Post Election
What happens after an election. The party that loses becomes the focus of all the punditry and criticism and an endless pile of people saying I told you so. When that happens a party has a couple of options and in 2004 the democrats took the loss as an opportunity.
When Kerry lost to Bush I was astounded. Not because Kerry ran a good campaign, far from it. What surprised me was how fractured the Democratic party was afterwards. I can remember saying to people, “this may be the end of the Democrats as we know them.” At the time the part of the party that wanted out of the war seemed like a fringe of wackos, people who just didn’t understand how complicated the mess in Iraq really was. Other parts of the party had spent the last while defending a purple heart winner’s war record in the face of scurrilous lies and were hungry for revenge. While others were having a hard time bringing focus on the looming housing crisis and subsequent meltdown that would come and many predicted. In the face of all this Howard Dean was named the head of the party, a seemingly reckless individual who could do more harm than good. In short we seemed doomed.
In this climate it would be easy to spend the next two years figuring out how things went wrong and who to blame. Instead the democrats set about climbing straight up the political learning curve. They examined not how they lost, but how the republicans won. They learned about Micro targeting voters, and used the new data driven approach to figure out what issues really mattered. They learned that the “values” issues were not the real issues of the future and not worth using the divide people. They learned new issues and applied a progressive point of view to them and in the process found out that the country is more united than it had seemed.
The Bush years had driven the country together and during that time the Democratic Party had emerged from being almost broken to a solid position on a wide and popular platform. They had taken the opportunity of defeat in 2004 and used it to grow and improve.
If I may address my friends across the aisle. Your party is almost broken, your issues are out of date, your base is aging and passing on. Do not look at this as a defeat but an opportunity to grow. Due in large part to your own successes many of your issues that you used to divide and conquer (welfare for example) are non-issues. You must seize the next set of issues that will be affecting our country -climate change, immigration- and apply a set of solutions to them. If you make the mistake that we did after 2000 and look backwards, you will most certainly end up like we did four years later in 2004. Like it or not we as a nation are moving forward and you will have to as well.
When Kerry lost to Bush I was astounded. Not because Kerry ran a good campaign, far from it. What surprised me was how fractured the Democratic party was afterwards. I can remember saying to people, “this may be the end of the Democrats as we know them.” At the time the part of the party that wanted out of the war seemed like a fringe of wackos, people who just didn’t understand how complicated the mess in Iraq really was. Other parts of the party had spent the last while defending a purple heart winner’s war record in the face of scurrilous lies and were hungry for revenge. While others were having a hard time bringing focus on the looming housing crisis and subsequent meltdown that would come and many predicted. In the face of all this Howard Dean was named the head of the party, a seemingly reckless individual who could do more harm than good. In short we seemed doomed.
In this climate it would be easy to spend the next two years figuring out how things went wrong and who to blame. Instead the democrats set about climbing straight up the political learning curve. They examined not how they lost, but how the republicans won. They learned about Micro targeting voters, and used the new data driven approach to figure out what issues really mattered. They learned that the “values” issues were not the real issues of the future and not worth using the divide people. They learned new issues and applied a progressive point of view to them and in the process found out that the country is more united than it had seemed.
The Bush years had driven the country together and during that time the Democratic Party had emerged from being almost broken to a solid position on a wide and popular platform. They had taken the opportunity of defeat in 2004 and used it to grow and improve.
If I may address my friends across the aisle. Your party is almost broken, your issues are out of date, your base is aging and passing on. Do not look at this as a defeat but an opportunity to grow. Due in large part to your own successes many of your issues that you used to divide and conquer (welfare for example) are non-issues. You must seize the next set of issues that will be affecting our country -climate change, immigration- and apply a set of solutions to them. If you make the mistake that we did after 2000 and look backwards, you will most certainly end up like we did four years later in 2004. Like it or not we as a nation are moving forward and you will have to as well.