Brad Mayer wrote:
>..by now that the ABB Left were the biggest losers of the election.
>That should be an established fact beyoud all doubt by now:
-I have a doubt, but maybe I don't count. Who do you think could have -defeated Bush? Maybe Jesus Christ himself, but short of that, who? -Dennis Kucinich? Ralph Nader? Wake up, stop dreaming.
Conservative Democrats would argue that Joe Lieberman (good on values) or an even more hawkish Democrat could have done the job. Some are already promoting Brad Carson, the conservative Democrat who almost won the Oklahoma Senate seat, as the successor to Terry McAuliffe as head of the DNC.
Those on the left who belittle what was accomplished by the labor and civil rights ABB folks play into the hands of conservative interests in the Dems. In fact, progressive voters can start from a base of 56 million votes cast in support of a candidate who supported increasing the minimum wage, increasing taxes on the wealthy, protecting union rights to organize, ending discrimination against gays in the workplace, and massively expanding health care coverage.
The "ABB Left" did a good job this election. The rightwing just did a bit better. This was Charlie Cook's analysis and it seems a solid, non-hysterical analysis:
"The true measure of the quality of the effort by the Bush campaign, the Republican National Committee and the business community, is in the turnout figures. In key state after key state, the John Kerry campaign, the Democratic National Committee, organized labor and most of all, America Coming Together -- the 527 committee charged with the get-out-the-vote operation on the Democratic side -- not only hit but exceeded their target number of voters they thought were needed to win. But the Bush/Republican/business/social conservative coalition got even more.
In Ohio, for example, Kerry got 25,000 more votes than the goal ACT had set, but Bush got 130,000 more. This was also true in Florida. No one stands in more awe of the Bush campaign than the folks on the Democratic side. They put up a hell of a fight and yet were still bested by the Bush/Republican/business/social conservative effort."
But he also adds not to read too much into the election:
"While this was a good and clean win for President Bush and Republicans, it was hardly the transformational election that some are making it out to be. If, as the Almanac of American Politics' Michael Barone wrote after 2000, the country was a 49-49 nation two years ago, this election made it a 51-48 nation."
I'm unhappy we lost the election, but the ABB Left has moved the ball forward on turnout and mobilization of our voters in a serious way. Those pissing on us from the sidelines have trouble getting a few thousand people to a rally without our numbers, as the Million Worker March showed. A lot of antiwar leftists want to say that the hundreds of thousands of people who marched against the war represent "the real opposition" to Bush and his corporate allies, but the hard reality is that most of those numbers were ABB lefties.
We needed a few hundred thousand more votes in Ohio to win the election. Arguing for walking away from strategies that got us that close is hardly convincing, especially since the alternatives presented are so far-fetched and amorphous.
Nathan Newman