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Election aftermath: Go right? Go left? Debate starts for Dems

Date Posted: November 12 2004

Or is love all we need?

Union workers and their families were among the more than 100 million Americans who went to the polls on Nov. 2 to elect the next president of the United States.

It was the most important election in our lifetime, they were told. It was not difficult to see that the broad differences between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry. And the close race in 2000 provided impetus for both sides to redouble their efforts to get out the vote.

Democrats, wholly supported by organized labor, had every reason to believe that the higher voter turnout would a plus for Kerry and candidates for the House and Senate. They were right. But Republicans did just a little better in energizing voters in a few counties in Ohio to help win the presidency for Bush, and a lot better in other states, to help the GOP fortify its hold on the House and Senate.

In a post-election press conference Nov. 3, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney lauded labor's efforts at the polls, thanking union members for campaigning and turning out in 
record numbers.

"Union households accounted for one of every four voters - 27 million voters," Sweeney said. "Union members voted two to one for Kerry, and the margin was a little bigger in battleground states. Our program was the biggest ever... I've never seen our members so energized."

But it wasn't enough.

Nearly complete unofficial returns showed Bush with 58.53 million votes (51 percent) nationwide, to Kerry's 54.99 million votes (48 percent). Ralph Nader and others got 1 percent.

Under the headline, "Beaten Again, Democrats ponder shift in philosophy," a Nov. 3 Wall Street Journal article asked: "Twice in four years, the Democrats seemed inches from the front door of the White House, only to be turned away. Now what?"

Indeed, it's difficult to imagine that organized labor and others in the Democratic Party could have worked harder to get out the vote. A record amount of money was raised. Voter turnout was at an all-time high. So were energy levels - much of it from volunteers who never dreamed they would take part in a political campaign.

Democrats wouldn't have even been in the ballpark during this campaign without the money and work provided by organized labor. Now comes the million-dollar question: after two successive hard-fought presidential campaigns which Democrats lost, is a change of political direction in order?

Timothy Noah, a writer for the Slate, summed up the quandary nicely:

"In the coming days, a heartfelt dialogue will begin in which Democrats ask themselves, in a refreshing spirit of constructive self-criticism, why they can't connect with the American middle class. I have been listening to, and occasionally contributing to, discussions on this topic for more than two decades, and they began well before I tuned in. By now, the very subject makes me want to scream. Three critiques tend to dominate this discussion:

  1. Democrats need to move right.
  2. Democrats need to move left.
  3. Democrats should sit tight and await the inevitable demographic shift that will put them on top again."

Noah concludes: "They're all wrong." But he acknowledges that he has no idea, how, or if, Dems should change.

The AFL-CIO's Sweeney seemed more inclined to stay the course: "We're going to take that energy, that momentum, that technology, that field operation and start right now building a movement that will keep turning this country around," he declared.

One of the frequent critics of the AFL-CIO, writer Harry Kelber, weighed in: " Having spent tens of millions of dollars on the campaign, the AFL-CIO should make a public assessment of what went wrong. Why did Kerry lose when Bush was hit with a lot of bad news from Iraq and a stock market slump in the two weeks before the election?

"Specifically, why did we lose Ohio, which had suffered the worst loss of manufacturing jobs in the nation and where the AFL-CIO had as many as 728 full-time staff people on the ground for weeks? We need to re-examine our relations with the Democratic Party. And we should know, as precisely as we can, what mistakes were made, so we don't repeat them in the next presidential election."

Democrats were waylaid this election cycle by issues that zoomed to the top of voter concerns: terrorism and morality. Unions have endorsed Democratic candidates based on their traditional support of economic, safety and pro-worker issues - but in hindsight, those things sort of fell off the radar screen this election cycle.

One issue that's sure to get more attention is for Democrats to do a better job of explaining where they stand on traditional family values. It's a subject that's difficult to define - but Republicans embraced the general concept, and used it to energize their base.

Bruce Reed, head of the moderate Democratic Leadership Conference, told the Journal: "There are part of the country where our message isn't getting through because concerns of moral issues and security are keeping just enough people from voting their economic interests."

It was only 12 years ago that Bill Clinton stuck to the basic premise that the 1992 election "was about the economy, stupid" and went on to defeat incumbent George Bush the Elder.

Now, after 9-11 and the war on terror, the nation's attention has apparently shifted away somewhat from the economy. But where it's going to be four years from now is anyone's guess.

Florida Sen. Bob Graham told the New York Times that the Democratic Party has to address some basic positions as well. "We ought to debate what our strategy should be in the war on terrorism," he said. "We also ought to have a debate, on how we can move the debate on values beyond God, guns and gays - to tolerance, concern for others, love."