Blue in a Red America (continued)

What went wrong? In a nation of nearly 300 million people, the three and a half million votes separating Bush and Kerry really don’t amount to all that much. It would appear that the biggest share of the blame goes to younger voters, who supposedly were going to turn out in record numbers but who instead stayed home. According to exit polls, turnout among the youngest group of voters was 17 percent, exactly the same as four years ago. It was really rather amazing. From Howard Dean’s youth-driven campaign to projects such as P. Diddy’s "Citizen Change," from delightfully crude anti-Bush songs such as "Ignorant Son of an Asshole" to more-polished efforts by the likes of Public Enemy and Eminem, from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, an unprecedented amount of attention has been lavished on young people in the hopes getting them to participate in self-government. After all that, nothing changed.

The media, too, must share some of the blame. Though they managed to avoid repeating the virtual wilding to which they subjected Al Gore four years ago, the mainstream media never quite figured out how to deal with the Bush campaign and its supporters, who often relied on outright lying to smear Kerry and make him unacceptable to voters. At one end of the spectrum, there were the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who took advantage of cable and talk radio’s endless need for provocative guests and limited fact-checking in order to throw mud at Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War. At the other end, you had Bush himself falsely claiming that Kerry is the most liberal member of the Senate, and that his health-care plan would amount to a takeover by big government.

As Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News, recently put it (his memo was quoted in the New Yorker), "Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his effort to win." By contrast, Halperin continued, the Bush campaign was seeking "to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions. We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that." Halperin’s memo was an incisive critique of the media’s reliance on the phony old model of objectivity, and of how skillful the Bush campaign was at exploiting the media’s demand for stories in which one side accuses the other of something, and the other side responds — the truth of the original accusation be damned.

But these are all reality-based critiques, aren’t they? In the end, I don’t think any of them mattered. Contrary to the assertions of all those reluctant Kerry supporters — heirs to reluctant Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, and Carter supporters — Kerry was a good candidate, a smart, serious, thoughtful senator with deep experience in foreign policy whose war-hero past, though certainly over-emphasized, was an enormous asset. He cleaned Bush’s clock in three nationally televised debates. He campaigned tirelessly. His only real shortcomings were his poor communications skills and a long Senate voting record that a disingenuous opponent could mine to come up with an endless array of seeming contradictions and inconsistencies.

Yet that’s not why Kerry lost. Rather, he lost because he is the epitome of Blue America. And Red America is on the rise.

THINK OF what we’re facing for the next few years. Since the Supreme Court reached its outrageous Bush v. Gore decision in December 2000, Blue America has basked in the righteous knowledge that Bush was an unelected president who had not only lost the popular vote, but who probably would have lost the electoral vote had the recount not been halted. This has given us enormous moral authority, at least among ourselves. Now Bush has — God help us — a mandate.

Moreover, as of Wednesday morning, it appears that the Republicans are going to pick up four seats in the House and three in the Senate, solidifying their current majorities. Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, has lost to his Republican challenger, John Thune. Two of the new Republican senators-elect, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and Georgia’s Johnny Isakson, are said to be even more extreme on reproductive choice and other cultural issues than are most current Republican senators. The country’s 24-year lurch to the right, begun when Ronald Reagan was elected president, continues unabated.

At 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, not long after I began writing this piece, Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, grabbed a microphone in Copley Square and vowed not to concede until the last vote in Ohio had been counted. "It’s been a long night, but we’ve waited four years for this victory," Edwards told the crowd, according to press accounts. "We can wait one more night. John Kerry and I made a promise — that in this election, every vote would count and every vote would be counted." Brave words. But they weren’t enough.

For those of us who live in Blue America — not just geographically, but in the idea of America that it embodies — this is a sad and dark week. The forces of reaction masquerading as morality are ascendant. Four more years. For more years of war, of global warming, of trampling on our civil liberties, of secrecy, of threats to women’s rights, of more tax cuts for the rich and bigger deficits for the rest of us, of right-wing court appointments, of continued inequality for lesbians and gay men. Every day now there are fewer leaves on the trees than there were the day before. And it’s starting to get damn cold.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.