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There is a huge group of potential voters in the US that no one touches. Let's call them the None of the Aboves (NotAs) because if the ballot had a line marked None of the Above, None of the Above would win in a landslide every election. NotAs are people who, when politics comes up, tune it out. They don't care because it doesn't catch their attention, or when it does, it's usually the negative politics and thus confirms their decision to avoid politics and politicians in general. NotAs are 50% of the adult population. To catch them, we have to sell them with "Elvis" and deliver with Populism.
First, the "Elvis". This is Molly Ivins' word for what Clinton had but Gore didn't, but it's more than just what Clinton had; other pols have it or don't, too. It's an indefinable quality that makes women throw panties at Tom Jones' concerts. It's part sex appeal, part vision, part articulation. It's the hint of (non)scandal and the positive politics that kept Clinton popular even during the height of the Impeachment debacle.
There's got to be a bit of sex and steam in a candidate to get people excited initially, and thus willing to work and vote. There has to be a little bit of National Enquirer first to get people to read the New York Times article, and then to read the Harper's essay. I sometimes think that Genifer Flowers was the best thing that happened to Clinton in 1992, and then in 1996, not re-electing him (with all the scandals) would have been like turning off Independence Day before Will Smith flew the UFO! The national mood in 1996 was "We gotta see how this turns out!!" The scandals caught the attention of the NotAs, and got them out to vote both times.
But we Dems learned the wrong lesson from that sorry mess. Ever since the Impeachment, Dems have been leery of putting out their best candidates and fully supporting anyone, for fear of another round with the politics of personal destruction. What the Democratic Party's leadership has missed is that the politics of personal destruction gave us an incredibly popular president! Yes, it's hard to work in that environment, but it's better to be in an environment where it's tough to work than be locked out entirely. Gore didn't have much Elvis, but a running mate who did would have helped. Instead, they gave us Lieberman, the anti-Elvis; he actually sucked what little Elvis Gore had right out of him like a black hole sucking down light.
The 2000 election was a travesty in many ways, but the fact that it was even a close election is the biggest donut in a nefarious Jim Baker's dozen. As a nation, we were going pretty darn well economically; people were finally digging out of the financial Mount Trashmore of the 1980s. Moreover, the world looked pretty good. Ireland was near peace and the Palestinians and the Israelis were talking. Eastern Europe was stabilizing and China wasn't eying us like a plate of three-day-old egg foo yung. Miracles had happened economically, socially, politically and globally. Gore should have strolled into the Presidency with a huge margin.
But George Bush got the Elvis award because of the scandally past - the drug rumors, the booze, the TANG, the money "irregularities", the trading of Sammy Sosa - not in spite of it. Bush managed close elections against both Gore and Kerry because Dems did not want a repeat of the Clinton fights. The problem was that both Gore and Kerry are so straight-arrow that they didn't fire much imagination. If 2000 hadn't been close, there would have been no Florida, and thus no Bush v. Gore. The lesson we needed to take home from that specific late unpleasantness was not to find the most inoffensive candidate we can, but to find the candidate that people are willing to walk over hot coals for.
So in 2008, we have to sell the NotAs with Elvis.... and who that is, I don't know. But once we sell them, we have to deliver, because the one thing all NotAs agree on is that they hate politics and what they hate about politics is that it seems like it is Bought and Paid For, inaccessible, and not about "We, the People." Dems need to get some good, old-fashioned Populism going and let the NotAs know that the reason their credit card payments went up is because of the war in Iraq is making the dollar weaker due to deficit spending; the reason their raises got eaten up by their health insurance premiums is because the corporations wrote the law; the reason their kid can't afford to go to college is because of Bush-sponsored spending cuts and class warfare. We, as Dems, do a terrible job of articulating A+B=C to the NotAs. We're not much better at articulating it to ourselves. When we try to do it in 10 second soundbites, we get worse.
Our march to the middle is killing us with the NotAs, too. It's not Populist and that's where the NotAs are. They are not "middle of the road" type moderates - there is no such thing. Everyone has opinions and national studies say that most of "us" are pro-choice, frustrated with defense spending, have needed or will need some sort of public assistance in our lives, like birth control and are in favor of single payer health care. “We” are big on parks, forests and cleaning up the environment; we like efficient, effective spending and supporting our military personnel.... typically Dem concepts. We are a nation of strong feeling, and most of it is liberal. The party that should speak to that feeling, however, has been moving further away from the majority opinion and toward the extremists on the Right. The NotAs get disgusted by that, the Dem stronghold groups feel left out, and the Right is not appeased. The Right pushes harder to the right, the Dem leadership follows, and the NotAs grow. This is not serving us well, and our leadership needs to take note.
The last reason everybody loses the NotAs is expectations, and we do worse on this than the Repugs. We Dems have this nasty set of "our type" expectations. It's not the "our type" of the country club set, or even the "our type" of the more unReconstructed elements of the Dixiecrats. It's an expectation that we don't have to work for our votes, and we are guilty of it. The expectation is this: "Who else are the (insert typically Democratic-affiliated group here) going to vote for?"
The answer is: if the Party doesn't speak for and to "us", "we" won't vote. There are a lot of NotAs out there and there are more every year.
Example: Clinton had the best turnout since 1917 of unmarried women between 21 and 30 per 1000 voters. Lest you think this insignificant, do recall that there were a lot of unmarried women in the 1920 election thanks to WWI, the influenza epidemic and the fact that the right TO vote was very new. Clinton caught the attention of women and they turned out for him. John Kerry had the lowest turn out of the same segment of the population since 1974 (and I would bet that the activism that went into feminism and reproductive rights had a lot to do with that....) There are more young and unmarried/early first marriage women in the United States than any other single population group, but do the Dems court us? Hell no! They expect us to fall in line and vote with our uteri. Instead, we are the most disconnected set of voters since the Amish.
So how do we get NotAs to sit up and pay attention? NotAs like political outsiders because they don't seem as tainted with Bought and Paid For Syndrome. Those political outsiders are more likely to win because NotAs don't trust politicians. Rove picked up on that in 2000 and played it hard. It helped narrow the gap that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
The last time the NotAs got politically active in any great numbers was in 1992 with Ross Perot, and contrary to conventional wisdom, they did not "throw" the election. They were evenly split as to Bush vs. Clinton. Clinton still would have won if Perot had not won - Perot voters would probably not have voted.
What that, and the other 3rd party elections in the past century tell us is this: a strong 3rd party candidate with moderate name recognition and no political history would probably win 2008 if s/he came out with an apolitical, socially moderate, diplomatically protectionist, fiscally balanced campaign. If for example, Brendon Fraser (to be perfectly silly) decided to run as an Independent with a platform of fiscal moderation, an Iraq exit plan, some job creation and tax breaks for those making less than 55K, and a federally funded, elementary education small voucher system, he'd win. It would be a landslide and we'd get an political incompetent because s/he wouldn’t know how to work in a tripartite system.
So this is how we win... the question are Who? And will we even try?
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