The Long Morning After

I waded uninvited into the gloom of a small office work crew at about the time of John Kerry’s concession speech. The atmosphere oozed with subdued misery, evidently shared equally by the four or five employees.

It’s awkward intruding on a scene of grief, especially when you have to add a few drabs of your own. I would have felt the same way walking into an opera a few moments after the soprano expired from consumption. I came on a minor business errand I’d been postponing for hours. I didn’t feel any better than the employees or, when you think about it, than the soprano.

The customer’s arrival may have interrupted their conversation. I couldn’t tell. I wanted to ask if this was a private wake or could anybody get in. Somebody spotted my Kerry button and seemed relieved to drop the mask of nonpartisanship with a safe customer on the premises.

“I’m just so damned devastated by the election,” he said. “I thought we were going to win it.”

I did, too, but I don’t know about devastated. Devastated sounds like something wholly and tragically irreversible, and politics is never that. But I had joined the deepening trauma around me until I remembered Adlai’s Stevenson’s story after his loss to Dwight Eisenhower in their second election. Stevenson was asked how it felt being blown out a second time by the general. Adlai was a worldly guy, passionate about social justice but a thinker and a realist. He told of a farmer sitting in the debris of his house and outbuildings, all of them torn to bits by a tornado. A neighbor walked a mile to commiserate with him and found the farmer giggling unstoppably.

“What are you laughing at, you crazy fool,” the neighbor asked. “Your place is a wreck.”

“I’m laughing,” he said, “at the completeness of it.”

The Democrats weren’t ripped to bits by the George Bush Republicans, so I’m not laughing through the gloom. They were left in shock because in the final days, feeling the adrenaline of a solidarity they had not experienced for years, they translated the dead-heat prophecies of the polls into a surging victory for their candidate.

There was nothing wrong with the Democratic candidate. This is a man of honor and judgment and proven guts who could have led the county out of its new isolation and imperialism. He was pilloried early in the campaign and some of the crud stuck. It wasn’t only the Swift Boat Liars’ slander against him that was offensive. It was the robotic arrogance with which they pressed their story. They came back into Minnesota in the last week of the campaign and in effect were telling Minnesotans: “We know this is garbage, but we’re going to run these ads because we want to win and we think you’re dumb enough to buy into it.”

Some of the country was. Minnesota wasn’t.

The late count in Ohio and the odd arithmetic of the electoral vote made it look a little closer than it was. But it was no sweep and no mandate. The country is still and angrily divided, with reason. It was fashionable among Democratic bean counters, in the final hours of the campaign, to picture the Bush adherents and the Bush team itself as people in denial.

At the time, it was the Democrats who were probably in denial. We called it the most important election in our lifetimes. In retrospect that has the sound of apocalypse now, and the temptation today may be to sweep it into the corner. If that was the election of a lifetime, what do we call 2006 and 2008 and beyond?

The language, in fact, may not have been far-fetched. We will know in the next four years and beyond. It will be then when we learn the price of the Bush government’s mismanagement of the war it created, its paranoid secrecies, the horrific deficits it has run up for the sake of corporate and private enrichment, the gradual erosion of quality education in the public schools and of the social contract between government and its citizens. This does not take into account the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians and more than a thousand American service men and women in a bizarre and needless war.

The election results didn’t repeal those indictments against a reckless government. What they did was to affirm the reality of politics in America today. The Republicans have successfully lined up with aggressive, Bible-thumping armies of believers, with armies of hunters and sportsmen, with mainstream farmers and blue-color workers who are appalled by the idea of writing gay and lesbian marriage into law.

To millions of Americans, being part of these multitudes is to wear the look of true blue Americans and to hold beliefs and animosities that have the feel of true American values. And some of them, in fact, are traditional American values.

And then all of those true blue colors turn to solid red on the electoral maps, from the South to the Midwest to the Southwest to the Mountain West, and the Democrats become enclaves trying to stay afloat against the tide.

And does that mean millions of Americans are voting against their economic interests, against their own yearnings for productive and healthy lives, and their belief in the preservation of strong public schooling?

It does.

And when the man who identifies himself as the embodiment of all these values tells you he will protect you against terror by sending the American flag into Iraq, you are probably not going to vote against the American flag. A retired major general did make the point during the campaign—one that shouldn’t have to be made—that baloney is baloney whether or not it’s wrapped in the flag.

The building of the Republican base has been shrewd and sometimes ruthless, but that is called hardball politics and it is what the Republicans play far better than the Democrats, with assistance from the cable TV drumbeaters. They have been able to play it well and successfully because the Democrats years ago began paying the price for spreading their traditional umbrella of support wider as the appellant groups grew and began demanding their share of justice or a wedge of the democracy’s pie. Their clients from the turn of the century began with labor and the poor and weak and voiceless and minorities and grew to women’s rights and environmental rights. And then came gays and lesbians and now gay marriage. The Democrats have not officially espoused all of the demands, nor have all Democrats or even most of them. But Democrats became easy targets for politicians who tar them as tree-huggers, elitists, gun-confiscators and promoters of homosexuality.

That is sad and mostly abominable. Democrats invited it by being perceived as cavalier about what was offending Americans. But that is the politics of today and soon millions of people who once crowded under that umbrella no longer have need for it and can comfortably ignore those who do. Yet how does all of that explain Minnesota, which with Wisconsin defied the Republican farm belt sweep?

This isn’t quite the Minnesota of Hubert Humphrey or the same old never-never land of happy liberalism. The Republicans hold much of the power in Minnesota today, but it is a Republicanism unlike the one remembered best by the builder Republicans who still vote. A half century ago, moderate Republicans and the new Democratic Farmer-Labor Party together built a political ethic in Minnesota that gave rise to some of the country’s most progressive political and social concepts and movements. Corporate power and government cooperated in building world-renowned medicine and brain industries. The weak were cared for. Public health and education mattered. There were excesses but by and large the state worked. So the rankest appeals to partisanship and self-interest don’t always fly in Minnesota. Thousands of once moderate Republicans voted for John Kerry. They included many of the most prominent ones, who did it in the closet. Minnesota is a state where strong minded women are not exactly unknown. Many of those, in essentially Republican, suburban households, voted for Kerry. College students got involved. And Kerry delivered his calls for a new turn in American politics, and a new awareness of our need for friends around the world, to thundering ovations the last week in Minnesota.

As a citizen of this state, I take some comfort in Tuesday. But I take more in the sight of those aroused young people, finding a cause, discovering that they could invest their energies in something beyond their own needs and ambitions. And not only in the young people, but in grandmas walking with canes, and in veterans who know something about guts and sacrifice, standing proud with John Kerry.

I was proud to stand with them.

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar