Election Day 2004

Today was supposed to be glorious. It was supposed to be the second coming of November 4, 1992, the day I woke up to a Seattle Times headline declaring it “Democrats’ Day”. We had won the presidency, kept control of Congress and lost only two statewide races in Washington State. And in one of those races we didn’t even endorse the candidate because she was crazy.

I was supposed to be writing about President-Elect John Kerry today. The crazy optimist in me also expected to be writing about Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Well, obviously, I have a massive case of the s’posedta’s this morning. George W. Bush won re-election by a comfortable margin. Democrats lost ground in both the House and the Senate. Daschle lost re-election in South Dakota. Anti-gay initiatives passed in 11 states. Oh, and we’re still at war.

So, you know, not a good day for me. Or the country.

I am a partisan. I am a Democrat. You could say it’s a congenital condition. It’s who I was raised to be. My grandmother taught me to love FDR and the New Deal. My mother taught me about the glory of JFK. And my Dad taught me, through his actions, to respect a man who volunteers to serve his country in times of crisis. For those reasons, and many more, I wanted John Kerry to be elected President. He wasn’t. Them’s the breaks.

Except. Except. This was an abysmal campaign. George W. Bush ran on a platform of hate and fear. Hate for gay men and women and fear of a terrorist bogeyman he has proven himself impotent to confront. We should have been able to nominate Mickey Mouse and won this election, irrespective of the fact that he’s both fictional and a rodent. We didn’t nominate Steamboat Willie, though. We nominated John Kerry, a brilliant, contemplative war hero with a prosecutor’s mind, a moderate’s social conscience and a conservative’s fiscal responsibility. And yet Bush paints him as a weak-willed, wishy-washy liberal. Who speaks French.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time bashing John Kerry. For one thing, I like the guy. I think he’s smart and principled and would have made a great chief executive. But he should have fought back harder. Being the decent guy doesn’t work against Karl Rove and his criminal thugs. He should have showed more outrage over the Swift Boat Vets. He should have done what Dean did and owned being a liberal on some causes. He should have been proud of it. Why do Democrats persist in allowing Republicans to use liberal as a pejorative? I’m proud to be a liberal, so are my liberal friends. Why aren’t our leaders proud of the liberal tradition? It’s the tradition of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. It’s what won World War II and beat the great Depression. It’s the Civil Rights Movement and Abolition and Suffrage. Why do we continue to allow the GOP to define the language of the campaign and turn what is glorious into an insult?

But, as I said, I am not angry with Kerry this morning. I think that even though he made some mistakes, he ran a pretty good campaign. He was the only President on stage during the debates. Many of the ads we ran (and I’m including the 527s in that “we”) were very effective. And Iraq really should have been the main issue, our issue.

Instead, we allowed the Republicans to scare the fundamentalists with the idea of gay marriage. Not the fact that their children were dying in Iraq. Not the very real possibility of some kind of draft. Not the sputtering economy. Not the reality the Bush and his administration did nothing to prevent 9/11. Not rising oil costs and our dependence on foreign fuel. Not the blatant corruption in our military contracts. Not the fact that our commander in chief refuses to think a problem through and simple goes by his gut.

No, apparently the scariest thing in the nation right now is the possibility that my partner Scott and I could file a joint tax return. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say “moral values”.

Look, I can already teach at school. I can already have a child biologically or adopt one. I can already draw a will naming Scott my beneficiary. All I can’t do is cover him on my insurance easily or visit him in the hospital. Which, you know, would harm the children.

The conservative chatterers like to refer to us liberals as elitist, as intellectual wussies, as out of step with America. And yeah, I dismiss their arguments on gay marriage pretty flippantly. I’m not going to apologize for that. The idea that my being in love poses a threat to the American family is asinine. It’s unworthy of intelligent response. That’s not elitist, that’s common sense. I do not have to justify my existence to Ann Coulter. I do not have to change who I am for Sean Hannity. And I should not have to lie to myself about who I love to please George W. Bush. I am an American and I am entitled to equal rights. It’s not up for debate, it’s right there in the first sentence an American ever wrote. This truth is self-evident.

I resent that I was the wedge issue that drove this election. And, make no mistake, we lost this in large part because of the gay marriage issue. That’s why so many swing states had anti-gay initiatives on the ballot: to drive up the bigot vote. I’m done referring to Ralph Reed’s army of idiots as fundamentalists or evangelicals. I’ve met many fundamentalists and evangelicals who were freethinking social liberals. You know who may be the biggest freethinking social liberal ever? Jesus Christ. No, the Christian Coalition and its descendents are a bunch of bigots and it’s time we call them as such. They are the same types who we used to call segregationists or state’s righters or confederates. They are amoral, backward morons confusing hate for faith. And George Bush calls them his base. He courts them. He tailors his message to suit them. He tried to tailor the Constitution to suit them. I’m not sure what is worse, the idea that he agrees with every bigoted thing they say or that he disagrees and cynically uses them to consolidate power for his true base, the oil industry and the super-rich.

Scott is seriously talking about us moving to Canada. He can’t stomach this country anymore. Part of me agrees with him. Part of me just wants to throw down my toys and say, “I’m going somewhere where they’ll appreciate me!” There is a long list of great expatriate writers and artists. I can be an expatriate occasional blog-updater.

But a bigger part of me wants to stay and fight. If a President feels he can write bigotry into the Constitution, then someone has to stay to fight him. And I know there are many who will. My voice can only be one in a chorus. But one voice, like one vote, when joined with thousands of others, can shake the soul.

At this point it appears as if George W. Bush was legitimately elected to a term as President. I don’t think we should abandon investigating the irregularities in the voting and the counting, but the race is over. I’m angry, I’m sickened and I’m sad. But no matter how much W. tramples on the Constitution, no matter how wrong we go in the next four years (and we will go plenty wrong), America, the idea or it, the words of it, the spirit of it, America is so much bigger than this tiny man. Change is the one constant in the United States. Since our founding, the constant current has been the extension of rights -- the equalization of the population -- to women and racial minorities, to immigrants and people of diverse faiths. There have been hiccups and steps back, some small, some huge, but the country always continues in one direction: liberty for all. And each step we take makes the words of our Founders more true. Our union is more perfect now that it was in 1789. And it will be more perfect in 200 years than it is now. No one man, not even a President, can stop that tide, no matter how hard he tries. Freedom is indeed on the march. We may have to go to the trenches for the next four years. But I have no doubt that we will win, because we have no other choice.

Today is a sad day for me. But it’s not a hopeless day. Our fight for equality and progress has faced a setback. Now it is time to regroup, choose some new generals, and fight like hell. Our courts, our troops, our fellow citizens on the margins -- and in the middle -- need us. But unlike Bush, and his bigot’s brigade, we are on the side of the right. We are on the side of the abolitionists and the child laborers and the suffragettes and the freedom riders. We have history on our side. We have the Constitution on our side. I think we might even have God on our side. And someday, someday soon, we will have the majority on our side. And then the real work will begin.

I, for one, can’t wait for that day.