[Marxism] Cockburn on the elections

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
November 6 / 7, 2004
Don't Say We Didn't Warn You
Lessons They Won't Learn from November 2: a Word from Nader; a Last Look 
at Kerry and Michael Moore

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

(clip)

November 2, 2004, marks a terrible defeat for the liberal elites, 
whether represented by Paul Krugman in the New York Times, by Michael 
Moore in his baseball cap, by the New York Review, by that vast complex 
of delusion and self-aggrandizement known as the Democratic Party. Its 
establishment is truly in crisis now, from the labor leaders who 
squandered millions in vehement efforts to keep Ralph Nader off the 
ballot to the public interest groups have gave Kerry the green light to 
waffle on all the crucial issues, to the "strategists" who got their cut 
on the campaign ads and got it all wrong. I hadn't the heart to warn the 
weeping young thing that they'll be back in 2008, as wrong as ever and 
that mass movements have to build up momentum over years, not in the 
span of one election campaign and zeppelins of electronic hype.

A couple of days after the election I called Ralph Nader to see how he 
was doing. He was feisty.

"You will know within a week whether there'll be a turn around in the 
Democratic Party. There'd have to be a complete turnover of personnel; a 
clean out of the stables."

We talked about the No Fault mood in the Democrats' high command, summed 
up in the imperishable remark of Terry McAuliffe, DNC chairman, on 
November 4, the aftermath of Waterloo, "This party is stronger than it's 
ever been". "When they campaign and leave out most of the states," Nader 
remarked, "they're destroying the farm team. If they abandon the red 
states they'll lose everything in those states, right down to city 
councils. They're destroying their whole congressional base. All that 
Republicans have to do is push them into the ocean. The Democrats are in 
a death dive. They'll never say that they didn't stand up for any 
progressive agenda for working families in America. Our only hope is 
that the Republicans fissure."

Nader reckons that the Democrats spent up to $20 million total to keep 
him off state ballots across the country, which means that the 400,000 
votes Nader ended up getting cost them $200 each. If they put that money 
into the senate races in Kentucky, Oklahoma and Alaska or Florida they'd 
have recaptured the US Senate.

Reeling Kerrycrats like The Nation's Katha Pollitt and Michael Moore 
have taken refuge in the odd posture that, so far from unwisely 
investing their political capital in a snooty North-Eastern 
fence-straddler who blew the all opportunities offered by an unpopular 
war and a grim economy, Kerry was a cutting edge liberal who fought a 
great campaign. Moore even cited as the last and most of his "Seventeen 
Reasons" not to be down-hearted on November 3, the following: "Finally 
and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate 
dubbed the #1 Liberal in the Senate."

I doubt anyone, except maybe Moore, punched the screen for Kerry 
thinking "I'm voting for the guy because he's been dubbed the #1 liberal 
in the Senate". Most of the people voting for Kerry did so because he 
wasn't Bush, and the Diebold machines quite rightly rejected this as 
"wasted vote" and tossed them into the Bush column. It's a fantasy to 
write as Moore does that "If the media are looking for a trend it should 
be this ­ that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, 
willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal."

This is complete nonsense, though not just the Pied Piper Moore, leading 
his troupes from one disaster to the next, but the Democratic Leadership 
Council will be waving this "liberalism" of Kerry as the rationale for 
moving the Democratic Party even further to the right.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/

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