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Carol Platt Liebau - Columnist
Carol
Platt Liebau is editorial director and a senior member of tOR and CRO editorial
boards. She is an attorney, political analyst and commentator
based in San Marino, CA, and has appeared on the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC, CNN, Orange County News Channel, Cox Cable
and a variety of radio programs throughout the United States.
A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School,
Carol Platt Liebau also served as the first female managing
editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her web log can be found
at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com
[go to Liebau index]
 Why
the Democrats Lost
Or,
the Corrosive Power of Hate...
[Carol
Platt Liebau] 11/8/04
When our
hatred is violent, it sinks us even beneath those we hate.
Francois De
La Rochefoucauld
President
Bush’s
convincing victory in last week’s election has kept “journalists” busy
burying their cherished dreams of a Kerry victory. Maureen
Dowd characterizes the President’s campaign as a “jihad.” E.J.
Dionne asserts that President Bush’s 51% of the vote - the
first popular majority since 1988 and larger than any Democrat
presidential contender’s share since 1964 - doesn’t really
constitute a mandate. And according to Margaret Carlson,
Kerry lost because he couldn’t “connect” during a campaign
in which Republicans “demonized” their opponents.
But
they’ve
got it all wrong. Democrats lost because they became
the party that offered nothing but hate. Terry McAuliffe,
the party’s chairman, accused the President of being AWOL from
his National Guard duty. House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi referred to him as “incompetent.” Al Gore
called him dishonest and a traitor (“he betrayed this country!”). Teddy
Kennedy asserted that the President cooked up the Iraq war
for oil. Leaders of the NAACP compared the President
to a Nazi, a confederate, a Taliban member and a Jim Crow segregationist.
The
mainstream media likewise lost any pretense of objectivity. CBS
News, not content with circulating patently false documents
in order to cook up a hit on the President, teamed with The
New York Times to
produce an ill-researched “October Surprise” on missing Iraqi
munitions - and both media organs were willing to make common
cause with the President’s foreign adversaries at the International
Atomic Energy Association. Lawrence O’Donnell, a journalist/commentator
on MSNBC, suffered an on-air meltdown where he repeatedly shrieked
without evidence that his guest, Swift Boat Veteran’s John
O’Neill, was a “liar.”
As
if all this weren’t enough, the Democrats welcomed the entire constellation
of hyperbole-spouting, profoundly ignorant Hollywood “stars” - like
political theorist Cameron Diaz, who whimpered that if women
didn’t vote (against the President), somehow rape would be
legalized. They embraced Michael Moore, Al Franken, and George
Soros and even Moveon.org, which insisted that President Bush
was not only wrong, he was evil. Americans heard their
President called a liar, a thief, an idiot, a cheat and much,
much more. On the local level, they saw Bush-Cheney headquarters
across the country vandalized by those who had taken their
rhetoric to the next level.
Ordinary
Americans didn’t like any of it. For, quite simply, we’re
not a country of haters.
There
was already a widespread sense that the culture was coarsening
and spinning
out of control. This sense may in part explain why 22%
of voters named moral values as the most important issue of
the presidential campaign - more than the economy, terrorism
or the war in Iraq. The Democrats have not only entirely
ignored these concerns - they amplified them through the cruelty
and crudity of their election-season attacks. But secluded
in the cocoon stretching from Michael Moore’s film studio on
the west coast to Dan Rather’s anchor chair in the east, they
lulled themselves into the cozy conviction that “everyone” hated
the President just as much as they did.
The
residents of Red State America didn’t speak up at the time. Red
Staters are well aware of what the self-proclaimed “elite” think
of them. And knowing full well that they themselves have
been condescended to and “misunderestimated,” they found it
easy to believe that the President might be the undeserving
object of similar contempt.
When
the left-wing grandees heard no howls of protest about their
treatment of
the President, they assumed that the silence was tacit agreement. They
didn’t realize that Red State America has become so alienated
from them and all that they stand for that the silence, instead,
was an expression of profound indifference to “elite” opinion.
Yes,
all on their own, Red Staters (and many in the Blue States,
too) recognized
that the President, despite his flaws, has met unprecedented
challenges with determination. And they saw that it was
not he, but his critics, who were petty, short-sighted, and
willing to put their own political objectives before the country’s
well-being. Most of all, they responded to President
Bush’s straightforward and unashamed religious faith, sensing
that Americans need a leader who is guided by something larger
than either his ego or his appetites.
In
a party dominated by secularists, the Democrats are going
to have to find a way
to reach out to people of faith with overtures that don’t have
the phony, forced quality of John Kerry’s forays into black
churches. It won’t be an easy task - because in their
heart of hearts, many Democrats are suspicious of religion
as a concept, and even more suspicious of its adherents. It’s
easier - as erstwhile hippie Tom Hayden did on Los Angeles
radio last week - simply to dismiss the residents of the now
solidly Republican south as “a bunch of religious fanatics
and Confederates.”
If
that’s the
best the Democrats can do, the new Republican majority will
become more entrenched than even Karl Rove could have imagined. By
their hatred for President Bush, the Democrats destroyed themselves;
through the violence of their opposition, they brought about
the result they feared most: Four more years. CRO
Columnist
Carol Platt Liebau is a political analyst, commentator and CaliforniaRepublic.org editorial
director based in San Marino, CA. Ms. Liebau also served
as the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Her web log can be found at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com
copyright
2004
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