[lavender] FW: [Lavender-caucus] Dems in denial blame gays for Bush victory (DougIreland, LA Weekly)

[Owen Broadhurst]

----Original Message Follows----
From: Scott McLarty <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 06:55:41 -0800 (PST)

Gays on the Ropes
Democrats in denial blame gays for Bush’s victory
by Doug Ireland

LA Weekly, December 3-9, 2004
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/02/news-ireland.php


Democrats, liberals and gays are all in denial
about the meaning and extent of the defeat they
suffered on Election Day — and about the sea
change in the nation’s politics that defeat
confirmed.

I have argued, since 9/11, that the dastardly
terrorist attacks that day cemented a tectonic
shift to the right in the nation’s politics which
had been under way for over two decades. Since
the first Reagan presidency, progressive values
in electoral politics have steadily eroded, as
the money-and-poll-driven Democrats have scurried
— sometimes furtively, often openly — to their
right. This election only reinforced my
conclusion that we are in for a period of
reaction that may well last several generations.

There have been a few who have captured the
atmosphere in which America’s politics now
breathes — but they have been dismissed
contemptuously by the liberal elites in denial.
For example, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd got
it absolutely right when she wrote a
post-election diagnosis of "a scary, paranoid,
regressive reality," with "strains of
isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism
and religious fanaticism." All of which, by the
by, are the symptoms of what I’ve identified as
the base reactionary demagogy whose success was
guaranteed by 9/11. But, in a rare attack on
another pundit, D.C.-style liberalism’s Pope of
the Obvious — the Washington Post’s David Broder
— reflected the Inside-the-Beltway Democratic
establishment’s thinking when he wrote a sniffy,
mocking dismissal of Dowd’s dire diagnosis as
"exaggerated," and portrayed the election results
as just another quadrennial pendulum swing that
left the Democrats "a sturdy base from which to
climb back into power."

Typical of liberalism’s Pollyanna politics of
denial was an article in The Nation for November
29. The magazine’s editor, Katrina Vanden Heuvel,
and Robert Borosage (director of the Campaign for
America’s Future) co-signed a manifesto urging
progressives to "get ready to fight" for a series
of sensible, if rather mild, shifts in political
attitude. But the article by my friends Bob and
Katrina was seriously flawed by its delusional
overestimation of progressive political strength:
It asserted that "progressives drove the debate"
during the election campaign, and that
"progressives drive this [Democratic] party now."

Well, just about every single post-election
autopsy of the presidential campaign — from Time
to Newsweek to Kerry’s hometown Boston Globe —
has emphasized how the Democrats’ campaign was
reactive to Bush’s demagogy, rather than
pro-actively driven by progressive values. No
less than James Carville, the snarling face of
knee-jerk Democrats, told Newsweek’s Eleanor
Clift that, "We lost because we didn’t say
anything," just like in 2000. Does that sound
like a campaign in which progressives "drove the
debate"? Cueball Carville added that the
Democrats failed to break out of the box framed
by Bush’s "narrative forged in the ashes of 9/11.
‘I’m going to protect you from the terrorists in
Tikrit and the homos in Hollywood’ is how
Carville summed it up." Running a reactive
campaign devoid of real content — instead of an
aggressive, pro-government, progressive-populist
one — is the principal reason why a post-election
Pew Poll released November 11 found that, when
asked to rate their party’s campaign on a report
card, only 37 percent of Democrats gave it an A
or a B. The average score was a grudging C-.

Moreover, all across the country, Democratic
House and Senate candidates scampered away from
even the milquetoast liberalism of the party’s
watered-down national platform — led by the
Democrats’ defeated Senate leader, Tom Daschle,
who dumped on the presidential candidate of his
party on Meet the Press and distanced himself
from the party’s positions on "social" questions
on the stump, in a failed genuflection to the
"family values" mood imposed by the Republicans.

As to the assertion that "progressives drive the
party now," the election of the Mormon abortion
foe and corporate-coddling lobbyists’ darling
Harry Reid (who also opposes marriage equality
for gays) as the party’s Senate leader — and thus
its most public face for the next four years — is
only the latest refutation of such unwarranted
optimism.

The election was also a rebuttal of the liberals’
favorite mantra: that the bigger the turnout, and
the more new voters who could be registered, the
better it was for Democrats. The latest,
post-election New Voters Poll sponsored by Rock
the Vote and Pace University, released November
18, not only underscores the emptiness of such
febrile notions, it gives much reason for
pessimism about the future — since new voters are
heavily skewed toward the young. By a significant
margin, new voters say they’re political
conservatives, not liberals (36 percent to 29
percent). And 55 percent of new voters say their
vote was affected by the gay-marriage issue (much
higher than the one in five of all voters who
said so in the last, pre-election national Gallup
survey). A lopsided majority of white women (65
percent) among new voters say gay marriage
affected how they voted — worse, so did 61
percent of college students. Similarly, the study
said that "We found considerable support for the
conventional wisdom that pro-life, rather than
pro-choice, voters are the most likely to vote on
the abortion issue," with a 15-point advantage to
Bush over Kerry among new voters who said the
issue was key in determining their vote. So for
new voters, the study concluded, "Moral values,
gay marriage and abortion appear to be their
motivating issues."

There is similar bad news in that November 11 Pew
Poll, which — when it asked voters what had
motivated them — found that "a plurality of 27
percent selected moral values, followed by 22
percent who chose Iraq and 21 percent who
selected the economy and jobs. Terrorism was
chosen by 14 percent; education and health care
were chosen by 4 percent each and taxes by 3
percent." That "moral values" number is a full
five points higher than in the much-disputed
National Election Pool exit polls taken for the
TV networks on November 2.

More so than any other Americans, gay people have
reason to fear both the election results and this
description of our current political topography.
The Republicans scapegoated gays to win the
election. Now, the dominant Democratic Leadership
Council’s Democratic right wing — and the
Gitlinesque and Tomaskyish pseudo-liberal
commentators, with their endless crusades against
identity politics — are blaming the election loss
on gays for, as California’s indigestible Senator
Dianne Feinstein put it, wanting "too much, too
fast, too soon." These scapegoatings come just as
a new FBI report, released November 22, shows
that violent anti-gay crimes have now become the
second-highest category of hate crimes, right
after race — and the FBI doesn’t even track
crimes against the transgendered, 21 of whom have
been murdered in the past year.

Of course, the Democrats harvested gay dollars
this year in the multimillions — and gave nothing
in return. In not a single referendum state did
the party or its leaders lift a finger to help
defeat the vicious, hate-building referenda, nor
try to educate its own base about these blatant
electoral manipulations of bigotry and fear. Is
it any wonder we got creamed — or that a part of
the Democrats’ working-class base was lured into
voting for the gay-baiting Republican president
when more gut-grabbing, bread-and-butter issues
were off the table?

And now, as the Democratic establishment tries to
shove gays asking for fairness not just to the
back of the bus but to the back of the closet, we
face a theocratic rollback agenda of frightening
dimensions. The GOP hasn’t even waited until the
New Year to begin tearing down what remains of
the wall separating church and state — that
essential dike against new tsunamis of primitive
religious bigotry. On November 17, the lame-duck
Republican House passed the California Missions
Preservation Act, which provides $10 million to
"restore and repair" 21 mission churches, 19 of
which have active congregations, and all of which
are owned by the Roman Catholic Church — the same
church whose bishops this year preached electoral
homo-hate from the pulpit. And there’s a lot more
to come.

We in the gay community will have few national
allies as the Democrats squirm even further into
the "family values" cocoon, leaving us isolated
and blamed for the ’04 defeat. The U.S. Supreme
Court’s refusal to review the Massachusetts
court’s decision on gay marriage means very
little: Not only will the composition of the
Supremes change during Bush’s second term —
making the court even more conservative and
anti-gay — but in at least half a dozen states
the right is already planning new anti-gay
referenda to ban marriage equality, domestic
partnerships and the like in the wake of the
November 2 success of 11 similar referenda. And
for every step forward we win in the courts,
under the Republicans’ renewed legislative
assault we will be forced two steps back.


Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog,
DIRELAND at http://direland.typepad.com/.