Oh, will the fatuous solipsism ever stop?

I was going to write a big long deal on what I considered the State of the Party; this is what came out instead.

I dunno, maybe this is the same thing.

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When was the last time you made a redneck joke?

I was born in Chicago and was, long story short, transplanted to North Carolina. Land of the eternal doublewide hick, the Weekly World News set, Bubba and Bertha Lou, right? I was twelve, maybe thirteen. The first time I heard myself say “ah” instead of “eye” I started reciting the alphabet in a strict northern diction whenever possible.

I was at that age, you know? I was pissed at everything and everybody, especially my parents for moving and new neighbors for not being my old neighbors. I grew out of it, and learned to love the south deeply, and tend to tell people that that’s where I’m from. Hearing those honeydipped drawls in Memphis did my heart good, even for those few days.

Southern trees, like the Lady sang, do indeed bear strange fruit; nothing can wash that blood off the root, I know. I’m not trying to. But I swear to god I heard the word ‘nigger’ more on the streets of Chicago than I ever did in North Carolina. In my experiences, once you get to a certain level of income, black and white don’t matter as much as green.

There’s a lot of white liberal guilt and optimism in those sentences, but they're not entirely untrue. And the last time I checked, when the Constitution was ratified, women couldn't vote and slavery was legal everywhere. The guilt, rage, and shame that is slavery's legacy is an American burden to bear, not simply a Southern one.

Listen: you cannot rule by electoral mandate. You cannot claim leadership by grasping two coasts as your cradle and by making the presidential race about 17 states-- you can’t win by seeking a mandate from marginalization. The South, the Midwest, and everywhere else you may have flown over are full of people who are-- get this-- just like you. We work and try to save money when we can. We’re worried about the kind of world our kids are going to inherit just as much as you. And you cannot lead by ignoring us.

Read the numbers. Gay marriage didn’t decide the election. Evangelicals didn’t vote any more or less than they normally do. Look at the numbers hard. The GOP nickel and dimed their way to 51%. As convenient a villain as we crackers are, as much as you want David Brooks to explain us to you in a cute little high concept pitch, as much as you want to think NASCAR is some sort of philosophy and not, you know, just what some people watch on the weekends, the numbers don’t lie. Not just 2004. Go back, do your research. Look at 2000, 1996, 1992. Dig in, New York Times Subscriber. Dig in, Atlantic Monthly reader. Go precinct to precinct, go county to county. Look at Charlotte, Atlanta, St. Louis, and every other metropolis in states that went for Bush. Do your homework before tarring us with the Klan Brush. People didn’t vote because they wanted to see gays oppressed and abortion illegalized. They voted with the guy that they felt safer with.

(I, uh, subscribe to the New York Times and read the Atlantic. Just sayin’.)

Give us a candidate who will speak to us, and we will speak back. You don’t have to like what we like, but you simply must understand that this country is far more purple than it is red, and no election is so easily scapegoated.

Give us a leader and we will follow. Ignore us in your quickest route to 270 and you’ll lose.

We’ll all lose.

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I’m a writer, and I work in what amounts to advertising an awful lot. I tend to look at things like this in terms of narrative and brand, then: what are you gonna do, and how are you gonna sell it? And I think maybe those are the terms that dictate how elections get decided.

It’s not that people don’t want a President that’s the smartest guy in the room, it’s that they don’t want a President that makes them feel like the dumbest. And you, O My Party, do just that. You make people that aren’t on the coasts feel stupid. Not dumb, like we don’t know; stupid, like we CAN’T know, because we can’t possibly understand, because we were not born in New England. And when you run a Yalie from New England, you play into a brand the GOP has been building since Goldwater and has deployed since Dukakis: the Liberal Intellegensia. The East Coast Elitist. The New England Liberal.

When a talkinghead would slip on-air and refer to Sen. Kerry as “Sen. Kennedy”-- which even Tim Russert was doing Election Night-- Democrats would think “John.”

Republicans would think “Ted.”

Look: they own that. That’s theirs. That’s done. You run a guy from New England and the GOP have a long-standing frame ready-to-order. The candidate is defined from the word go. They did it to Dean during the primaries, for God’s sake. It’s a big dumb fish in a very small barrel.

The radioactive half-life on “Liberal” will outlast us all. So, not ‘liberal.’ Try “progressive.” Try anything to get away from that caricature that the media are so complicit in perpetuating, I don’t care. Throw it back at them. Don’t talk about Republicans. Rebrand them. Conservatives. These people are conservatives. Say it again and again and again and again. Conservatives.

It’s a simple tactic, but so was that swift boat shit. What’s more is it begins to reframe the debate by putting the Democrats on the offensive instead of having to forever explain themselves out of the Conservative quagmires unleashed upon us.

People voted for the Conservatives because it was the devil they knew, pure and simple. Maybe it was the bin Laden tape, maybe it was destined to happen all along, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s been any post-election polling, but I have a feeling that bin Laden tape may have pushed it back into the red. There was a micro-trend back towards Bush just before the tape came out, then we were being told there was No Effect. Bullshit. I think undecideds that had turned blue and were ready for a change went red after that tape broke. The devil they knew.

In that booth, one candidate looked like a leader, the other looked like a mass of talking points and a thumbnail doodle hammered into their heads for twenty years. Look, even JFK-- the, uh, first one-- couldn’t get elected today, even if his old man was still gonna buy Illinois. People didn’t vote for evil, they didn’t vote for fascism and oppression-- I mean, they might get it, in the end, but that’s not what made them flip the wrong switch. Bush made them feel safer, or, if not Bush, than The Same made them feel safer and they were, in fact, voting Against Transition.

And every time you blame someone other than the candidate and the party management as it stands and you’re shooting yourself (we’re shooting ourselves?) in the foot. This red state-blue state shit is precisely what the kind of poison they want polluting the discourse. Anything is better than a group of reasoned, intelligent people pointing out again and again and again that 51% does not a majority make. Every time you sneer at a red state, every time you read another fucking article by David Brooks and nod sagely over your Sunday coffee, every time you denigrate the entirety of a state that had but a sliver of distance between the two parties, you’re winning the fight for them.

We lost because we didn’t close the deal. We’re running old-media wars and old media tactics against a bunch of feckless plutocrats lacking the shame to play fair. We lost because we didn’t have anything to say. We cannot run candidates in the negative space around the opposing party-- we need to present a strong and clear alternative. We need to present a better way. Because it is a better way: the numbers show, and have always shown, that the majority of voters side with the Democrats on most social issues. And yet we insist on running candidates too easily kneecapped before they get out of Iowa. Now, in the wake of this bitterly divisive election, they’ve got us fighting ourselves.

And if there’s anyone the Democrats can beat soundly, it’s the Democrats.