Disgrace

Given that I have no influence on the public discourse, I can safely say that as of now it would be reasonable to call the election for Bush. It’s over.

This is a dark day for the United States. The most reactionary President since (at least) Coolidge and the most incompetent since Pierce has been re-elected, on the back of a largely disgusting campaign, with bigotry being decisive (more on that later.) Some truly reprehensible people–with Coburn and Bunning at the top of the list, but the number of brain-dead reactionaries is just mind-numbing–will be in the Senate, which has a larger Republican majority ready to ram through a large number of Confederate judges onto the federal courts. DeLay’s Texas redistricting worked exactly as planned. It’s a disgrace. A couple postmortem comments:

–I have little patience for the inevitable upcoming complaints that this was a terrible campaign, Kerry was an awful candidate, Iowa screwed up, etc. The Democrats nearly beat a wartime, incumbent Republican in a non-recessionary economy, an extremely difficult task. Kerry has real shortcomings, but he was clearly the best candidate the Democrats had in this cycle, and he almost recovered from the vicious beating he received between the conventions. It was a pretty good campaign, it was close, and it didn’t quite make it.

–One issue on which I was completely wrong was the electoral impact of gay rights. Over-optimistically, I didn’t think the cynical mobilization of bigotry would help Bush. I was tragically wrong. If the gay-bashing constitutional amendment isn’t on the Ohio ballot–mobilizing a huge evangelical turnout–Kerry probably takes Ohio. Rove was right–attacking gay people was the crucial wedge issue that won the campaign. Evangelicals came out, and (as Kos notes, young voters didn’t, and I hope apathetic 22 year-olds like the weather in Tehran.) Moreover, gay-bashing was crucial to expanding Republican control of the Senate. (As of this writing, it could well take down Daschle.) Anti-gay bigotry is not a good long-term strategy, but this year, it worked. Worse, in the short-term there’s no obvious solution. Nationally, these are issues on which the Dmeocrats simply shouldn’t compromise.

–The next four years, to state the obvious, will be ugly. Nothing good comes from this. I don’t, for a second, relish the thought of Bush being left to clean up his mess. A lot of people will suffer, and path dependencies that will make even modest progressive reform difficult will be further entrenched. It will be a very, very, difficult struggle.

UPDATE: DeLong has the best writing about the Democratic campaign. I’m not sure it’s even possible to lift our heads, but we should be proud.