broke now, but Ill be rich one day' also disturbs me. Alot of people let Bushco get away with their favoritism of rich folks mostly because 'hey you cant tax the rich! Im going to be rich one day and I want to keep all of my money!' Someone at the American Prospect mentioned something along the lines of Bush's greatest success in the recent election and the last 4 years was to convince blue collar workers that giving a tax break to millionaires was in their best interest.

jeez, if you hate america so much, why don't you just leave?

jeez, if you hate america so much, why don't you just leave?

(that was a joke, btw. she did. ha ha. don't attack me.)

Which is a dumb thing for a minority to do.

She lives in a solidly red Southern state. Her vote is meaningless.

Unfortunately, we need to find one hell of a candidate or something has to go horribly, horribly wrong in order to win back the south.

But judging by prevailing trends, if something completely fucked up does happen it would only result in drawing people closer to the military/fascist/'values' complex that the republican party has become.

On the other hand, what the hell can you do about it? There are people that feel more comfortable with "great guy = great president" instinct rather than having to go back and analyze simple cause and effect. And they seem to be in larger abundance than we thought. They're not necessarily dumb.. they just put something else as a higher priority above the cause-and-effect thing. (What that "something else" is is up to your interpretation.)

What do you do? How do you change these people's minds?

(Bush may do a better job of doing that this term than any Democrat, for all we know... )

(even though I think we, as in the Western countries, have far worse problems ahead of us to warrant this whole Dem vs. Repub thing as just total noise... nothing that Kerry would have fixed nor could fix even if he wanted to fix it. I'm talking about future issues with the ever inflating price of fuel to the current currency that might -- though I stress "might" -- start affecting the world within the next couple of decades... bye bye Wal-Marts and all other mega-corps that depend on cheap fuel to hire cheap labor! And let the logical chain reaction follow re: suburbia as we know it today.)

OTM — absolutely vile.

And I do think Kerry was VERY VERY dismal in expressing the interests of the Democratic party. The Dems need to stop nominating centrist twats (who might pull more independent voters but simultaneously push the country further and further right) and start nominating people who will, in the long term, protect and keep people interested in liberalism.

For example, I am ENDLESSLY TICKED OFF by Kerry's "Well I believe in the sanctity of marriage, but..." reactions to gay marriage questions--the issue here is CIVIL LIBERTIES and yet Kerry consistently drew MORE AND MORE ATTENTION back towards the SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE as a core issue of the argument. The Dems apparently thought they could pull the socially-conservative-leaning independent vote through such compromises of values, which would hopefully earn more votes. It might have. It didn't matter, because KERRY STILL LOST. Things like this will hurt the Democratic party in the long run.

Perhaps they could have a peaceful civil war, where the blue states form a wholesome alliance and the red states shove their heads even further up their own arses.

Now that Bush is back in there might not even be people, let alone elections.

You ugly

Tricky. You can't go for the most obvious stuff, like their wealth and determination to keep getting richer, because they have already co-opted a down-to-earth image. It's not like W has a yacht. And you can stereotype then as liars, because going around beating *that* particular truth like a drum stinks of a schoolyard rhyme. You got any ideas?

And C.) her criticisms of the Democratic Party are hardly manufactured whole cloth. For people who have grown up with the Reagan and post-Reagan mantras about government and liberals, I think it can be kind of hard to tell what exactly the Democrats do stand for. That's a legitimate criticism of the Democratic Party. That doesn't excuse a vote for Bush, but it would be nice if the Dems got off the defensive and started piecing together a coherent vision of the world. They did this a little during the last few months of the campaign, but you have to do it more than once every 4 years for it to resonate. Now it seems like they're going to just go back into suspended animation. WTF? There's no reason for John Kerry to be any less outspoken in the Senate about this administration than he was on the campaign trail. Unless, you know, he didn't really mean any of that stuff he said...

i mean that's if the democrats wanna. who knows. yeah clinton didn't bring on the apocalypse, but he was no enemy of corporations and war and such neither. pretty much anyone cut out for the job sold their soul years ago. (but at least some of em could broker the deal themselves)

wotta fuckin' moron

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Only at TNR Online | Post date 11.17.04 E-mail this article

or those who follow politics, there are few things more mysterious, more inscrutable, more maddening than the mind of the undecided voter. In this year's election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between the candidates were so obvious, how could any halfway intelligent human remain undecided for long? "These people," Jonah Goldberg once wrote of undecided voters, on a rare occasion when he probably spoke for the entire political class, "can't make up their minds, in all likelihood, because either they don't care or they don't know anything."

And that was more or less how I felt before I decided to spend the last seven weeks of the campaign talking to swing voters in Wisconsin. In September, I signed up to work for the League of Conservation Voters' Environmental Victory Project--a canvassing operation that recruited volunteers in five states to knock on doors in "swing wards" with high concentrations of undecided or persuadable voters. During my time in suburban Dane County, which surrounds Madison, I knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin residents. Our mission was simple: to identify undecided voters and convince them to vote for John Kerry.

My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn't do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them--just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck.

Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information, relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics.

The mere fact that you're reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I'll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation--and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy during an election year since 1972.

But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn't mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism--an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument--accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington--that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.

In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters--as well as some Kerry supporters--towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the "mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats." I didn't quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options? Assure him that a Kerry White House wouldn't waste tax dollars on literacy classes for rodents?)

That may have been the most explicit articulation I heard of this mindset--but it wasn't an isolated incident. A few days later, someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he "knew how to rule these people." While Bush's rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its candidate's frequent--and wince- inducing--America-first rhetoric about opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States.

The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president's undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush's Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn't matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what's Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naïve. C'mon, they'd say, you don't really think that's going to work, do you?

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry's promise to bring in allies was a lame idea--after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation--but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry's ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush's failures as badly as Bush was.

As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed--thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry's case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.

Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured--a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example--but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The "issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It's what makes up the subheadings on a candidate's website, it's what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it's what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it's what we always complain we don't see enough coverage of.

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps--though I'll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics--maybe, I thought, "issue" is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they're being quizzed on a topic they haven't studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?"

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman's car after having worked a week straight. He didn't think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. "There's too many lawsuits these days," he told me. I was set to have to rebut a "tort reform" argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn't think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. "The last job was unionized," he said. "They would have covered my expenses." I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers' rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn't seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided.

In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don't even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues--a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary--of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer living in Chicago.

x-post:

Yeah, you couldn't wait to read 900 pages for a few more hours? It's not like a concert, you know. Prioritize, plz. Prioritize a nap during that time. Do ya some good.

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea–after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation–but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.

All I can say is, OTM.