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2004 vs. 2008
2004 vs. 2008....Back in 2004, I remember at least a few bloggers and pundits arguing that liberals would be better off if John Kerry lost. I never really bought this, but the arguments were pretty reasonable. Leaving George Bush in power meant that he'd retain responsibility and blame for the Iraq war. (Despite the surge, that's exactly what happened.) Four more years of Republican control would turn the American public firmly against conservative misrule. (Actually, it only took two years.) If we waited, a better candidate than Kerry would come along. (Arguably, both Hillary Clinton and Obama were better candidates.)
Conversely, it's unlikely that John Kerry could have gotten much done with a razor-thin victory and a Congress still controlled by the GOP. What's more, there's a good chance that the 2006 midterm rebellion against congressional Republicans wouldn't have happened if Kerry had gotten elected. By waiting, we've gotten a strong, charismatic candidate who's likely to win convincingly and have huge Democratic majorities in Congress behind him. If he's willing to fully use the power of his office, Obama could very well be a transformational president.
So: were we, in fact, better off losing in 2004? The downside was four more years of George Bush and Dick Cheney. That's hardly to be minimized, especially since the upside is still not completely knowable. But for myself, I think I'm convinced. The cause of liberal change is better served by Obama in 2008 than it would have been by Kerry in 2004. Comments?
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Maybe. Though what about Justice Alito and Roberts? They'll be with us for decades.
I'd prefer Kerry and presumably American Soldiers alive and all else that implies.
In a similarly dumb vein, some dipshit from Brookings was making the rounds saying that split government IS better than a "one party" government. And apparently the thought was that if you ignore the Supreme Court, that McCain is much much more likely to agree with a Democratic Congress on healthcare, and the environment, and so it would be easier to get progressive legislation through with McCain in and thus having some Republican support than with Obama and having no Republican support.
I think both arguments are pretty asinine.
I'm inclined to agree.
But, to head off an argument I see coming like a freight train, that kind of reasoning doesn't put "Country First(tm)."
Destroyed our economy.
Destroyed our balance books.
Destroyed our global reputation.
Pass.
I'll second most of the other comments (ie Bill $, JMcC:WtB, and esp. Jerry).
It's been devastating for the reputation of the Republican Party, thus helpful for Democratic electoral hopes. But it's only devastated the GOP because of how they devastated the US.
I'd rather we hadn't gone through this. Having everyone learn never to elect Republicans again is a small consolation. Hopefully we'll have a new opposition party not centered on Southern social conservatives, but that could take a decade, and only if the GOP is too stupid to learn as the rest of us have.
It's a quandry, and I can see it from both sides. But I can't set the Supreme Court aside, and the Romans on the court are going to be with us for a long, long time. So the wankers who made that argument and undermined Kerry in a close election can piss right the hell off.
Add the couple thousand dead Americans thanks to the war in Iraq, and they can fuck off and die.
Better for Democratic politicians that Kerry lost? Sure.
better for the country? Not at all.
Again, missing out on appointing two new SCOTUS judges was the big disappointment of not having a President Kerry. Actually it'd have been three judges, since Stevens would have almost certainly retired.
I'm inclined to agree with the general consensus of the previous commenters. Sure Obama will enjoy a favorable political climate, but he will face a huge task in cleaning up the mess of the Bush years, a mess that is geometrically greater than it would have been in 2004. In many respects, the situation threatens to tarnish liberalism much as Shrub and company have done with conservatism, because with the Dems now clearly in charge it will be all too easy for the Right to blame continuing bad times on the failure of liberals to fix the catastrophe we're in (never mind who created that catastrophe to begin with).
That and the courts. After reading the New York Times article last week on the reshaping of the courts over the past four years, I can't help but wonder how much better off we would be without so many judges, Roberts and Alito on down, who list "Federalist Society" among their affiliations.
A thousand times No. Put me in a time machine and I will take a chance on the Kerry administration in a heartbeat. I am even more skeptical of "better off losing" arguments than Kevin is; good conversation starter, very rarely if ever actually good thinking. Where the price to be paid is four years of George Bush Jr., not a chance.
As much as I think we now have a "perfect storm" and an opportunity to take advantage of it in a wonderful way, I really wonder if the cost has not been too great. I think if I had a time machine and could go back and flip the outcome to Kerry, I would still do so.
In each time, we must deal with the reality that IS, and all the "what ifs" are simply mental exercises.
Sigh, I don't know. I think you have to fight for every victory every ear. But the idea of still having a Republican Congress, and Kerry blamed this year for financial meltdowns does not fill me with joy. Maybe in the long run we'll be better off the way things have gone.
The Supreme Court is one argument for Kerry, but if we actually getting progressive health care and global warming legislation under Obama? That would be a much bigger deal.
Ask the people of New Orleans.
I'm opposed in principle to 'worse is better' arguments. As previous commenters have noted, the four years of Bush's second term have been just awful, and that's not a good thing.
And, by the way, the Republican party is pretty much dead meat at the moment, which is also, actually, a not good thing either.
Naw. this is just wrongheaded. Most disastrous Presidency in the history of the nation.
There's some kind of presumption in your post, Kevin, that Kerry would have made a mediocre President. He was bad at campaigning, but his commitment to the democratic values that made his country great, not to mention competent government, would have at least adverted some of the worst disasters of the past four years. Worth turning back the clock for that one.
It's a fun parlor game, but the only people who face this dilemma in real life are potential candidates wondering whether to run in a season that seems inauspicious.
Surely anyone in such a position will consider the 1992 election, specifically the strange fate of Mario Cuomo. His keynote speech in 1984 was nearly as brilliant as Obama's. But he passed in 1988, and again in 1992, no doubt influenced by the daunting poll numbers Bush had run up in the wake of the successful Persian Gulf war.
We know the rest of the story: the economy goes south (and Bush's popularity with them), Clinton wins, offers Cuomo a Supreme Court appointment, Cuomo declines (probably) because it forecloses the possibility of him ever becoming President, then Cuomo loses the NY governorship in the Republican insurgency of 1994.
The moral of the story is that you take the opportunity when it presents itself, even if it isn't perfectly optimal, because the future upside is outweighed by the immense uncertainty.
Pile-on.
What everyone else said.
Time is not a fungible commodity. People are dead, poor, illegally detained, devoid of human rights, and crushed who otherwise would not be.
Inert Jellyfish 04-08 then ?? > Bush 04-08 then Obama 08-??
Can we take the way back machine back to 2000 instead?
No, because if Kerry won we'd have a 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court -- or at least a 5-4 one (if a Republican Senate had insisted on at least one moderate conservative).
That's an opportunity we won't have again for a generation.
And though I don't think a Kerry admin. would have been perfect, it could have: made a serious effort at reducing the deficit, increased the minimum wage, expanded SCHIP and *possibly* had a universal health care effort along Bennett-Widen lines (unlikely, I know), along with immigration reform, withdrawal from Iraq, a proper and organized response to Katrina, a refocusing of energy on Afghanistan, and earlier action on the subprime mortage crisis.
I realize Kerry may have been a one-termer. But the country would be better for his having won.
I'm glad the current iteration of the Republican party has been exposed and consequently hammered. If the traditional conservatives win out over the religious nuts, then I'm inclined to agree that losing 2004 was a good thing. But if Palin's freaks win out, I'm not so sure.
On a personal level, I've lost hundreds of thousands of unrealized dollars due to the market crashing. It's hard not to wish that things were different. Still, I tend to regret Gore's loss more than Kerry's.
The Republican party is by no means dead: a likely 53-47 Obama win with 57 Senate seats will get some things done, but a full scale realignment? Not yet.
And the commentators above, from Bill Dollar onwards, have made trenchant arguments about why the costs of the last four years have been so painful. Let me add one more: Gauntanamo is still a festering sore.
There never is a "we can afford to lose this one" election. I had thought 2000 was one we could afford to lose. Dopey me.
Not sure how to deal with your logic-How bad does it have to get before we actually vote the bums out of office? Much as I hate to admit it, I have to admire the Parlimentary Governments of England and Israel-Somebody brings up a "Vote of Confidence" and you can get rid of the whole bunch at once! You can't knock that action! It may be a problem in the States as we have a tendency to over react but it might be worth looking into if we get another "Bush!"
Kevin, I'm surprised. Think of the 1000 (at least) soldiers that would not have died, and the thousand more that might well have been saved in Katrina.
Your argument in it's abstract form, i.e. ideological shift in the direction of the nation is probably true, but I'm sorry, to me the price has been way too high.
The Republicans are worse off, the Democrats are better off, but the country remains terribly fucked.
Looking back, I agree with the premise but disagree with any followup idea that we should ever take solace in losing. There's just too much at stake. Maybe losing and watching this blossoming clusterfuck will teach us that, but I can't be too confident in the American people's new-found sobriety.
No way we were better off losing in 2004. Look at the mess we are in today. This could have been averted. Plus I'm still not sure Obama is gonna win this. I'll believe it when it is official and not a second sooner.
So, it was worth ruining the country to bring a Democrat back to the White House? That's Republican thinking, that the only important thing is political advantage and winning elections. C'mon, don't make that argument. People are dead, lives have been ruined, hope shattered for millions of people on account of the policies followed in the last four years. It most emphatically hasn't been worth a minute of it.
I would rather Kerry had won in 2004 than the observe the deterioration caused by these last four years of Bush.
On the other hand, the RW and the RNC were still confident in 2004 and a lot more Americans still bought that crap. So Kerry would have had to deal with the standard RW crazy attack dog stuff for the past four years. Even now, the Bushies think their man is being unfairly treated--they view all the disasters that occurred on his watch as unfortunate events that Bush handled well rather than as the predictable consequences of Bushco's conservative ideology.
In any case, Bush has been president, and America has suffered. We will never be able to go back to before the damage, but maybe finally, a majority has learned that Reagan-era conservatism is a huge con, not to be trusted, and we can work towards the goal of a functioning nation of, by and for the people. That would be the one good thing that might emerge after eight years of Bushco.
The Supreme Court argument is a good one.
On Iraq, though, I have my doubts that Kerry would have pulled us out by now. I know that's a very debatable point, and there's no way to know for sure, but my sense is that once he was in office he might have been very, very cautious about withdrawing.
On Katrina: Yeah, FEMA would almost certainly have been in better shape if Kerry had won. It's hard to know just how big a difference that would have made, but it would have made a difference.
On our economic debacle: I doubt that that would have played out any differently under Kerry. Over the past decade, Dems have not really been much better on financial industry regulation than Republicans.
The last four years have been disastrous, but the upside is that maybe (maybe!) it means the public is ready for serious change now, not just a few ornamental doodads. In the long run, that could be worth a lot more lives and a lot more security than winning in 2004.
(Needless to say, I don't think this question is even debatable about the 2000 election. There's no alternate universe in which eight years of Gore isn't light years better in every possible respect than eight years of Bush/Cheney.)
Everybody's counting chickens instead of phone banking for Obama?
That means the job is left to the terrorists.
Country First. The last four years were a disaster. Nothing Kerry could have done or Obama might do will fully repair the damage.
Republicans have a credo: Always win.
pyrrhic victory
By the way, anyone who feels inclined to do some last-minute GOTV volunteering can search for Obama locations by zip code at:
my.barackobama.com/page/event/search_simple
You can also phone bank to battleground states from home -- details at:
my.barackobama.com/page/votercontact
New Orleans.
So: were we, in fact, better off losing in 2004?
Well, if by "we" you mean upper middle-class white suburban Americans with no kids who sit on their ass for a living, yes.
To most other people, it's an insulting stupid question.
(Actually, it only took two years.)
Actually, it only took one year. The Social Security clown show and then Hurricane Katrina had soured the public on Bush before the first anniversary of his re-election.
I started making this argument a couple of nights ago and my husband stopped me cold.
He's right. No matter what the president's ideology, you want him to have a successful presidency. George Bush most decidedly did not. Better for everyone had Gore or Kerry won instead.
Drudge is still trying so very hard to win for Repugs in 08 as well. The latest trumpeting is about Obama saying that harsh cap and trade etc, would "bankrupt" a coal plant:
http://media.newsbusters.org/stories/hidden-audio-obama-tells-sf-chronic....
BTW, it shows how totally phony he is, that he doesn't feature the phony "Sarkozy" call to Palin prank.
Man, they put two Supreme Court justices on the court, including the Chief, and they are, what, 23 years old? They will be their _forever_. Can you imagine the court if we could have replaced those two slots with liberals? Would have been nice. With Obama, he will be replacing the moderate Stevens, theoretically, and a few of the liberals, essentially leaving the votes unchanged.
It would have been very, very, very nice to have replaced Rehnquist with a liberal.
I completely disagree with the assertion being made by many here that Kerry was a "disastrous campaigner." Kerry came just short of unseating a incumbent president during war time. No one has ever done that in the US.
If you think the campaign was poorly run, you probably weren't volunteering in a swing state. When I went door-to-door in rural Iowa four years ago, I was impressed by how well the campaign had identified potential swing voters. Time after time I found myself talking to people who said they agreed with Kerry on most issues and thought Kerry would be a better president, but felt they couldn't vote against Bush because it would be disloyal to their brother/sister/husband/wife/father/son/etc. who was currently deployed, recently back from, or on their way to Iraq.
The fact that Kerry was even close to winning in 2004 was amazing. Four years later, it is depressing to see that Republicans can actually campaign in public without being laughed down.
Republicans lied.
People died.
Elect Democrats.
Add me to the pile-on of NO, NO, 1000x NO.
This question reminds me of "Would it have been better to let the South secede?" Yeah for the North, who have been subsidizing the South ever since. Not so much for the Southern slaves though.
Fellow Liberals:
Which channel do you recommend for election evening? I'm thinking MSNBC, but CNN appears a strong contender. Or should I keep switching between the two? I'll have my popcorn and three flavors of beer ready and start watching 30 minutes before 7 pm EST.
I do remember some of those discussions back in the day, and even though I wasn't happy about Kerry losing (or how he ran his campaign), I do remember predicting in one of the threads that the conservative humpty dumpty movement would be crippled by another Bush term, as the obvious and complete incompetence of their governing vision would become ridiculously obvious, as things started falling apart (off the wall).
As a student of Bubbles (economic, financial, political), I assert that we were in a Conservative Bubble. Characteristic of a bubble is that most people go to great extremes to rationalize the bubble, which is what happened with the Conservative Bubble. Even a huge mess in Iraq by 2004 didn't help voters see the problem with Conservatives. As with other bubbles (e.g. stock market bubble in 2000 and Credit Bubble in 2007-08), people are very reactive and not proactive. The Conservative Bubble had to blow up spectacularly as it did with the crises on several fronts (Iraq/afghanistan; Katrina; Finance system; economy) before Joe Sixpack realized that they were living in a bubble.
Kerry lost not because he was an incompetent candidate, but because the voters were in a bubble and they refused to see it until it blew up in their face. If people, collectively, are smart enough to recognize a bubble and act on it, they wouldn't have gotten themselves into that bubble in the first place. Once they get into a bubble most people lose the ability to see it and continue to sink deeper until it bursts spectacularly.
About the only difference between a 2004 Kerry victory and a W. Bush one is two conservative, business friendly Supreme Court Justices. Kerry wanted the surge before W. Bush; the surge was part of Kerry's platform. The economic crisis would have been the same, threatening a Republican win now had Kerry won in 2004.
Kevin, I don't know if you will see this comment, but isn't what you are describing called "intensifying the contradictions?" And in some cases such a strategy might actually work if there really are core contradictions built into your opponent's ideology. In this case their were.
I am going to disagree with most posters here and say that, on balance, it was better to lose in 2004 than win.
One objection is that many more American soldiers and Iraqis are dead now than would otherwise have been the case. Well, we can't know that. Could Kerry have executed a withdrawl? Perhaps. Would the Civil War have been worse than it was or not as bad? As a guess, it would have been about the same since it seems that it was not the Surge that stopped it but rather that it just burned itself out.
But what about the future? Had Kerry executed a withdrawal in 2005-6 the "Stab in the Back" meme would have been assured of living on to haunt the nation in years to come. Instead, Republicans have been forced to own the consequences of their policies; the hypotheticals that the stab-in-the-back idea raises have been answered: yes, staying longer would not have made a difference. In addition, Obama's candidacy is in part a mandate for withdrawal. There can be no talk of a stab-in-the-back when a majority of the American electorate was holding the knife. What the combination of these lessons means is that the U.S. will be much less likely to engage in such neo-imperialist adventures in the future. If Vietnam was not a clear enough lesson, Iraq should drive it home once and for all. (OK, that's too much, but for a good long time.)
We have also seen the result of conservative economic policies play out in all their glory. Make no mistake - the housing bubble was going to pop no matter who was president. And without a clear mandate, one wonders what Kerry could have accomplished to avert the contraction that was going to create. Instead, what we see this year is that Barack Obama is going to have a clear mandate for progressive economic policies and a total repudiation of laize faire principles.
I don't know if "intesifying the contraditions" is an immoral strategy, since one must take into account the long term (though who can know the long term?), but certainly, I think that because Kerry lost the way was opened for the emergence of Obama at just this moment. And that turned out to be a very good thing.
Yes, and I thought the same thing in 04... but it hardly diluted the bitter disappointment. I believe I thought the same thing in the early Bush days as well... 02 or something... that he would create a backlash that would be good for the left. Meanwhile, I figured that if McCain won, well that would surely decrease American imperialism considerably... I'm very glad he probably won't, though.
"I'd prefer Kerry and presumably American Soldiers alive and all else that implies."
I'm with Jerry on this one. Those that died in Iraq between 2004 and now, if they could express their opinion to us, probably could give a shit about how that helps the Democratic Party today. The same goes for those that have been ruined by healthcare expenses, or seen their retirement go up in smoke.
Wasn't this Nader's raison d' etre in 2000? & hasn't Ralph, with Obie as the Dem nom, gotten as good as he could expect from the Dems, eight years out?
So, why is Ralph running again?
& my other, larger point: parrotting the arrogant talking-points of upper-middle & upper class trustifarians with nothing to lose from a Republican administration, thus they can engage in vanity projects like Nader/LaDuke, should not be seen on this blog. Never. Never. Never, never.
Have we all gone mad?
I'm confident we would have accomplished positive things and brought the war in Iraq to a close.
The momentum was swinging against the Republican Party.