Epiphanies of a Massachusetts Liberal

Frustration, anger, and shock pulsed through many people I know. Then a kind of sadness quickly displaced the more volatile emotions. It was something closer to confusion than melancholy, nearer to paralysis than despair. These are feelings that people of my generation never associated with politics. The charged conflicts of the 1960s were stories from my parents’ mouths, and I was three years old when Ronald Reagan won the presidency. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” of 2000 hoodwinked me into believing that it was bad when the Supreme Court handed him the election, but not abominable. All this is to say that while politics were a great interest of mine, they rarely had the power to touch my emotions.

Bush’s recent victory was different. I realized that I was distraught not simply because John Kerry lost the election, but because I found it initially incomprehensible. As I came to understand the reasons for Kerry’s defeat, I also started to realize how deep my ignorance ran – how little I understood about my own nation. It is a tenet of conservative dogma that Massachusetts liberals like myself are out of touch with America. We are the people who George Wallace mocked, Reagan weakened, and both Bushes conquered. It is all but certain that the Democrats will nominate no more Massachusetts liberals in the near future. But it is not yet time to write an epitaph; instead, this election coaxed in many liberals healthier epiphanies.

From 1940 to 1964, my native Massachusetts voted for the presidential victor each time. Since then, the state sided with the winner only in the three elections that Democrats captured – Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. While our recent governors have all been Republicans, Massachusetts prides itself – and attracts conservative derision – as a bastion of American liberalism. Since Reagan’s landslide over Mondale and Dukakis’s thrashing, I have known that “liberal” was a dirty word in the rest of America. I knew also that if a politician could not elude that tag, neither could he escape national defeat. Yet this line of thinking carries with it a certain determinism, one reinforced every time the country’s map pops up in two tones. The tautology has it that a “Massachusetts liberal” cannot win a red state because red states do not support Massachusetts liberals. There are many things short-sighted in the common quest to break down America into red and blue. A world so divided is easy, clear, and satisfies some inner part of everyone. It is also inaccurate.

Red states possess bleeding-heart liberals and unreconstructed leftists, just as the citadels of blue contain many conservatives. This first became apparent to me in 1988, when I was in the 6th grade. At my public school in Springfield, Massachusetts, I would answer “Bush is a Tush” to any students who yelled, “The Duke makes me Puke.” While the hallways did not exactly brim with political banter, it was enough for me to realize that Republicans existed even in Massachusetts. Today, that lesson becomes clear when one colors the nation’s election map by counties, instead of states. One then glimpses large bubbles of blue alongside those of red. This is true in almost every state that contains both cities and suburbs, both whites and racial minorities.

In effect, every state qualifies as mixed except for the Great Plains and Utah. Bush won by the most number of votes (155,010) in Orange County, California; Kerry gained his second-biggest margin right next door, in Los Angeles County (714,771). Of course, this is in part because California has the most people – and those counties do not account for the widest percentage victories. They are nevertheless significant. Smack in the middle of America, the Kansas City area divided evenly between Bush and Kerry. Kerry won the Denver area, while Colorado Springs voted strongly for Bush. The Deep South went for Bush on the whole, but not without large pockets of blue. New Orleans and Atlanta gave Kerry wide margins, as did Austin, Brownsville, and El Paso, Texas. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland voted for Kerry in large numbers. The rest of California (my temporarily adopted state) was Bush country. Alas, Bush garnered only 37 percent in Massachusetts. My native state notwithstanding, the most meaningful political differences were within states, not between them.

Up until Election Day, I thought I understood why Massachusetts liberals possessed such a bad name. Liberals were notorious for taxing and spending, and in any battle of war and peace, spines would crack as they embraced plowshares instead of swords. Dukakis could never overcome the stereotypes, even as he donned a combat helmet and climbed atop a tank. But nobody ever accused John F. Kennedy, the architect of the Bay of Pigs and master of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as being soft on defense. Clearly, a lot has changed in the parties’ foreign policies since the last days a Massachusetts politician occupied the White House. These decades-long political evolutions augured poorly for John Kerry, especially in the face of a sitting president who waged war while he sliced taxes for the rich. Kerry did his best to blunt the image of a Massachusetts liberal. He won the Democratic primaries because of his experience in Vietnam, and because of his roving “band of brothers.” In the series of presidential debates that Kerry handily won, he gazed into the camera and promised awkwardly – yet sincerely – not to raise taxes on the middle class. This man would not so easily be smeared, I thought, and more to the point, Karl Rove and George W. Bush attempted to tar Kerry more as a “flip-flopper” than a liberal. Kerry was the rare man from the Bay State who could win the Buckeye State, and with it the presidency. He would have been the first northern Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to carry Ohio. John F. Kennedy did not win Ohio.

My misconceptions were also John Kerry’s, and those errors of judgment marked Democrats everywhere -- far beyond Cape Cod and the Berkshires. Many of us thought religious issues could not swing an entire election, particularly a wartime election, and especially if overall turnout was high. Those long lines of African-Americans in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Jacksonville provided so much comfort and promised so much hope. On the wings of a galvanized black electorate, a sturdy Democratic base, and a fair share of independents, a Massachusetts liberal could soar again to the presidency.

I never envisioned, and I am not sure Kerry ever did, how evangelicals might assert the power to clip those wings. They showed that religious Americans dwelled much closer to the soul of the nation than I might ever be, my college years in Ohio notwithstanding. I am unsure whether they worry about Bush’s war, his stubborn refusal to shoulder any blame, or his woeful handling of the surplus. I did not realize until Election Day how many people the Republicans could draw to the polls, and how American politics would beat the rhythms of their hearts. I still wonder what the election might have looked like if thousands more had died in Iraq, and thousands more workers had lost their jobs. I wonder whether it would have looked much the same.

A consensus explanation emerged for all of this. The exit polls tell us, as do the op-eds, "Crossfires," and bloggers, that the most voters cited “moral values” as the primary factor in their decision -- more than the war in Iraq, the economy, or terrorism. Pollsters and columnists engaged in a battle over the meaning of the phrase, “moral values.” Some argued that the question was posed too vaguely to have any real meaning; others believed it bequeathed religious conservatives with a mandate. Perhaps in this instance, it is a literal accuracy to say that only God knows their aspirations. Yet the argument over exit polling cannot obscure a fact that I, in my dim awareness of America, had not previously known or accepted. It is that white evangelicals and born-again Christians outnumber African-Americans by more than two to one. Massachusetts is a heavily white state, but from its shores America still looks much less white and evangelical than it actually is.

The numbers alone best tell this story. Out of a total electorate of roughly 115 million, almost 27 million identified themselves as white evangelicals or born-agains. Almost 13 million are African-Americans. Bush won the votes of roughly 21 million white evangelicals and nearly one million blacks. Kerry gained the votes of approximately 6 million white evangelicals and 12 million African-Americans. Based on the votes of those two groups alone, Bush garnered a total of 22 million votes to Kerry’s 18 million. That difference mirrored the margin in the popular vote. One can slice the election results in millions of different shapes, but I found these statistics the most eye-opening. It is not to say that elections are decided only by white evangelicals and African-Americans; far from it. Polls also show that Bush fared better among Latinos, Catholics, and women than he did four years ago. But the statistics about evangelical voters and African-American voters highlight a noteworthy reality. Americans who dwell in urban areas, particularly in the Northeast and on the west coast, cannot help but gain skewed perceptions of the country. The nation is far less racially diverse, far less Jewish, and far more born-again, than it looks to us. Liberals may not be out of touch with rural America because of their pointy heads, but because of their eyes. Those of us in coastal cities look around, and sometimes think that we can glimpse America. It is difficult to disbelieve one’s eyes.

Misperceptions do not stop with the varying numbers of racial minorities and religious Americans; they only begin there. Women in coastal cities also look a lot different than they do in the Heartland. Forty-eight percent of American women voted for a president who boasts about the “culture of life” he aims to promote. If the women I know voted on the grounds of “moral values,” they would have voted for the candidate who vowed to protect their control over their own bodies and lives. Of all the facts of the election, this one continues to baffle me. Yet I must also confess that I never asked the mothers of my childhood friends what they thought about abortion. For Massachusetts remains a rather righteous place. The Puritan heritage is somewhere still with us, and Massachusetts possesses a large number of religious Catholics. Here was another fact I learned in the 6th grade. On one day of the week, my school bus would be flooded with students who normally took other buses. They were all headed to catechism class, and the after-school exodus to church reduced my friends and I to fledgling 2-on-2 games of tackle football. Today’s statistics still show that the divorce rate in Massachusetts is lower than that in any other state. Massachusetts residents take their faith seriously. But they vote on matters of dollars and cents, and war and peace.

Coastal liberals who moan about their plight can take a perverse solace in the fact that so many fates are worse than our own. Most of us are not soldiers in Iraq, and few have family members fighting. We are not poor, and neither are many of us Arab-Americans. These people will bear the brunt of a second Bush term. We often marvel that middle-class citizens of the Midwest and South vote against their economic self-interest when they vote for Republicans. Yet wealthy liberals in Marin County or the Upper West Side just as surely vote against their economic interest when they support Democrats. There is, however, one undeniable manner in which coastal liberals voted their self-interest. In New York City and Washington, DC, the two cities struck on September 11, John Kerry garnered over 75 percent of the total votes. These citizens truly feel that Bush’s foreign policy is wrong-headed, confused, and ultimately makes them less safe when it increases anti-Americanism abroad. So the large-city vote for Kerry had also to do with the hope that his policies could have dampened in some way – if not drastically reduced – the anger that fuels terrorism, and that keeps cities like New York and Washington in peril. It is residents in the coastal cities of blue, and not the red middle, for whom terrorist attacks constitute a part of everyday life.

With “moral values” yesterday’s news, many pundits have turned their attention to the fates of the two parties. As we can see now, Karl Rove made a brilliant maneuver when he ran in reverse. While first term presidents often veer toward the middle in hopes of re-election, Rove exposed that conventional wisdom as merely conventional. Rove and Bush spurned “compassionate conservatism,” strategically lurched to the right, and reaped the electoral dividends. Now Democrats wonder what magic formula will allow them to compete in those lands of red. I have no great ideas about what to do, nor any predictions about the direction of the party. Two “northeastern liberals” – Howard Dean and Hillary Rodham Clinton – are rumored top contenders, along with John Edwards, who himself may be forever tainted as the running mate of a Massachusetts liberal. I do not know who the Democrats will or should nominate, but I can be pretty certain that Massachusetts liberals will warrant little consideration. If it were up to me, however, I could wholeheartedly support one more good fight. Perhaps the Democrats should nominate Barney Frank, or resuscitate Ted Kennedy. At least, a child of the Bay State can dream. Uncomprehending naivete is often more pleasant than clear-headed frustration.