> In the exit poll, most Kerry voters didn't say that they were voting
> for Kerry to vote against Bush. When asked if "your vote for
> president was mostly for your candidate or against his opponent," only
> 25% answered "against his opponent." Kerry's share of the 25% of
> voters who said they voted against his opponent was 71%. That means
> the Anybody But Bush voters was roughly 18% of the popular vote, a
> minority of Kerry voters.
Nevertheless, what I want to point out is that the Kerry voters did vote against Bush. A very obvious point, but people who are now crying, "Woe is us! The Bushies' juggernaut is overwhelming the world!" are being a trifle defeatist, I think. There are plenty of Americans who strongly disagree with Shrub's agenda, and it looks likely that he will not get much of it passed in Congress, given that his power as a lame duck will inevitably decline, and it's not that impressive even now, as Doug noted. Presidents do have stronger powers in foreign policy than domestic, but he's running out of military punch to run the world, and his floundering in Iraq shows that he doesn't even know how to use what he has.
The problem, of course, is that the strongest organized political force against him at this point is the ever-lovin' Democratic Party, and it has plenty of well-known faults (well-known on the Left, at any rate). Could a stronger force be generated? It seems that that would require massive defections from the DP, and as I pointed out a while back, the short-term consequences, at least, of that would be such a fractured Left, as various third parties fought to determine who would be the new dominant party on the Left, that the GOP would have no effective opposition, and would constitute a one-party state, much like the LDP in Japan. Of course, there are plenty of potential (at least) rifts in the GOP; perhaps a general unsettling of the political scene would result.
But it seems to me that a much more reasonable approach to advancing the progressive cause at this point is to work outside direct political organizations: advance a general left world-view in the culture through all possible means, as the reactionaries have been doing for several decades now, so that when the time for a political realignment comes, a reasonable number of people are at least thinking in the right direction.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ "...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." -- Voltaire