1. Time to toss the tea bags. The
first lesson is that one can be conservative, but one cannot be stark raving
mad. The Tea Party had its hissy fit moment in 2010, but it is what it is: a
group of angry white folks whose passion is far greater than its collective
IQ. The defeat of mouth-breathers such as Richard Mourdock (IN) and Todd Akin
(MO) ought to serve as a wake-up call for the GOP. (Akin was so extreme he
managed to make Claire McCaskill seem like a reasonable person!) Some Republicans
are touting Paul Ryan for 2016, but he’s exactly the sort of extremist Republicans
must avoid.
2. Morality is dead. No,
I don’t mean that the nation has gone to hell in handbag. But votes for gay
marriage, decriminalization of marijuana and similar ballot issues across the
country show that social mores are changing and that old-style morality doesn’t
have a lot of political traction any more. Single-issue voters can produce
steam, but not fire. I’ve said for years that most Americans are de facto
libertarians.
3. White people are just another voting bloc. Romney won a majority of both
white men and women, but Barack Obama won more easily than pollsters predicted. It might help if pollsters
left the lily-white suburbs to conduct their polls. Angry whites (see Tea Party) can make
a lot of noise and they hold a lot of financial resources, but this isn’t 1956,
and they can’t dictate elections any more. Whether whites like it or not,
America is a multiracial, multicultural society and a candidate who can’t
attract black, Latino, and Asian votes needs to practice concession-speech writing.
Yes, roughly seven of ten Americans still identify as Caucasian, but quite a
few of them are liberals and many are biracial or Hispanic. Any political
contest that extends beyond a single (gerrymandered) district must appeal to a
broad demographic swath.
4. The old-style media strikes out. The pre-election polls were
such an embarrassment that one suspects they were manufactured by media moguls
for the sole purpose of creating a track event out of sack race. The old media
has no clue on how to parse social media, cell phones, Facebook advocacy pages,
and other such like. Polls varied widely in part because certain pollsters—will
we ever trust Gallup again?—relied on mid-20th century sampling
techniques. And old-style media looked really old on Election Night. The PBS crew
was so grey that it could have saved money by broadcasting in black and white, and
ABC’s Cokie Roberts looked like she was on life support. Ditto Bob Schieffer on
CBS. As for Fox News, its broadcast was far livelier than its competitors in
part because postmortems tend to be grislier than postpartums. But have you
ever seen so many blow-dried white boys and dyed blond gals in your life? Fox needs
to see # 3 above.
5. The kids are alright. The
media said that young people wouldn’t turn out. It was wrong. Pundits must have
been thinking about their own youthful Baby Boomer non-voting behavior. Nearly
20% of the voters were under 35. This Baby Boomer offers this observation to
youth: you guys rock!
6. Go Mid and West, young man. The
electoral map is clear—for all the hoopla about the Sun Belt, the Midwest and
West reelected Obama. Forget those coiffed white girls from Cobb County, Georgia;
if you want to win you need to press the flesh in Iowa, drink coffee in gritty
Michigan diners, and say nice things about the Badger State. And while you’re
at it, keep heading west. Colorado isn’t red anymore, and neither is Nevada.
Democrats have an opportunity, if they play their cards carefully, to turn
Hispanic Arizona into the next New Mexico. They might even recapture parts of
Texas.
7. The Solid South isn’t. Republicans might want to bury the old
Kevin Phillips/Lee Atwater playbook along with their tea bags. Obama won
Virginia, was very close in North Carolina, and won Florida (again). Hey
GOP—take down the Confederate flags because the Old South is starting to look
new. North Carolina, for example, has a large number of Latino voters. Okay,
the old Cotton Belt is still rock-ribbed GOP, but this election shows you can safely
ignore the NASCAR South and pick off states whose populace knows it’s the 21st
century.
8. Even a blind man can smell faux
leather. Harry Truman once warned Democrats that if you gave voters a
choice between a fake Republican and a real one, they’d choose the real one
every time. Mitt Romney should have listened. In the end, Romney was exactly
what Massachusetts residents who have seen his act said he is: a man with no
real political center who says what he thinks people want to hear, not what he believes.
Romney was a made-for-TV candidate who looked
the part of president, but flip-flopped more than a seal on a water-slide. Who
is Mitt Romney? Can anyone really answer that question?
9. Mud sticks. Talk about fake! Americans say they hate mudslinging, but it’s not
true. Barack Obama may have taught Democrats a lesson they’ve been loath to
learn: define your opponent before that opponent defines you. How many voters
repudiated Romney because they thought him a ruthless job destroyer, a
tax-dodger, and an elitist who doesn’t care about half (okay, 47%) of the
population? Answer: Just enough.
10. The ‘burbs shot a blank. After
decades of ignoring inner cities and kissing butts in suburban malls, Democrats
did very well in places like Akron, Milwaukee, Detroit, Las Vegas, and
Manchester, NH. Suburbanites might not like cities, but more Americans live
there than in gated communities or leafy suburbs.
11. Corporations are the Bane [sic]
of our existence. Big money came from Fortune 500 companies—much of it
aimed at defeating Obama. Small business is who actually employs Americans, not
corporate giants. In fact, 52% of all employees work in firms with fewer than
500 employees. Many of those over 500 are employers such as schools, hospitals,
and government agencies—not Bane Capital. Score one for Main Street over Wall
Street. If, as the Supreme Court insists, corporations are people, many
Americans have decided that they are the variety that sucks!
12. Big government works! Notice
how many of the paranoid Big Government types shut their traps when Hurricane
Sandy hit? Notice how FEMA came back to bite Mitt Romney in the butt? Notice
the complete absence of Chris Christie in the waning days of the GOP campaign? It’s oh-so-fashionable to decry government spending,
but when the chips are down (corporate bankruptcy, bank failures, disaster
relief, terrorist attacks), one doesn’t see private enterprise filling the
gaps. Hurricane Sandy blew Romney’s anti-government screeds out to sea.
13. Enjoy gridlock? I
hope so, because with the Congress divided and some of the most rabid tea
baggers still in the House of Representatives, you’ll see more of it.
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