HAVING watched television coverage of the midterm elections, and solicited comments from my partisan friends, I gather that Democrats seem pleased with the election results. George Allen, R-Va. will soon be seeking employment of the non-elected sort. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., too. Democrats will preside over both houses of Congress, which some assume will produce fresh progressive ideas on the war in Iraq, federal spending and social welfare. But Democrats shouldn't be so eager to sew the "mission accomplished" banner. For the Democrats, aside from their well-executed congressional coup, this election revealed several worrisome trends and a few promising glimpses of electoral good judgment -- at best, a tentative victory for disillusioned liberals.
I watched the election coverage, or as much as any decent human could reasonably tolerate -- since when has political reporting necessitated so much graphics, pyrotechnics and animation? During Wolf Blitzer's riveting account of votes being counted on CNN, I noticed this: Every word of the pundits' analysis pertained to congressional realignment, future presidential politics, Mark Foley's deviance, or George Allen's room-temperature IQ. Not one of the commentators bothered to mention many states' rejection of gay marriage, or Arizona making English its official language, or Colorado's flirtation with legalizing marijuana. Not a single "expert" appeared aware of the fact that, in every state in which it appeared on the ballot, voters elected to raise the minimum wage.
The collective political leanings of cities, counties and states converge to form the deceivingly simple image of national politics -- something Wolf Blitzer can summarize in a terse, hour-long segment. To actually address these issues, however, or at least to better conceptualize American electoral politics, one might want to penetrate deeper than television pundits and their catchy one-liners. Look local. Examine the data itself. A
For instance, Virginians evidently harbor vast hostility toward marriage in general. Not only did we think it necessary to ban something that is already illegal, but Virginians voted overwhelmingly to extend the Marshall-Newman Amendment's gross subjection of same-sex couples to heterosexual couples as well. Same-sex marriage, dear readers, is still banned by Virginia law. And it would have remained so had the amendment failed. So, either Virginians actually wanted to limit the rights of all married couples, or they disapprove of homosexuality so much, that they felt compelled to ban it (again) and seize a few other privileges with it.
Redundant though they may have been, Virginians in concert with residents of Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin passed laws prohibiting (or restating the prohibition of) same-sex marriage. It seems that despite the new Congress in January, despite having usurped GOP doyens in Virginia and Pennsylvania, the left still has work to do.
But evaluating individual ballot initiatives without bearing in mind local politics is like excising random, two-sentence quotations from a novel and trying to reassemble the plot. It neglects the details. Arizona's law instituting English as the national language, for instance, could be interpreted as excessive nationalism, or a response to illegal immigration. Democrats hoping to retain "the Latino vote," as it's so reductively called, need to pay close attention to local issues like this, and the specific circumstances of individual constituencies.
Broad messages of change won't maintain the sort of popularity Democrats need to propel whomever they nominate to the presidency. If Democrats want a congressional shelf life longer than a single election cycle, they ought to engage each ballot initiative as an isolated target, and then try to synthesize a national message that delineates clear, progressive, achievable goals for the next two years. It's tempting to see the Democrats' victory as a collective, national whine that Republicans couldn't cut it. But, as can be seen by close statewide elections in Montana and Virginia, the electoral fate of the party rested on a few thousand votes -- a university's worth, even. Certainly that is not the mandate the left was hoping for.
Democrats won the midterms as an alternative to the stalled political party already in power. Obviously, that platform won't hold come 2008. These ballot measures -- raising the minimum wage, banning same-sex marriage, illegal immigration legislation -- will dictate the terms of future elections. The results from this one serve as warning.
Democrats and moderate Republicans might be well served to imagine this next year, not as a mandate, but as an audition. Democrats can either capitalize on the opportunity or they can do nothing, and lose. Choosing the latter option they can ignore the ballot measures altogether -- submerging Congress in investigations and hearings and drown their future prospects in partisan stalemate.
Dan Keyserling is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at dkeyserling@cavalierdaily.com.
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