Learning from the Loss

By Tom Hayden, AlterNet. Posted November 8, 2004.

51 percent is no mandate.

Maybe the Republicans were confusing the outcome with a mandate from heaven (more on that later), but as soon as the polls closed their propaganda machinery began repeating the mantra of mandate, using the mass media as an echo chamber. By the next day, Grover Norquist was announcing that America is a "Republican majority country," and you could hear him squelching the urge to say "love it or leave it."

This mandate talk is nothing less than orchestrated state propaganda. America is as fundamentally divided today as it was last week, as divided as the ‘60s, as divided as it has been since the last civil war.

John Kerry, almost nobody's candidate one year ago, won 49 percent, or 55 million votes — the largest number of votes against an incumbent in history.

But Republicans are trying to consolidate their power over every branch of government in excess of their 51 percent popular mandate.

Kerry could have won, According to a compilation of exit polls, the Democrats squandered their usual gender gap, beating Bush by only 51-48, even among working women. The Democrats' cultural elitism won them the post-graduate vote 55-44, while handing Bush 52 percent of high school and college graduates. The eastern Democratic establishment's relative disinterest in Latinos let Bush win 44% of those votes. The accurate perception that John Kerry is given to "flip-flopping,” or "nuanced thinking" if you will, was so magnified by Republican advertising that only 40 percent of voters thought Kerry said what he believed (unlike the president's flat-out lies about weapons of mass destruction).

But the Democrats' unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort worked. Seventeen percent of the 18-29 year olds turned out, an increase of seven percent, with 54 percent supporting Kerry. Those undecideds who made up their minds on either election day or the last three days voted for Kerry by margins up to 55 percent. Among first-time voters, who were 11 percent of the turnout, Kerry topped Bush 53-46. Over 1,500 community-based organizations threw themselves into this election. Mark Ritchie of nationalvoice.org was quite right in feeling that "we are in the first stages of creating a [new] pro-democracy movement in the United States, one that draws on the best of all our political streams."

So what lessons can be sifted from this bittersweet experience?

1. The anti-war movement now must assert its opposition everywhere.

Despite the Democrats' hawkish rhetoric, the anti-war movement stayed the course against Bush. Among the 45 percent of voters who disapproved of going to war, 87 percent voted for Kerry.

The two-year rise of anti-war opposition has been under-reported but unprecedented. Beginning with marches of 100,000 or more in fall 2002, and millions in February 2003, the anti-war forces inevitably flowed into electoral politics through the Dean and Kucinich campaigns, just as many went "clean for Gene" McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in 1968. The new movement still produced 500,000 marchers at the Republican convention in New York while absorbing over 1,000 arrests, and remaining steadfast to the strategy of maximizing the anti-Bush vote on Nov. 2.

2. Now, however, the movement must reassemble, attack and expand.

A U.S. military offensive against Fallujah and Ramadi may begin at any moment. From an anti-war viewpoint, it was unforgivable that Kerry and other Democrats assented to this pending assault. Bombing and killing civilians is hardly the way to build democracy, and only intensifies the irreversible Iraqi demand for self-determination. Even worse, the U.S. strategy being prepared by Ambassador John Negroponte — whose previous assignments included the Phoenix assassination program in South Vietnam and the U.S. war against the Sandinistas — is aimed at either (a) rigging the Iraqi electoral outcome by unifying a coalition of U.S.-backed parties of former exiles, or (b) bypassing the elections altogether in the name of a "security" crisis of U.S. making.. Mass suffering will continue to increase in Iraq, especially among women and children.

Unfortunately, the American peace movement could not accelerate its pace rapidly enough, in large part because of lingering public anxiety over the 9/11 attacks. But the rapid grown of protest was still significant compared to the Vietnam era, when just 25,000 showed up for the first Washington march in early 1965. It took three years of war and conscription, 500,000 American troops, and 200 body bags per month before a majority of Americans judged the Vietnam war mistaken and immoral. In half that time, and with far fewer casualties, a near-majority of Americans has come to disapprove the decision to invade Iraq (45 percent-51 percent) and a larger number of Nov. 2 voters felt the war was going badly (52 percent). But those numbers were not enough to propel John Kerry to the presidency.

Tom Hayden teaches on social movements at Occidental College.

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