The Unfinished Story of Election 2006: We Get to Choose the Ending

By Ira Chernus
Created Nov 13 2006 - 8:39am

Election statistics are like pies. You can slice them up any way you want.
And the way you slice them depends on the tool you use. My favorite tool is
a nugget of wisdom from Democratic political guru Stanley Greenberg: "A
narrative is the key to everything." The party that tells the best story
wins. And the recipe for a winning story is simple: Take a few handfuls of
fact, throw in a large dollop of fiction, and stir.

But the story of the 2006 election isn't over yet. It's like one of those
movies on DVD with several alternative endings. You get to choose the one
you want.

Greenberg said "a narrative is the key" right after the election of 2004.
Back then, he credited the Republicans with "a much more coherent attack and
narrative that motivated their voters." Though the media gave us a story
about a new breed of "values voters," Karl Rove knew that was mostly
fiction. It was the "war on terror" story that put George W. Bush back in
the White House.

This year, Rove told Republicans to count on the same story to keep control
of Congress. It went this way: Republicans, who are real Americans, have the
backbone to fight against evil and do whatever it takes to win. Cowardly
Democrats just want to cut and run.

By early October, it was clear that Rove's Scheherazade strategy [1] -- keep
spinning ever wilder stories to avoid certain death -- wasn't faring well.
Nevertheless, Bush was out on the campaign trail right up to Election Day,
sticking to the same old script. As he put it at a "victory rally" [2] in
Georgia:

"The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and
America loses. ... The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican
goal is to win in Iraq. We will not run from thugs and assassins."

Of course it was all fiction, just as the administration's Iraq policy has
been based on fiction, from start to finish. Even the pathetic attempt at a
"November surprise," [3] the death sentence pronounced on Saddam Hussein on
the eve of the election, was filled with fiction. The mainstream press gave
us images of the "good guys" -- the Shi'ites -- celebrating with us, while
the "bad guys" -- the pro-Saddam Sunnis -- threatened revenge. Meanwhile,
behind the scenes, the Bush administration was busy wooing [4] those very
Sunnis to our side to fend off the rise of pro-Iranian Shi'ite rule. But
that reality had to be ignored to make the fiction work.

The Media Chooses Its Story

On Election Day, though, all of Karl Rove's storytelling couldn't stave off
the verdict the voters pronounced on the GOP. Then the media had its chance
to slice up those polling and voting numbers and turn them into its own
version of a good narrative. The result, as in 2004, was a mix of fact and
fiction.

This year, the "values voters" were scarcely given a walk-on part. In fact,
they were largely written off before the voting even happened. In most
pre-election polls, when voters were asked what issue would influence them
most, hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage were not even
offered as an option. As it turned out, according to the exit polls [5] on
the House of Representatives, almost 30%% of white evangelicals [6] voted
Democratic. So the old story of 2004 just wouldn't play.

Of course, the story that did play, right up on the marquee in bright
shining letters, was: IRAQ.

But the polling data didn't demand that narrative. In most pre-election
polling, less than a third of respondents said that Iraq was, to them, the
most important issue in the election -- and the economy often ran a close
second. In the House exit polls, only 36%% of voters claimed they voted
mainly to show opposition to George W. Bush and his policies. Nearly 40%%
said that local issues mattered most to them. However, 67%% said that Iraq
was "extremely" or "very" important in deciding their vote. But 74%% said the
same thing about corruption, while 82%% said it about the economy. And all
these groups voted pro-Democratic in nearly the same numbers. Moreover,
there was a direct correlation between income and voting: The richer they
were, the more likely voters were to go Republican.

So the media could easily have told us that the electorate had no clear
focus. But their job -- no less than Karl Rove's -- is to tell coherent
(news) stories that seem to make sense of it all. They could just as easily
have spun a tale about the middle class repudiating an administration run by
and for the rich who corrupt our government. But that is certainly not the
story of choice for the corporate elite who own the media.

On the other hand many among the elite, and many editors and reporters in
their pay, do want us to change the course in Iraq. So they took up Karl
Rove's election-season invitation to focus on Iraq, but stood his story on
its head. The president lent credibility to their new narrative by promptly
linking the electoral "thumpin" [7] to Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. He
seemed to confirm the media's story of the election as a negative verdict on
"staying the course" in Iraq.

Of course, that narrative does have a good dose of truth in it. Most
Americans do now oppose Bush's Iraq policy and particularly its
implementation. But the Democratic win does not mean that voters simply saw
through the administration's lies and now demand the true story. They just
want a new story.

Us and Them

In fact, truth didn't play much of a role in this year's elections at all.
The airwaves were filled with negative ads concocted largely of fictional
distortions of every wild sort. No matter how much we say we hate such ads,
they work, because they reach deep into the heart of darkness of the
political landscape. That's where Rove's narrative was supposed to do its
magic, creating a simple moral drama of good versus evil that would send
enough of the public to the polls reassured that there is an enduring moral
order amid the chaotic tides of change that always seem to threaten our
lives.

All that chaos makes it hard to hold onto any enduring sense of identity. If
you can't say precisely what you stand for, it's a relief, at least, to know
what you stand against. That's why so many of us are eager to have an enemy.
We get a sense of certainty and clarity when we define ourselves in
opposition to others. "I may not know exactly what I am," is what we, in
effect, say to ourselves, "but I sure as hell know I'm not one of them."

That psychological trick works best when, as in the negative campaign ads,
we create outsized fictional images of what we are not. By exaggerating the
evil of the enemy, we assure ourselves that we are on the side of absolute
goodness. It may be more than coincidence that a campaign season with a
record number of negative ads, filled with exaggeration, brought out more
voters [8] than any non-presidential election in 24 years. Some of them
voted for the candidate they liked. But most voted against the candidate --
and thus the story -- they disliked.

If our political life, like our identity, works by saying who and what we
are against, what did the voters really say they are against? Exceedingly
modest numbers of them are against war itself. More are against this war --
and have been from the beginning. But when the war started -- despite what
was the largest prewar antiwar movement in our history -- it had broad
public support. Even now, no great wave of moral revulsion against the war
seems to be sweeping across the land. As far as can be told, not many of
those voters who switched from the Republican to Democratic column were
expressing outrage at the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died
since we invaded their country. In fact, few seemed to care, or notice, when
the media quickly disappeared the most recent, rigorous Johns Hopkins study
[9] (published in The Lancet, the prestigious British scientific journal)
that confirmed the shocking magnitude of death in Iraq.

Most Americans seem content enough to see the U.S. use its immense military
force no matter how many of "them" died -- but only as long as we win. We
know what it means to be an American as long as we face an enemy who is not
just an evildoer, but a loser. To see our side losing, however, just doesn't
fit our national story.

For once, you don't have to be a conservative to agree with George F. Will
[10]: "Republicans sank beneath the weight of Iraq, the lesson of which is
patent [to most Americans]: Wars of choice should be won swiftly rather than
lost protractedly." As another major reason for the GOP defeat, Will added
that the Bush administration was guilty of "nation-building grandiosity
pursued incompetently."

Across the political spectrum, an incompetent, losing war effort creates
cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the United States, by definition, is
supposed to be Number One -- as in, for instance, a phrase you hear a lot
less of lately: "the world's sole remaining superpower." On the other hand,
just about every American knows, deep down, that the U.S. is screwing up in
Iraq. Most of us no longer believe that we can win, or even know what
winning would mean. But there is no place in the dominant narrative of this
country for a bumbling unsuccessful war. It's like trying to put a square
story peg into a round narrative hole. Just ask the ghost of Lyndon B.
Johnson as it nightly stalks the halls of the Bush White House.

Apple Pie, Mom, and a New Tale for a Lost War

It is a rare day when I agree with neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer [11].
Yet he was right on target when he said: "The election will be a referendum
of sorts on Iraq. But it will be registering nothing more than uneasiness
and discontent. Had the Democrats offered a coherent alternative to the
current policy, one could draw lessons as to what course the country should
take."

A number of Democrats, like Congressman John Murtha, have spelled out their
own plans for getting us out of the Iraq fiasco. But the Democrats as a
party have not yet come close to agreeing on a single, clear alternative
policy -- no less a story to tell about it. They've merely played on our
cognitive dissonance about the Bush administration's losing war by telling
us what they are against. So a midterm vote against the administration could
not have been in favor of any specific Iraq policy.

That means it's now up to us to decide whether Krauthammer's conclusion
proves true: "If either friends or enemies interpret the results as a
mandate for giving up, they will be mistaken."

That's certainly what the Bush administration wants us to believe. And
advance reports suggest that the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group [12] (of
which Robert Gates was a member until he was nominated to be the new
Secretary of Defense) will probably agree. But the election results hint at
a public hungry for a new story about the war. And George Bush's day-after
response -- sacking Rumsfeld -- shows that, however reluctantly, he will
change his story in response to voter disaffection. The public may be able
to force policy change too, but only if there is a compelling new story that
demands a new policy.

This is a job for the peace movement, whose role has always been to
articulate alternatives. Now is the time to offer a new narrative using an
alternative recipe, the same one that the peace movement has always used:
Take big dollops of truth and moral compassion in equal measure and stir.

But there's another ingredient as well, one that peace activists should
borrow from Rove's recipe, despite its recent failure: To succeed, the "new"
story must contain elements of an old, familiar morality tale about good
against evil. It must offer reassurance that there is still some ethical
clarity amid growing war-bred dissonance, and some permanence amid all the
change. That means it should be built on time-honored, bedrock principles
from the mainstream of American political discourse.

Here are a few that those who would like to begin telling a tale of a lost
war might consider picking up:

* Pragmatic Yankee ingenuity: If one approach isn't working, we Americans
don't let our pride get in the way of simply trying something else.

* The innate goodness of American motives: As a people, we are not by nature
imperialists; it's not in our cultural DNA to send troops to occupy the
lands of people who don't want us there.

* Self-determination: We started the ball rolling in 1776 and it wasn't just
for us either; it was for every individual and every nation; it's as
American as apple pie and Mom that we keep our noses out of other people's
business.

* The sacredness of life: Every human life is precious -- and what American
can't get behind that?

* It's the American way to give citizens a fair chance to have their
opinions heard and respected or we wouldn't have had a Bill of Rights: The
humblest guy or gal might have the best idea for fixing things -- and the
American people might have the best ones of all.

* We Americans trust that most people, deep down, are reasonable:
Eventually, they can see that compromise is better than killing.

* And, most American of all, we apply all our principles not only here at
home but in every land -- including Iraq.

There isn't an American principle in this list that the Bush administration
hasn't tried its best to trash. That's why a new narrative built on any or
all of them is bound to confound the President and his advisors. It also
offers hope of building real pressure for a new policy that would actually
get our troops out of Iraq, removing the main irritant that keeps the
violence there going.

But the Democrats who now control Congress won't embrace a new story (or a
genuinely new policy) unless they feel some pressure. Lobbyists are already
descending on the new majority in droves. Now is the time for the peace
movement to push its way to the head of the line.

Copyright 2006 Ira Chernus

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson