I am so excited.

It's probably because I drank a full pot of coffee today. It's probably because I've spent most of the day talking about the election and what it means for us. But I am pumped up. I am ready to fight.

I refuse to be depressed. We lost, sure. We worked hard, we organized, we campaigned, we blogged, we called, we wrote, we voted. And we lost. But all is not lost. Not by a long shot.

So here it is, my ten point plan to take back the country.

1. Don't get cynical. We are more powerful than we think.

We made Karl Rove sweat. We made him sweat! We took Pennsylvania, Ohio was close. We took New Hampshire away from them. We made them campaign in states they thought were safe. We blocked their attempts to broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary on Sinclair's TV stations, in just a matter of days. We won the spin on all four debates. We registered and turned out a record number of voters.

Was this a landslide victory for Bush? No it was not. It was incredibly tight, all the way down to the wire. 48% of the voting public sided with us. 55.5 million people. We have power, and they know it.

Do not be fooled by the red and blue map you see everywhere. Remember that it makes "red country" look huge. It's not. Many of those "red" states are geographically large but sparsely populated. Montana is just not that influential. Look at this:

2004 Cartogram

These are the 2004 votes. The states are shaded according to the strength of each party's support. The states are sized according to their population.

Suddenly it doesn't look so bad, does it? (Thanks to Mike at http://www.edwardsforprez.com/ for the applet to create this.)

2. They are more powerful than we thought.

The Convential Wisdom was that turnout favors the Democrats. We just need to Get Out The Vote and we'll win. Vote or Die, etc. Well, guess what? We turned out the vote. So did they.

The Republicans also worked to suppress our voters. We did not.

What does this mean? It means that we have to make access to the polls a major issue. Something is wrong with our democracy when 2 million votes are "spoiled." When parents and old people and working people have to wait in line for hours into the night, in critical places like Ohio. How many people gave up? When people don't have faith that their vote will be actually counted, because mechanical systems fail, because electronic systems have no paper trail. We are the richest country on earth. Why can't we get the best democracy money can buy? How can we be a beacon of democracy and freedom if we can't get it right at home?

(Want to do something about this now? Join the Open Voting Consortium. Is democracy worth ten bucks a month to you?)

We need paper trails. We need a 24-hour national voting period. We need absentee and early ballots that the voter can be confident will be counted. We need open-source software in our voting machines (if they can do it in Australia, why not here?)

Read this Greg Palast article about vote spoilage, and how it disproportionally affects African-Americans and Hispanic voters: An Election Spoiled Rotten

The GOP turnout also means that we have to use their own tactics against them. We may not have the CEO of Diebold on our side. We cannot, should not, and must not do anything illegal. But we can challenge votes and voters in primarily Republican counties. We can send registered letters to Republican voters, and then challenge the legitimacy of those registrations if they don't answer the letters. Many Democrats will recoil at the thought of using the GOP's tactics. But this is not about principle. This is about power. And if we're going to regain power, we have to throw a few elbows, use our muscle as well as our hustle.

3. Second Term Hell

The following is from Boing Boing:

"I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost. 'Get over it,' he said, 'The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term. Change comes from discontent,' he said. 'And right now, there's a lot of discontent.'"

Remember what happened to Clinton in *his* second term, too. The Gingrich Republicans went after him and took him down.

We are now out of power. We've lost in the House, we've lost in the Senate. Well, that's more rope for them to hang themselves with.

Look at it this way. If John Kerry had won the election, we'd still be facing a Republican Congress. We would be caught in the morass of Iraq. Any failure in Iraq, any terrorist attack against us (God forbid), would be blamed on Kerry and the "weak" Democrats. The economy worsens because of Bush's disastrous tax cuts, soaring deficits, etc? Kerry's fault.

Now, there's only the GOP to blame for whatever happens. They broke it, they bought it. I don't wish for bad news, at home or abroad. (Don't try that "Democrats want us to lose the war!" crap with me.) But I believe that the neoconservative philosophy is leading us in the wrong direction. They should answer for what happens. And they will.

4. Get Beyond Red and Blue.

In a marketing class at Harvard Business School (yes I have the same degrees as W), we were discussing the cola wars -- Coke vs. Pepsi. "Why only Coke and Pepsi?" demanded our professor. "Because this is America," I replied. "We live in a two-party system!" Big laugh line, although I don't think the prof appreciated it. But there's some truth there. We like things black and white. (In the case of race & ethnicity, we like them black and white quite literally.) There's a Manichean[1] worldview, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, paper vs. plastic, Coke vs. Pepsi, that I think goes quite deeply into our national psyche.

The oversimplification of "Red America" and "Blue America" has become a cottage industry for pundits like David Brooks, Wayne's Worst Export. If you haven't read Thomas Frank's article "Lie Down for America" in the April 2004 Harper's, debunking this myth, then by all means read his book "What's The Matter With Kansas?" See here for more: What's the matter with Kansas?

The "Red and Blue" America myth isn't just about making sure that all Democrats aren't parodied as latte-drinking Coastal Elites. It's important for us to understand that all Republicans aren't trailer-park dwelling Bible-thumpers.

I'm serious about this. In conversations, on blogs, etc. I've heard this again and again: "how can people be so stupid / misguided / misled / selfish / immoral as to vote for George Bush?" In so many words.

Well, it ain't so.

First, saying stuff like this confirms the worst stereotypes of Democrats: that we think we're smarter than other people, that we're out of touch with the great masses, that we condescend. Don't let them tag you with that one.

Secondly, as long as we go down that road, we'll never understand *why* 51% of the electorate went for Bush. You can talk "false consciousness" until you're blue (or red) in the face, but it won't help you in the next election.

Thirdly, our strategy has to get more "Red Staters" -- and more Republicans on our side. Bush picked off 11% of Democrats; Kerry took 6% of Republicans. (Gore got 8% of the GOP vote in 2000). 5.5% of the electorate thinks the U.S. is going in the wrong direction, but voted for Bush anyway.

This is the best resource I've seen on a better way to look at the country. They divide the nation up into 10 regions, based on voting habits, that cut *across* state boundaries: Beyond Red and Blue

Fascinating stuff, and I hope every Democratic strategist reads it.

(Factoid: In 9% of the counties in the US, the margin in the 2004 election was 5% or less. Meaning that in one of every 11 counties is solidly purple.)

One last thing -- remember how our rhetoric plays in the mainstream. Our policies don't have to move to the center, but our rhetoric should. Demeaning the president's intelligence, or those who vote for him, ain't gonna play in Paducah. Neither does running naked in the streets, chanting "No Blood For Oil!", etc. Marching is good for the spirit, it's a good show of strength, and it energizes the base -- but let's try to be sensible. Because you know that it's the one guy who kicks a cop that will get all the news, while 100,000 protestors are ignored in their Free Speech Zone.

We're liberals, we're good at tolerance; let's show some to the other side as we engage in conversation on their blogs, their porches, over beer. Let's listen to what they are saying, and strive for civility. We might not convince anyone to switch, but we'll show them that our policies and our beliefs aren't based in hate, they're based in hope. And we could certainly use more civility all around.

5. Wedge, wedge, wedge, wedge, wedge.

One of the brilliant GOP strategies this year was to use the anti- gay marriage ballot initiatives to get the religious right out to vote. See this article in the American Prospect: How to Win a National Election

Nick Confessore argues that the gay marriage issue tilted Ohio for the GOP, and that we should do the same with stem-cell research initiatives in key states. (If Arnold can do it, why not?) We have to create issues that will bring out our base -- and will split off voters from the GOP.

In my (completely, wildly, utterly wrong) pre-election prediction post, I pointed out how many prominent Republicans had broken with their party to endorse Bush as evidence that their base wouldn't turn out. See the whole list here: Republicans for Kerry 2004

The point is, there is major dissatisfaction within the GOP. The libertarians see Ashcroft and the gutting of civil liberties. The fiscal conservatives see Bush running up huge deficits, in the name of tax cuts that have not created jobs anywhere near their own projections. The social liberals see the party hijacked by the fundamentalists and the theocrats of the religious right. Those who disagree with the neoconservatives and the PNACers in their global vision and their strategy are pushed out of the tent. We need to use wedges to turn these fissures into cracks. We need to remind the GOP again and again that their big tent is empty, abandoned, and the president is headed for the tent revival going on over on the right. Should Soros fund the Libertarian party, the way that the Republicans backed Nader? Hell yes.

Stem-cell research is a good idea for a wedge issue. I think electoral reform, minimum wage reform, and health care would be good bring-out-the-base issues. We need to think more on this.

6. Organize.

I know, this almost goes without saying. We've done a lot of organizing in the last year. We used the internets to great advantage. Blogs swarmed. MoveOn did a fantastic job of mobilizing. The Sinclair Boycott was organized and executed in days. *Days*. Party for America, America Coming Together. Let's not forget Designs on the White House!

But it's one thing to organize people. It's another to organize organizations.

A few years ago I was involved in an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Saul Alinsky's organizing group, in East Harlem. The genius of the IAF is that they don't organize people, and they don't organize around issues. They organize organizations, institutions, like churches and unions and tenant groups. The organizations are responsible to each other, and the members are (naturally) responsible to their own organizations. The organizations stick together on a series of issues, not just one. I saw it in action, and it works.

The Democrats need to tap more into these pre-existing organizations. We always do well with unions, but union membership is declining. We need to reach out to churches. We need to promote electoral reform and electoral access as a social justice issue. We need to think more about pre-existing groups, even as we use technology to create loose associations of individuals.

7. Take Back the Media.

The right wing has an excellent strategy. Their think tanks and their media (Fox, O'Reilly, Rush, Coulter, etc.) go hand in hand. The echo chamber makes their message loud, the mainstream media picks it up. And it energizes their base.

Blogs are good, because we get to make our own media. (Remember Trent Lott!) But they're not enough.

Michael Moore is our own Rush Limbaugh. You might hate him, he's a major lightning rod for the other side, but he fufills a purpose.

Air America is a start. We need to do more.

8. Take Back the Flag.

We're still flying the flag from our window. Three years after 9/11.

I get hit all the time with the whole "liberals are unpatriotic" thing. Nothing makes me more furious. I've worked my whole life to try and make this place better, to try and make America more like my ideal of what we should be, what we could be. I'm tired of the lie that being critical of politicians is the same as hating your country. That saying you think a war is strategically wrong makes you a traitor or something. Whatever I may think of our political leaders, and the strategic wisdom of entering this war, I have the highest regard for the soldiers who put their life at risk for us. And no one has the right to assume that I think otherwise.

We need to wrap ourselves in the flag. Not for the political advantage. But because we love our country. We can't let anyone call us "traitor" and get away with it. We can't let Bush send our soldiers overseas, make their families pay for their body armor, and claim that that's "supporting the troops." We have to celebrate our victories, here and in Afghanistan and in Iraq, even if they're victories in a war we don't approve of (for moral reasons, for strategic reasons, for tactial reasons, whatever.)

We have to fly the flag. We have to wear the flag. We have to show that we love what it stands for, the promise of America. Because we do.

"The stars and stripes, they've been swiped, washed out and wiped / And replaced with his own face." So raps Eminem in "Mosh." Let's swipe back the stars and stripes.

9. Take Back Religion.

We need to promote liberal values as compassionate values as religious values. We need to use not only the language of Scripture, but its true tenets: The Sermon on the Mount, Tikkun Olam. We need to appeal to the mainstream of religion in our society, those churchgoers who recoil at the thought of theocracy. We need to make *our* issues religious ones -- social justice, war, aiding the poor, helping the elderly, healing the sick -- and not just *their* religious issues -- abortion and gay marriage and prayer in school. We need to go not only to the churches and the shuls but also the mosques and the temples. 7% of the voters said they were "Other" as a religion (not Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or None), and Kerry got 73% of their votes. (Bush lost 5 points among this group since the 2000 election.)

We need to wrest religion from the right.

10. Take back the country.

I was talking with a friend today about the election. She's a black lesbian -- basically, the GOP's nightmare. "I've never felt that my rights are so threatened. I am thinking about getting a gun to defend myself." She talked about all her work to make America better, in the nonprofit sector, and how she felt like giving it up, embracing the Republican values of capitalism. "Maybe I *should* just look out for #1, instead of cleaning up all the messes that they don't want to deal with." Atlas shrugs, indeed. And she wept as she talked about her mother, how she worked all her life and was now being threatened with eviction because Bush had changed the formula for the federal housing program to take money away from New York and give more to New Jersey.

And I thought: we have to take back this country. We just have to.

And we will.

I am reminded of the following:

"Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood." -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

As Rev. King reminds us, it will be hard work. But now is the time. Now is the time.

Now is the time.

-- Mike Everett-Lane

Please, forward this around. I'm interested in what you have to say; I can be reached at via email or on my blog at www.ishbadiddle.net. This manifesto lives at this link address.

[1]Or, more properly, Zoroastrian -- see Calling Bush's Views Manichean Is an Insult to the Manicheans

M E-L posted this on November 04, 2004
It is filed under Featured Posts, National News

It is also indexed with the following tags: 2004 Election | 2008 Election | Democrats | GOP | Activism | Electronic Voting | Democracy | Religion | Manifesto |