AFTER EVERYTHING, after all the hue and cry about the Supreme Court and “spoilers” and Social Security and foreign-policy competence, the Presidential election may have turned out to be what I thought it was back in the summer–a matter of branding, of the demographic target marketing of similar products.
As Republican analyst Laura Ingraham has pointed out, Gore was marketed to the “hip” areas, the big-money urban centers. Bush was marketed to the “square” areas, the rural midsection and Sunbelt areas. The “swing states” tended to be the ones where these two market niches had near-equal constituencies.
Chief among these “battlegrounds” was Florida, where, as of the time I’m writing this (11:18 p.m. PST), two TV networks have just proclaimed George Bush fils the winner of the state’s electoral votes, and hence of the whole national shebang.
Bush was able to do this by simultaneously running against the Clinton legacy and with Clintonesque tactics. He packaged himself, like the 1992 Clinton, as the confident, smiling, hand-shaking, baby-kissing Good Ole Boy (who only incidentally had the backing of real-power-and-money institutions).
Bush also won back enough of the territories that Bush pere had won in ’88 but lost in ’92, by distancing himself, on a superficial marketing level, from the rhetorical excesses of recent-past Repo men. No Contracts With (or on) America, no impeachment-era moralizing. The serious anti-abortion and pro-handgun arguments were saved for local ads in those states where such statements were likely to play. In the rest of the country, Bush ran away from the worst of Gingrich and Limbaugh and DeLay (and even, by implication, Reagan), at least as much as Gore had run away from Clinton and Clinton had previously run away from the Democrats’ FDR-liberal heritage.
What corporate-Democrat media people labeled “the Nader spoiler factor” might indeed have been a factor there, and also in Oregon and Wisconsin. But the Nader challenge may also have reinvigorated the Gore campaign, almost enough to have won.
For the longest time this summer and even into early fall, Gore was offering nothing to ordinary voters but a stay-the-course economic plan and a vague promise to keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of Roe-v.-Wade haters. Thanks to Nader, Gore had to rediscover the leftish-leaning voters he and Clinton had written off as irrelevant since circa 1993. But the too-little-too-late part of this was that Gore’s campaigners and media flunkies never did come up with a solid argument why Naderites should vote for Gore rather than merely against Bush.
In the end, you had a Democrat (once, supposedly, the party of populist crusading) who’d let himself be branded as the scared-stiff status-quo defender, and a Republican (once, supposedly, the party of boardrooms and golf courses) who’d worked hard to get himself branded as the affable dumb-cluck whose heart was in the right place.
One complication: Bush fils, like Bush pere, will be taking office just as those pesky economic indicators are starting to turn south. It’ll be fun to see Bush blaming Clinton for any ’01 recession, and to see the Demos blame Bush for it as part of a drive to win back Congress in ’02.
The Naderites insisted all along that these images were just images, that there was no significant difference between the two big candidates or between the two big parties. Well, there’s also no significant difference between Glenfiddich and plastic-bottled rotgut–if you happen to be a Prohibitionist. To someone who only thinks in absolutes, the Big 2 can indeed seem like interchangeable parts. But in the subtleties, in the details, there’s still enough variation between the party of Rupert Murdoch and the party of Time Warner to be worth a vote.
(Disclaimer: That pesky Fla. vote’s so close, it might just swing back by the time you read this.)
In local stuff, meanwhile, the Demos and progressives won pretty much everything they’d reasonably hoped to. John Carlson and (apparently) Sen. Fishstick were defeated, as was the worst of Tim Eyman’s two initiatives. The save-the-Monorail initiative seems to have passed. Now if we can only get decent challengers for mayor and city attorney next year….
MIDMORNING UPDATE: Yep, Fla.’s too close to call again. Recounts are underway (with brother Jeb Bush, the governor there, promising to “take charge”). Best coverage of the impasse: The Onion. And Sen. Fishstick isn’t conceding yet.
TOMORROW: The ‘war on drugs’ as a drug.
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