Let's not let the fact that Mitt was a horrific candidate
mask what really happened on Election Day and is happening in America. I was
relieved and somewhat surprised that Americans found it within them to rise above their racial ambivalence
to re-elect a black man for President. Now having had the chance to see the
details about the electorate, particularly the demographic breakouts, there is
reason to be even happier. Moreover, the results give us some perspective as to
why for the last four years there has been such deep, sometimes nearly hysterical,
animosity towards the President.
The good news is that the electorate, at least during
Presidential races, has shown itself to be younger, more racially diverse, and
more socially liberal than I even imagined. I’m not sure this extends to matters
of the economy and fiscal issues. This election process has shown that
Americans in many ways are fiscally conservative. Obama and the Dems will take
a pasting the next time around if they do not get the debt under control, and
they ought to. The Republicans new found concerns regarding deficit spending
are a canard, but I still felt one of their most effective attack lines was the
$16 trillion debt.
Though Obama’s share of the white vote was down a little, his
support there did not vary far from what other Democrats had been pulling in
recent elections. That’s an encouraging sign and suggests a level of maturity
in the electorate that the recent campaign might suggest wouldn’t be there. Even
more satisfying is the fact that we now know that the electorate is made up of
increasing numbers of politically engaged African Americans, Latinos, Asians,
and young people. Republicans took a shellacking among young voters and women. As
Andy Borowitz said, “I guess rape wasn’t the sure fire campaign issue the
Republicans thought it would be.” It’ll be interesting to see if the coalition
can hold together after the transcendent Barack Obama leaves the stage. At the
moment there are reasons to be both hopeful and pessimistic about that.
Obama took 75% of the votes generated by an increasingly
vibrant and engaged Latino electorate. Based on current birth rates, Latinos
add 50,000 voting age individuals to the electorate every month. That’s 600,000
freshly minted voters per year. Thanks to self-deportation and other heinous
rhetoric, and a few well timed initiatives by the President, Latinos voted overwhelmingly Democratic. I heard
someone say, a Republican in fact, that it’s hard to rally someone to your side
when they think you hate them. There is much talk now among Republicans about
the need for a change in rhetoric. It makes you wonder if their policies will adjust
to the new reality, or whether softer language alone will be enough to change
votes?
America is becoming a truly interracial society at a
breathtaking rate. Republicans will either adapt to that new reality or perish.
I suspect they will adapt, but I have to laugh when I see Tea Party androids
having their post-election press conference blaming it all on the weakness of
their moderate candidate. In general I heard very few Republican voices that
really seemed to get what happened.
The President won a close election in a complex and difficult
environment with still near desperate economic circumstances meshing with
hyper-partisan and mean spirited political environment. Though there are encouraging
signs, this is no guarantee or harbinger of the future. Much has been made of
the Romney lies, and there were many, but Republicans will long remember the
Obama ad which accused Romney of killing that man’s wife. With systematic voter
suppression inspired by Republicans who sensed the demographics were against
them it was ugly. It’s ironic to me that the same political leaders that set out
to suppress votes in poor, and minority communities, now having lost can’t seem
to understand that what they tried to address with their suppression actually
came to pass. African American and Latino voters turned out in droves for the
president, sometimes waiting an obscene six, seven or eight hours to vote. #Stayinline
was all over twitter.
Obama’s opponent was a politically tone deaf, clumsy oaf who‘s
comments on the 47% could not be explained away. It’s funny now to think of all
those who mocked Nate Silver’s 538, prediction of 90.7 certainty, or a Florida
vote which would go 49.797 Obama and 49.775 Romney (Florida remains unresolved) who did not see the 47% calculation
with the same level of derision for the way it was: A number plucked from the air.
Silver shocked and shamed the punditry class with a spreadsheet. When you
create multi-level arithmetic formula you get results like 49.797. It wasn’t
romantic, but it was real, and it turned out to be more fact based than the rising
tide of emotion that the Republicans claimed. What a surprise. Romney pulled
47% from his ass, just like that little lizard Dick Morris’ who projected a Romney
landslide (325 electoral votes). The fuzzy and foolish math splattered all over
the right wing media machine was a perfect metaphor for a Republican Party that
denies climate science and wants to replace Evolution teaching in the schools with
Creationism. I believe what I believe, the facts will not interfere with that.
How fitting for a campaign that vowed they would not be restrained in any way by
fact checkers that in the end their own pollsters clearly didn’t check the
facts about the changing nature of the electorate. To a person the Republican establishment was
shocked. The look of utter shock on Sarah Palin’s face on Tuesday was priceless.
As the campaign went on I was really amazed that even though
Romney made it clear that he would be willing to abandon the conservatives he
had courted with severity, none of them balked. Until he lost. Both Hannity and
Limbaugh took the high road yesterday. Neither went after the candidate, for
which they harbored such doubts, with full fire. Both called him a good and
decent man, perhaps too decent for the likes of Obama, bla, bla, bla. But
across the country other conservatives are coming forward with harsher words.
Neither the grass roots organizers nor the high profile talking heads seem inclined
at the moment to reconsider the wisdom of their policy proposals.
Ironically, the conservative rank and file does seem to sense
something in the bigger picture though, something troubling and worrisome for
them and their world view. Though it cannot be discussed in proper company or
the media I’m convinced that it’s from this reality that so much of the
Anti-Obama rhetoric has been so overblown and at times hateful. White men are getting
the idea that they are losing whatever grip they ever had or thought they had
on power and they are not happy. Perhaps they do NOT hate Obama as a black man.
Even the most bilious and spiteful conservatives I have spoken to deny it. Perhaps
what they really despise is what the President represents.
Obama is the living breathing emblem of America headed to a
new day of cross racial coalitions, tolerance, and ambition, one where whites on
their own will no longer control the agenda unless they are engaged in coalitions
with others. That’s creating a lot of anger, from which Limbaugh, Hannity, and
the others feed, pulling in big ratings and whopping big salaries far beyond
the comprehension of most of their listeners. There is some irony in working
class whites complaining at the altar of these rich commentators to assuage their
anxieties about what they perceive to be their increasing lack of power in the
society. Perhaps this is power they never really had, but don’t tell them that.
Limbaugh and Hannity will sell far more soap, and get far more people to invest
at Goldline International if they can somehow convince their fearful audiences
that the return of their power is right around the corner, if only…
White Southerners, about half of whom consider themselves
evangelicals, are feeding at the government teat at astounding levels. Simultaneously
they are pissed off that Government is giving all their tax money to the
socially irresponsible, people, I guess, who might look a lot like them.
Mississippi, a state where more than one in four people relies on the
government health program for the poor, Medicaid, gave about 55% of their vote
to Romney. The Ryan budget plan called for a 30% reduction in Medicaid. In
Alabama, a state where about one in four of its citizens is reliant on Supplemental
Nutritional Assistance (Food Stamps) to sustain themselves and their families,
61% voted for Romney. The Ryan plan called for a 17% cut in Supplemental Food
Aid. This would require the elimination of close to 300,000 Alabamans from the
plan.
There is ample evidence that the conservative voter is
angrier than they are informed. Fox News is at the forefront of that, but by
far not the only cause. Mississippi, Alabaman and Louisiana lead the nation when
counting the number of its citizens with a High School education or less. A
cursory review of levels of government assistance across the deeply
conservative south suggests that any ire regarding the appropriation of
government funds could easily be pointed inward rather at Washington. The anger
though often directed at what they perceive as wasteful government spending,
could also be attributed to chronic crushing poverty throughout the region which
weighs on both whites and blacks, though disproportionately on blacks, with
bitter force.
Across the South, the heart of the Republican Party’s base,
unprecedented demographic shifts are taking place. These changes leave Southern
white males, already well behind their northern counterparts in economic terms,
holding on to a shrinking majority of political power in their home states.
Latinos, which passed the 10% threshold in the nationwide vote for the first
time, now make up 8% of the population in Georgia. Though they are only 4% of
the total, the Hispanic population in Alabama has risen 150% in the last
decade. African Americans make up an additional 27% of Alabama’s population.
Despite the growth of the Latino population there, or maybe because of it, the Alabama
Legislature still passed extremely hostile anti-immigrant legislation in 2011.
This is now being met with loud complaints from the business and agricultural
communities for the negative effect it is having on business across the state
and the labor shortages it has created in certain areas of the economy. A little further west, there is talk that a
generation from now Texas could be a blue state, which will shock the hell out
of the power structure there.
Considering the tortured history of race relations, across
the region, and the economic scarcity that still pervades, it is not hard to
see or understand a rising tide of anger. While much is made of the extreme
allegiance African Americans show towards the Democratic Party which has not
always reciprocated with respect, the same should be said for Southern Whites
and the Republican Party. There is nothing in recent history, let’s call that 30
years, which indicates the Republican Party has any proposals to truly lift the
economic circumstances in the States of the old Confederacy, the rock solid though
hemorrhaging base of the Party. Ironically the last politician who made any overt
effort in that direction was Bobby Kennedy, a Democrat, in 1968. Yet it may
take another decade or two, if not longer, until we see that race based
allegiance to the Republican Party is mitigated.
I have often felt that there was a racial element to the
extreme hostility we have seen in some quarters directed at the President. What
the election’s results did though was expose the much larger issue: White male
political power is shrinking at a rate so fast that in some quarters it cannot
even be acknowledged. So the candidate was weak. Self-deportation, and a whole
stage of candidates for the nomination jockeying to see who could appear most
hostile to immigrants had nothing to do with the loss. Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC,
had the best response to this which he presented even before the defeat: “We’re
not losing 95% of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters
under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.”
Cross racial coalitions, which would dramatically increase
the political power of the South, are not on anyone’s radar, except of course
that of David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Jim Messina, the President’s political
team who exploited the lack of understanding to the new demographic reality
held by the other side to great effect. While liberals like me fretted over the
polls, going to Silver’s blog for reassurance with some regularity, Obama’s
political team were executing a plan built on spreadsheets, math, practicality,
and a clear understanding of the cross-racial, coalition they needed to build.
They were certain all along they would win and they did. In one state The Romney
team crowed about knocking on 75,000 doors. In that same state The Obama team
knocked on 350,000. Jim Messina said that over the weekend before the election they
knocked on five million doors. Considering that that only nine states were
truly fought over, and the vote totals will be around 110 million people, that’s
an impressive and focused effort. Among other challenges to the Republican
Party add this: The Democrats outworked them.
In the end though this election is about more than spreadsheets
and graphs or how many women, gays, or people of what color voted for which
candidate. Elections matter, and for almost everyone on either side it seemed
this one mattered more than most. All the demographic analysis, the targeted door
to door canvasing and phone calls we heard about, these were just the tools of
victory. In the end this election was about whether or not any attempts would
be made to slow the onslaught of global warming or whether drill, baby, drill will
become the mantra of our own destruction. It’s about whether Americans have any
social contract with each other, or whether it’s literally every man for
himself. It’s about how Americans will define fair. Will there will be regulation
at all of the powerful financial interests that nearly brought America to its
knees through their greed and corruption only to climb out quickly with the help
of billions in TARP money. EDven then they still left the poor Joe’s and Jane’s
of the US with underwater mortgages, and
quick trigger foreclosure procedures. Many of those by the way proved to be
illegal and have been prosecuted, something we can be sure would not have happened
under Romney.
We can be glad that the Koch brothers, Shelly Adelson, and
about a 1,000 other Americans of endless wealth blew hundreds of millions,
actually nearly a billion, on an election from which they achieved very little except
an intransigent, Tea Party dominated, House of Representatives. Though heartened
by the voting public’s rejection of all that advertising, we should remain
concerned about the deep corruption of money that has been unleashed. Excepting
Bernie Sanders, there are no signs that anything will be done to drain the pond
of that poison. We can take a deep breath of gratitude that the rights of women
will not be reset to something more closely approximating Mad Men than the
enlightened 21st century we thought we were in. Even so we sit stunned
and shocked with what we have heard about women from well-educated but ideologically
blind men over these past months. On a more positive note the fight for gay
rights marches on, with clear indications this election cycle that the public
in many cases favors a more expansive view of what those rights are.
“I have always
believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all
the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we
have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.
America, I believe we
can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new
opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the
promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't
matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you
love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or
Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or
straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.
I believe we can seize
this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests.
We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our
individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and
blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.
And together with your
help and God's grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world
just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.
Thank you, America.
God bless you. God bless these United States.” Barack Obama, Nov-06, 2012
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