Rodney

Lot of attitude here, sorry to see it.

In my opinion, because both candidates ignored or glossed over the most looming issues in the campaign -- budget deficit, massive increases in public debt and its effect on the dollar, whether the tax cuts were working, the coming collapse of Medicare and the health care system when the mass of boomers crosses the big 60 (all the long-term, structural issues, in other words) -- all a lot of voters really had to go by was style and symbolism. A few more people like Bush's symbolism better. He won.

As a liberal -- and you can be a liberal without being a Democrat or thinking that big government is _always_ the answer -- I wasn't really pleased with either candidate. I voted Kerry because I thought he might eventually be more realistic in facing the domestic problems to come, the ones that George Bush will now face.

So George Bush won reelection on symbolism -- Christianity, a "moral outlook," opposition to abortion and gay marriage (real issues to some, but not to the big-money powerbrokers who aim to make billions by backing the right candidate). According to the pundits, terror wasn't the deciding issue. In any case, Bush has about a year before the glow of that symbolism starts to fade, less if we lose another thousand or two people in Iraq with no results, or if we sink into another recession.

At that point, many of the people who voted for a Christian, moral man will begin to think more with their pocketbooks. CNN polls on election day showed that 45 percent of Kerry voters had family members who'd lost jobs in the last two years, and only 22 percent of Bush voters had. If Bush voters begin to feel the heat more, through job loss or health insurance woes, Bush will have to step up to the plate with something that provides immediate relief. Health savings accounts won't do it, not for the many low-income Republican voters who have little income to save. More tax cuts won't do it, not with the results of the current ones being so slow and lackluster (he'd have been better off to target mainly the middle and lower class with his tax cuts, but his political ties didn't allow him to do that).

What do the Democrats do? For a start, find themselves another southern or border-state governor who can talk the evangelical talk. Charges that high-level Demos look down on the religious working class of the heartland are probably quite justified. The New Deal is not dead -- people now expect government help in hard times, in a way that they never did before the '30s (my mom was alive then, and poor -- she told me what the score used to be). The Demos just need the right mouthpiece to invoke it.

Personally, I'd like the two-party system to self-destruct. I'd love to see some kind of legislative system in which coalitions of parties could hold control instead of one monolithic party. If they are stable, such systems tend to encourage moderate government. And as a liberal, moderation is more than good enough for me. It gets there in the end. That's my major quibble with Bush -- he doesn't know about moderation or compromise. I read a quote from him today in which he said he'd be willing to reach out to people on the other side of the ideological divide if they could embrace his goals. A statement like that characterizes Bush as, at best, unclear on the concept of what "reaching out" means.