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So where do we go now (but nowhere)?

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STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:59 / 03.11.04

So what now? It's never over until there's nobody left alive (okay, that may have come a bit closer in itself last night).

I guess what I'm really asking is what the Democrats' plans are now- and I mean the voters rather than the opposition party itself. As far as I can tell, unprecedented numbers of "youth voters" were mobilised into action this time- will they remain politicised, will the defeat be too disheartening, will it just not be "fashionable" (or whatever) any more?

Here in the UK (and, I imagine, most everywhere else) we had the phenomenon over the last couple of years of vast numbers of people (again, particularly the young) becoming politicised who would, prior to Iraq etc. have had little or no interest in the process. I'm interested (well, more than interested) to see how that trickles down into OUR political system (though I guess I'll have to wait until next summer for some indication).

Will the kids brought on board by Eminem, Rock the Vote and the like stay? And what can be done to encourage them to do so in the wake of last night's Series Of Unfortunate Events?

Jack The Bodiless

11:07 / 03.11.04

It's not quite over yet though, yes?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:12 / 03.11.04

Well yeah, I know. I'm just trying to provide something to leaven the roll-over-and-die mood permeating the 'lith (myself included) this afternoon.

11:14 / 03.11.04

We pursue that which retreats us; a defeat now would only energize the progressives. And, likewise, a Republican defeat now would only make them leaner and stronger come 2008.

11:48 / 03.11.04

unprecedented numbers of "youth voters" were mobilised into action this time

...except for that last pesky part of actually voting, apparently.

12:06 / 03.11.04

I think a big factor as far as the youth turn-out went might have been the length of the queues at the polling booths. I mean two to six hours in some places... How many of *the kids* showed up to cast their vote, saw the length of the lines, thought fuck this and left again ? Let's face it, that's classic student behaviour, if nothing else.

12:27 / 03.11.04

>> so hillary and barak in 2008 then?

Hillary/Barak vs. Guiliani/Schwarzennger!!
MONSTER MONSTER MONSTER TRUCK MELTDOWNNN!!!
WITH GUEST HOST HULK HOGAN AND FORMER GOVERNOR
JESSE "THE BODY" VENTURA!!!!

THE WILDEST SHOW ON WHEELS WHEELS WHEELS!!!!!

)And I still have hope that Wesley Clark will run
again for Prez and win someday...I like that guy...)

12:44 / 03.11.04

Are you still part of the "youth vote" if you're in your (very) late 20's?

I voted for the first time ever this year. Everyone I know voted. As far as I know, we all voted for Kerry (except, of course, my boss, and the folks in the office upstairs).

Kerry, in fact, won in my county, with 56% of the vote. This is the county containing Austin, Texas, mind you; Bush used to live two blocks from where I'm sitting when he was Governor.

My plans for the future had included buying some land, opening a bed and breakfast, doing lots of organic gardening, and trying very hard to become self-employed. Of course, all of this was going to be happening here in Texas, and now I am frankly reconsidering that...

Perhaps we'll move to Vancouver. Or Ireland.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

12:46 / 03.11.04

Edwards/Barak would be an unstoppable juggernaut. Hillary would do just as poorly in the South as Kerry did, and if we learned one thing last night, it's that you can't ignore them the way the Democrats did this year.

And, yeah, thanks a lot youth vote. We won't be a viable group in public policy for at least twenty years, now. Enjoy your crippling loan debt. I hope Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was worth it.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

12:51 / 03.11.04

grant We pursue that which retreats us; a defeat now would only energize the progressives. And, likewise, a Republican defeat now would only make them leaner and stronger come 2008.

Hang on, are you saying that the left loosing this election is good for the world and that if the Republicans lost that would have been bad for the world? Shit, maybe we should all start working for the Republican party, make sure the Democrats never face the unimaginable disaster or winning ever again...

13:08 / 03.11.04

It's an infuriating thought now, yes, but a scant six months ago that meme was skulking around the block and getting a double-take or two. Last hope, maybe? 'cause barring some miracle of litigation (probably an oxymoronic idea), all the planet can hope for is that Bush & co. screw up the next four years twice as bad. Which, y'know, really really sucks for the rest of the planet.

13:43 / 03.11.04

Hey, the question was "where do we go from here," and that's my answer.

14:01 / 03.11.04

Subversion, darlings. I plan to join the NRA and become a volatile supporter of gun control and weaponry education. My father owns enough artillery to make Western Europe shit its pants, and I'm the firstborn.

14:12 / 03.11.04

Kerry just conceded the race. Fuck.

I'm so angry and so depressed I have no idea where we go from here. I can't believe it. I couldn't even believe how close it was. Where the fuck were all those people who registered to vote in record numbers? Where were the college students? Where are the brains of all those people who voted for a megalomaniacal idiot savant for President?

I'm sorry, I don't have anything constructive to say, I am so totally devastated. This was my first time voting for President. I'm thoroughly disgusted with the DNC. They'd better not try to push Hillary into the slot for 2008, if they can't even get a well-spoken rich old white man to win.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:20 / 03.11.04

Edwards/Barak would be an unstoppable juggernaut. Hillary would do just as poorly in the South as Kerry did, and if we learned one thing last night, it's that you can't ignore them the way the Democrats did this year.

Mmmmaybe... but would another way of looking at it not be that the key is largely to give up on the South and Midwest and concentrate on a very few borderline states. I'm not sure the Democrats will *ever* get the South back....

Mind you, that's basically what they did this time around and look where it's got us...

14:20 / 03.11.04

What about Kerry's promise to count all the provisional & absentee ballots???!!!

Mister Six, whom all the girls

14:20 / 03.11.04

???

Where did you see this? I can't find anything online.

14:26 / 03.11.04

Try Reuters. "Democratic challenger John Kerry called President Bush on Wednesday to concede the election, an aide said."

Mister Six, whom all the girls

14:27 / 03.11.04

Link

crap in a crap sammich.

14:30 / 03.11.04

Here's one report from the AP. It ain't gospel yet, but it don't look good. Quotes "a source" saying Kerry called the President to concede Ohio and the election this morning.

It's not an official announcement yet.

14:40 / 03.11.04

I honestly don't know. I don't think my sweetie and I can afford to move out of the country, so... I just don't know. I guess try to stay in liberal communities in the U.S. I'm still kind of in a state of shock.

14:45 / 03.11.04

The provisional/absentee votes will be counted apparently, ( I'm getting this off BBC News 24, ) it's just that given the high level of defective ballots usually involved, Kerry's accepted that even if the numbers came out overwhelmingly in his favour, they still wouldn't be enough. So he's to officially concede at 6PM GMT, is the latest.

Oh dear.

*

14:56 / 03.11.04

I kept telling myself over and over, with the youth vote at record levels, and the youth going overwhelmingly Kerry or third-party, it's only ten or twenty years before things start really getting better in this country. Hell the US is just a child, really, still in the experimental stages; a thousand years from now who won or lost this election will be a matter for ancient historians to quibble over based on reliefs and the cryptic information recorded on fragmentary discoidal laser tablets. The number of polities which in this year denied anyone the same rights they granted other humans on the grounds of with whom they had intercourse will be little known, but found quaintly amusing by paleovideography students.

All the same. I guess I am applying to UToronto after all.

15:02 / 03.11.04

Oh, sorry, a little too cloudy-headed to cite sources. I am watching Massachusetts local news, they're saying Kerry will speak at 1pm our time, and Bush will speak at 3pm our time.

15:03 / 03.11.04

Mmmmaybe... but would another way of looking at it not be that the key is largely to give up on the South and Midwest and concentrate on a very few borderline states. I'm not sure the Democrats will *ever* get the South back....

Mind you, that's basically what they did this time around and look where it's got us...

the thing is that every state you give up on frees up more money which can be spent in states you want to win. that can turn safe states into battlegrounds (see Minnesota and Wisconsin).

15:05 / 03.11.04

>> I kept telling myself over and over, with the youth vote at record levels, and the youth going overwhelmingly Kerry or third-party, it's only ten or twenty years before things start really getting better in this country. Hell the US is just a child, really, still in the experimental stages;

This is the only thing that has given me some solace - that the US is going through a Victorian period of conservative religious/moral values & intolerancy and will grow out of it in the long-term as a nation. Alan Moore theorized as much in an interview online several months ago (not a joke, he really did). If we take a long-term look at the US's evolution, we can see this as just a phase, albeit a horrible one. I do believe in human society to grow forward and evolve for the better, despite ups and downs and turbulent, dark times. Grant Morrison has also echoed this view.

15:08 / 03.11.04

Of course that also means we have to go through this bullshit in our lifetimes and trust in the universe and all that

15:09 / 03.11.04

Well, I'm obviously bummed out, but I feel like we can't just lay down and die. It really sucks, but I actually think Kerry did the gracious thing and minimized any damage to the democratic party by conceding.

I guess we're just gonna have to keep fighting. Personally I can't imagine Bush making it through the next 4 years, but i guess they say denial is the first stage...

Boy in a Suitcase

15:26 / 03.11.04

fucking crock of shit

15:42 / 03.11.04

Along with What FinderWolf's suggesting, this really is evolution. We're hitting fever pitch with the tenuous weaknesses of relativistic pluralism. We've got technology and communication ramping up culture to such an extreme that people know nothing is absolutely true, and thus fall back into "safer" modes of thought. Granted, Europe is past all this, or just underneath it, but America is in the death throes of the green value meme. It's only a matter of time before we're shaken out of the dying. It's Boomeritis and rabid self-interest until our parent's generation wilts and dies. I still have hope, but we need strength.

15:45 / 03.11.04

I guess what I'm really asking is what the Democrats' plans are now- and I mean the voters rather than the opposition party itself. As far as I can tell, unprecedented numbers of "youth voters" were mobilised into action this time- will they remain politicised, will the defeat be too disheartening

I'm afraid the answer is yes. A lot of young people figured their vote didn't matter, were persuaded otherwise, and went out to vote overwhelmingly for Kerry, only to find out that it didn't matter. That's not the best way to look at what happened, but that's the way a lot of young voters will likely see it. There's a perception of the Two-Party Democracy being a machine that just rolls over the little guy, and this election will have fueled that image. In addition to how it affected young people, I wonder how it affected record numbers of minority voters this year.

Now will someone please explain to me why Clinton/Obama is a "shoe-in" for 2008? A woman and a black man? What? Now if only Obama were gay, that'd really be landslide. I don't think likeability (as if Hillary were America's sweetheart) or popularity are the keys to the Presidency. It's all about the culture war. Look at what happened to Congress. America is split in two, with the Red side being slightly larger.

Hattie's Kitchen

16:02 / 03.11.04

Barring the emergence of another credible Democrat challenger (Obama will have to wait until 2012/2016, I reckon, I think that Clinton is a cert for the Democratic nomination in 2008, but whether she would win the presidency would depend on a seismic shift in cultural attitudes in the next four years - given how much the Christian right was mobilised in this election, and bearing in mind how Christian fundies think women should be seen and not heard (St Paul's "A woman shall have no authority over a man" line)...well...

Thatcher managed it here, but she was a woman in name only...

16:08 / 03.11.04

Now will someone please explain to me why Clinton/Obama is a "shoe-in" for 2008? A woman and a black man? What? Now if only Obama were gay, that'd really be landslide. I don't think likeability (as if Hillary were America's sweetheart) or popularity are the keys to the Presidency. It's all about the culture war. Look at what happened to Congress. America is split in two, with the Red side being slightly larger.

that's more or less why Clinton/Obama is considered a shoe-in by many Democrats. it is all about the culture war, and (or so the theory goes) it's time to start fighting it, instead of making futile attempts to build bridges. instead of trying to get some kind of milquetoast moderate, throw out people who represent the core of the Democratic party in the same way that Bush represents the core of the modern Republican party. basically, the idea is to be like "this is who we are, and this is what we believe, and we're going to stand up for it" and just fire up the base and hit the ground war hard in terms of turnout.

Hillary is one of the most polarizing figures in American politics. i personally think that it all stems from disparaging comments she made about some magazine (Ladies Home Journal or something) asking her to compete with Barbara Bush in a cookie bake-off and comments about not being like Tammy Wynette standing by her man. she's a powerful, sharp-tongued woman who pushes all the right's culture war buttons. and Obama... *whispers* they say he's a Negro.....

anyway, so we throw out a ball-busting woman associated with the Clinton 90s (beloved on the left, loathed on the right) and a charismatic black guy.

i don't know if it will work. i don't think it will, at first, but what they're doing now isn't working either, and this could build a coherent new core for the future. i think the Dems need to do what the GOP did after Goldwater in '64 - find a base, articulate a coherent ideology, and build and build and build until you're electable. it may be worth a shot.

16:36 / 03.11.04

Personally, I think Hillary Clinton is an excellent choice if the Democrats want to lose the next election. The exit polls indicated that terrorism and morality were the key triggers for voter choice this time around, and Clinton's got too much association with immorality (via her husband) to pull it off with those voters. Given Bush's fundie agenda, I'm guessing those issues will only grow stronger in the coming years, as the division between church and state is challenged.

Obama, on the other hand, is a strong contender: he's a community activist with a very mixed family background (white & black parents, a half-Indonesian sister), powerful church ties and impressive public charisma. I don't think his youth will hurt him any more than it hurt Jack Kennedy; in fact, I think it would probably be a benefit.

The problem with abandoning the bridge-building moderates is that the Democrats really don't represent half (or more) of the nation - or at least, not the voting nation. Obama stands a good chance of mobilizing the minority vote in a way that's never been done before, but I think that's more likely if he's the front-runner than standing for vice.

As for discouraging youth voters - well, they might have registered, but they didn't show up at the polls in any greater numbers than in 2000. 1 in 10 voters in the 18-24 range actually voted, and the voters in the 30-44 age range was actually down from 2000.

Looking at the geographic split among voters, I'd be tempted to suggest that Democrats in the west coast and north-east states start looking into separating from the union. It's done wonders for getting concessions for Quebec in Canada, after all...

16:41 / 03.11.04

Youth vote: WHAT THE HELL!?!?!
I don't understand this, I only know two people in the 18-25 group who didn't vote, and they aren't U.S. citizens. Who are these people who aren't voting? and why?

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