I generally don’t find much on Alternet worth reading; articles tend to cycle between liberal/progressive circle-jerks (“Why John Kerry will win in November!!!”), liberal/progressive blamefests (“Why John Kerry the Corporate Whore is the worst thing to ever happen to Democracy”), and “Diebold stole the election for Bush”-style conspiracy mongering. Nonetheless, I occasionally check in to see if I’ve missed anything.
Surprisingly, however, there is an article worth reading today. Or maybe not so surprising, given that it is a reprint from the New York Review of Books. Anyway, the article in question is a rather lengthy analysis of the factors contributing to George Bush’s win this past November, and frankly, it is about the best answer I have heard or read to the cry of “How could this have happened?” that has been the refrain of so many Democrats and progressives in the weeks following the election.
Kerry may have had better policies, and the facts (about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam Hussein’s connections to the 9/11 terrorists, about the administration’s handling of the entire war) may have supported his arguments. “But the facts did not matter,” writes the author, describing Bush’s conflation of Iraq and the War on Terror in a campaign speech in Orlando:
not necessarily because those in the stadium were ignorant of them, though some certainly were, but because the President was offering in their place a worldview that was whole, complete, comprehensible, and thus impermeable to statements of fact that clearly contradicted it. The thousands cheering around me in that Orlando stadium, and the many others who would come to support Bush on election day, faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts.
More than anything else, the author illustrates the skill with which the Bush campaign wrapped itself up in the war and then framed the debate in such a way as to make it extremely difficult for voters to separate their support for the war from their support for George Bush. Further, he points how the same tactic made it difficult for Kerry (and continues to do so for the Democrats in general) to talk about Iraq and the war on terrorism in a way that does not play into the Republicans’ hands.