“It Doesn’t Get Any More Bleak Than This”


The news moved slowly through the crowd. There were no boos, no hisses, no dropped glasses. Country singer Jamie O’Neal and the band had just finished the last song of their set. But there was Fox News anchor Bret Baier, on the big screen at the Republican National Convention’s election night party in downtown Washington, soberly delivering the news: President Obama was projected the winner of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes.

“That’s the presidency,” Baier said.

“It’s over,” added Fox White House correspondent Ed Henry.

Tom Lea, a tall, suited Republican from Southern California, was standing near a table piled high with baked pretzels and mini-slices of cheese and mushroom pizza when the call was made. Lea was angry—at the voters who’d inexplicably handed President Obama a second term, at a Congress divided by gridlock, at the direction of the country as a whole.

“It doesn’t get any more bleak than this,” Lea told me. “This is not hyperbole: This country is done. The writing’s on the wall. Dead.”

Lea said he believed newly elected Senate Democrats like Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and returning Democrats like Claire McCaskill would do nothing to fix what he called our “divided government.” He also hammered the president for doing nothing to bridge that partisan divide. “This president has not reached across the aisle to work with the members of the House,” Lea said. “This government isn’t working. We just inherited a worse government than what we had in 2008.”

The RNC’s election party was expected to attract 2,500 to 3,000 guests, RNC spokesman Tom Kise told reporters early in the night. And the main space at the Ronald Reagan Building did indeed fill up fast as polls closed across the country. The party roared with the sound of rollicking country tunes and chatter among the crowd. The guests nibbled their snacks and sipped their cocktails and watched the returns, the men dressed in suits, the women in tight dresses.

As the news trickled in—big Democratic wins in Senate races in Massachusetts, Missouri, Indiana, and Connecticut—the energy ebbed. At just past 11 p.m., the night’s emcee urged partiers to keep their spirits up, wait for all the results to come in, and to have “one or two more drinks” while they were at it.

But the party had thinned by the time Baier called the race for Obama. Half an hour later, it was abandoned but for a loyal few. A few couples still danced to the sound of the band while the catering crew cleared the food and the bartenders began stacking their cocktail glasses. Guests streamed toward the exits, arms interlocked, dressed in wool coats and scarves against the November chill.

DC residents Jonmarc Buffa and Liz Kelly made for the exits as the party died down. Buffa held a miniature American flag, and an “I voted!” sticker was affixed to his jacket. Buffa was at a loss to explain why, say, a working-class single mother in Cleveland would vote for Obama. “You have to admit: If you’re unemployed right now, continuing what we have currently is not going to get you very far,” he said. He added, “I think Democrats this time were able to convince people to vote against their own self-interest, which to me was shocking.”

Buffa did give the Democrats some credit. He said their get-out-the-vote operation was superior, and GOP voters just weren’t as motivated. “Republicans once again didn’t do what they should’ve done, which is show up.”

Kelly, Buffa’s spouse, had her own take: Republicans from Mitt Romney on down let themselves get too entangled with social issues like abortion. “Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot,” she said. Conservatives are “completely right on economics, but they’re completely wrong on social issues.”

Kelly said she’d recently graduated with a master’s degree in social work. The job market she entered was bleak—and she didn’t see President Obama doing anything to improve it. But so long as Republicans fielded candidates such as Missouri’s Todd Akin or Indiana’s Richard Mourdock—both candidates tripped up by controversial gaffes about rape and abortion—the party wasn’t going anywhere, she said.

Buffa was even grimmer with regard to the next four years. “I think at the end of the day,” he said before heading out into the cold, “people are going to regret this day.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate