Why We Lost

There’s been a real effort in the leftysphere, over the past couple of days, to figure out why we lost. The consensus, as far as I can tell, is this:

We underestimated the power of the red states, and specifically the power of “moral values” to eclipse more concrete concerns, such as the war in Iraq, the environment, the economy, health care, etc. If you look down the list of issues in this campaign, you’ll find that most of everything polls in the Democrat’s favor. But, in the end, it didn’t matter — or, rather, it didn’t matter enough.

We underestimated the weakness of nuance. Bush is a zero-virtue candidate, as far as I’m concerned, but he has the ability to take complex issues and boil them down to soundbite bromides that make him appear resolute and principled, when really he’s just dishonest and disingenuous. But, again — it worked. Kerry was all over the place on several issues. Part of that was standard politico-pandering, but part of it was that he understands that there is no simple answer to any of the problems we face. That doesn’t matter, either, though — in this day and age, nuance is a liability.

We underestimated Karl Rove. This is the big one, I think. A lot of people discounted his claim to 4 million evangelicals that didn’t vote last time around, and poo-pooed his efforts to draw them out. So the insertion of wedge issues into the national debate — abortion, stem cell research, and especially gay marriage — didn’t raise the alarm bells it should have. But it galvanized lots of people who care about this stuff much more than the issues that will actually affect their lives, and the lives of their children, in the years looming ahead of us.

It’s going to be a rough four years, no doubt about it. Bush was cockier than usual in the press conference he gave yesterday, smugly promising to expend his political capital to ram through the worst of his bad ideas. And he’ll get a lot of them passed. And he’ll get the judges he wants into the supreme court, and he’ll piss off the rest of the world, and he’ll sink us deeper into trouble with our allies and our enemies.

But I think the thing to focus on here is that this was a close election. Despite Bush’s claims to a resounding mandate, he only edged us out by a couple of points. A large chunk of the people who voted for him can’t be reached, of course, sunk as they are in their evangelical single-issue fervor, but a lot of them can.

So there’s a way out of this. Not a light at the end of the tunnel, granted, but at least a quality to the darkness that suggests the presence of light, somewhere. We just have to find it.