America votes, Bush wins, the world responds

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Bush is back
Paul Rogers

Until the weekend I had more or less assumed that George W Bush would win comfortably – the politics of fear is remarkably persuasive and John Kerry seemed unable to make a big enough impression. The last few days of the campaign seemed to change that enough to suggest a cliffhanger, so the three of us reckoned it was worth staying up for the results – my wife, one of our sons who was home for a few days, and me.

By 2am, nothing was very clear except that Kerry was not making the kind of progress we’d hoped for and we were all having difficulty staying awake. I have to admit I eventually went to bed, drifting in and out of sleep while half–heartedly listening to the radio.

Now, on a grey November morning, it is pretty obvious that Bush is back in, so it’s goodbye to Fallujah, watch out Damascus and Tehran, and we will no doubt rearrange the deckchairs as the dollar plunges.

Not feeling desperately happy, I’ve just been across to the field to feed the sheep. They aren’t bothered one way or the other. Moreover, a pair of Mallard ducks have taken up residence on the pond and seem thoroughly content with their new home. It may not be back to reality, but there’s some sense of perspective. Meanwhile, what on earth am I going to write about for this week’s openDemocracy column?

Bush’s bold worldview
Douglas Murray

With President Bush’s popular vote increased by 3–4 million, and a Republican electoral hat–trick of Senate, House of Representatives and President, it looks like Michael Moore may have to find a new joke.

The “Bush stole the election” jibe isn’t going to work this time. Which means Moore, like bin Laden, will probably just go on milking My Pet Goat for another four years.

Because this new mandate from the American people is vast, popular and vindicating.

The three years since 9/11 have shown President Bush to have a bold worldview. Thanks to that vision, last month the people of Afghanistan went to the ballot–box and appointed their own president. Thanks to that same vision, in two months’ time the people of Iraq will follow Afghanistan and America to the polls – an unimaginable feat four years ago.

Al–Qaida in Iraq have been escalating their operations in order to try to defeat the powerful call of democracy. Under Kerry, and in the wake of an upsurge in terrorism in Iraq, a precipitous withdrawal of American troops seemed possible. Under the president who initiated the new phase in Iraq’s history, it is not. Iraq will not be abandoned. Bush’s re–election confirms that it is the terrorists who will continue to be against the wall, and freedom that shall flourish.

There is one remaining, if relatively unimportant, source of joy in all this. That is the upset this result will cause among those, largely on the left, in Europe and elsewhere who are now so fantastically sidelined – the sinister fools who, after their communist idol fell, threw in their lot with the next opponent of freedom which came along. It is impossible not to relish the prospect of the rage Bush will continue to cause among the “anti–war”– riors and the fool–pacifist mujahideen.

As democracy storms on, throughout America and the world, a joyous side–effect has been not just that those who jumped on the jihadist horse–and–cart are now left far behind – but that they’re not even being missed.

Needed: a faith–based Left
Dave Belden

There is a gulf between the liberal intelligentsia and many religious people all over the world. It was seen in this election. The primary liberal task of the next four – even forty – years, is to bridge that divide.

The gulf is partly intellectual. Modern ideas – Darwinism, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, the social construction of gender – are often complex, counterintuitive and bruising to the human ego, and challenging to holy texts. Education is crucial, but so is some humility. God has been prematurely pronounced dead too many times. We could give that one a rest for a while.

The gulf is even more about values. This seems odd, because modern liberal values surely owe as much to religious as secular origins. Many religious leaders have focused on the points of disagreement with liberal values. So in the United States election they emphasised abortion, stem cells, homosexuality and faith in a commander–in–chief who has faith. This must be good marketing, because it works. But they also share values in common: raising up the poor and the oppressed, compassion, freedom of conscience, resistance to religious tyranny across the world.

One valuable thing that the liberal intelligentsia could do in the coming years would be to read and get to know more religious progressives: give them respect, learn from them, work with them, encourage them to take more leadership in our society. It takes some humility, again. Remember that no great secular causes – from separation of church and state to abolition of slavery, Indian independence to American civil rights, even democracy itself – were accomplished without alliances between secular and religious progressives.

This is a worldwide necessity. If liberal ideas and politics are to survive and prevail in all currently religious countries, not just the United States, they must be understood and expressed in religious as well as secular terms.

The sovereign’s smirk
David Theo Goldberg

For a hopeful moment it looked like The Smirk would be gone. Late in the afternoon, as east–coast state polls closed, exit interviews and reports of almost record voter turnouts suggested that Bush’s re–election was in trouble.

By the evening news on the “left coast”, the trend had clearly shifted in favour of W. Back and forth, emotions veered between anguish and a not–too–rational hope as a state here and there turned to Kerry. The colour of blood was seeping across the map of America, the south and midwest awash in the red of Republicans. Democratic blue dotted the northeastern states and the whole of the western seaboard. The colour of diversity is blue, that of moralistic homogenous univocity red. "W," after all, stands for whiteness too.

By 7pm on the west coast clock it was Ohio or bust. And these days in the United States, blue collar trends red. By 10pm you could see it was all over. But it wasn’t just that we were in for four more years of the sovereign’s smirk. It was worse: a real majority of a robust electoral vote, two million and growing; a slight increase in the House of Representatives majority; three or four more seats cushioning the Senate majority; unabashed evangelical conservatives leading the long–term charge to an even more conservative Supreme Court.

Any hopes that the arrogance of a Bush re–election would be tempered by split chambers were gone by mid–evening. You could hear the collective breath of the neighbourhood letting out a soft anguished whimper.

The message of the election: don’t get ill, lose your job, or retire; don’t breathe, swim in the ocean, travel, or think critical thoughts; invest your life–savings in the stock market even though you will likely lose it all; go to community college for two years of technical training rather than to four–year universities where your mind will be turned to liberal mush; support tax cuts for the wealthy, and military service for the poor. If you step out of line, remember the Patriot Act is there to police you at home, and a loaded B52 bomber hovers overhead abroad.

As the election results were turning the evening into a prescription for Prozac, I was receiving email demands for an interview with the conservative campus newspaper, local chapter of the censorious Campus Watch, regarding two petitions I signed a couple of years ago protesting Ariel Sharon’s violence against Palestinians: reminders that the state is sustained by a bloodying civil society bent on shutting down any critical opposition.

So it’s four more years of The Smirk, I’m afraid, only broader and more sneering. The politics of fear has trumped a more reasoned response. Hobbes’s sovereign still rules. He prompts a call for a much more robust, well organized, and outspoken critical opposition of the unwilling, local and global, of states and especially across civil societies, than we have witnessed to date.

Small expectations
Antara Dev Sen

I’m in Britain now, far from my Delhi home, and stayed up late Tuesday night to watch the results. When Kerry conceded and called to congratulate Bush, I had a curious feeling of déjà vu. The British media had seemed so hopeful of a Kerry win, possessed of an overpowering belief that there was an anti–Bush wave, that the man behind the Iraq war would finally go – even though there was really nothing to substantiate the sentiment.

I had seen this smug satisfaction before – though in reverse – during the Indian elections earlier in May 2004. Then, too, the predictions had been wrong.

This morning, true, it seems very different. Once more the international media, ever–threatened by competition and ever–eager to sell dreams, was offering what would make the audience happy. A majority of the international audience wanted a change, but of course they didn’t have votes. And we happily glossed over the suspicion that a country that was already at war might not want a change in leadership.

Far removed from the American reality, looking at the grand land of opportunity from the outside, we expected, foolishly, the election to be determined largely by issues like anti–war sentiment and the economy. But exit polls show that “moral values” played a far bigger role. The international media projected a feelgood expectation, and its audience feels taken aback when we come face–to–face with the “real” America: the America that voted in its millions to defeat the challenger, even as we yelped in glee in expectation that the large turnout spelled a change in leadership.

Of course, this is the country where almost half the population believes that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, where abortion rights are being challenged by a resurgent pro–life wave, where gay rights have been slapped back in a thus–far–and–no–further stand of indignant condescension, which can launch an invasion of another country on a whim, and which refuses to commit to environmental pacts like the Kyoto agreement.

In any case, a new United States president would not make much of a difference to us in India. We have never had reason to love US foreign policy, and we weren’t expecting enormous changes now. We would just hope that the difficult relationship between India and the US doesn’t deteriorate, that Pakistan is treated with fairness but not indulgence, – especially now, when Osama bin Laden has apparently been sighted in Pakistan.

Otherwise, we in India have the same hopes and fears as the rest of the world: that the violence in Iraq stops, that the middle–east peace process gets back on track, that nuclear arms are controlled, that liberal and democratic ideas are allowed to flourish again in the land that once stood for freedom and democracy.

And that there is a little more empathy and justice in an increasingly illiberal and dangerous world.

Elation from Washington to Ethiopia
Avik Roy

Who needs a post–election espresso when we have Ethiopian taxi–drivers?

200 metres from the White House, at 7:30am on Wednesday, I boarded my cab for Reagan National Airport in Washington. I was rather bleary–eyed, having been up until 2am attending an election–night party.

“Bush won!” my driver exclaimed. “God bless America! Now that the election is over I am not afraid to speak my mind!”

After confirming that I, too, supported the president, he couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “You see, we in Ethiopia don’t have the right to vote like you do. Bush is the president who knows that we want democracy as much as westerners do. He is the one who shares our dreams and our hopes.”

He continued by expressing his frustrations with the United Nations, Europeans, and John Kerry; how for years they all looked away as socialist marionettes “starved and bled” his country. And though I knew my driver for only fifteen minutes, he seemed to me more alive at that moment than he could possibly have been in years. I found it difficult to cut him off as we arrived at the terminal, but I had a flight to catch.

There were so many themes and storylines to the election of 2004, but this Ethiopian reminded me of two memories, one personal and one historical.

The personal was of older Indian family members telling me how their British rulers thought them incapable of self–government. After all, the British had a centuries–old parliamentary tradition; the Indians had only an idol–worshipping religion and a collection of second–rate potentates.

The historical was of the election of 1984, where another president depicted as a dimwitted warmonger was elected to a second term. The intelligentsia regarded Ronald Reagan as dangerously naïve when he described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and mocked his assertions that eastern Europeans would prefer democracy to communism, if given the choice.

Today, the descendants of Victorian aristocrats and cold war fellow–travellers echoed their sentiments: that dark–skinned people don’t want democracy, and even if they do, they aren’t competent enough to make it work; that it is solipsistic to believe that people around the world yearn for liberal government.

But fifty years from now, Bush’s re–election will be seen as a watershed victory for human rights in the Muslim world, in the same lineage as those earlier victories in India and eastern Europe. By then, Immanuel Kant’s dream of a peaceful, democratic world may be very close indeed.

It would be an act of intellectual statesmanship if those who resent America’s power, and her Texan president, could find a way to rise above their emotions and root for the success of their stated ideals, for the fledgling democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it naïve of me to believe that possible? I hope not.

Now, Europe must lead
Susan George

I’m not usually much for mob scenes but the French channel TV5 had asked me to go to Planet Hollywood, a huge nightclub on Paris’s Champs–Elysèes, to be one of their commentators on the election. I stayed there, surrounded by Bobos (bourgeois–bohemians) and many politicians and media people, until after 4am; then returned home thoroughly depressed as it became clear that the initial tide favourable to Kerry had turned.

Three days earlier, I had been canvassing for Kerry in small–town Pennsylvania with friends from Cornell University. We all thought he had a very good chance, even though everyone admitted it was hard to get really enthusiastic about him. But at least he’s not a proto–fascist or a go–it–aloner, and that’s what we seem now to be stuck with.

With four clear years ahead of him, and no re–election to worry about, I fear Bush and the ghastly neo–conservatives /neo–liberals around him will now go on the rampage. They can continue with impunity their attacks on the constitution and on hard–won freedoms; while profound economic inequalities and religious obscurantism spread throughout the country. Beyond its borders they can’t really carry out another full–scale invasion – they haven’t the money and the soaring deficit was the best–kept secret of the election – but Iraq and Israel–Palestine will continue to fester and Osama bin Laden will recruit thousands of new followers.

So, “3/11” is the first day of the rest of our lives. The Brits have got to redouble their efforts to get rid of Blair. Europeans in general must understand that it’s no use hoping that the United States will join in any necessary effort or aim for any decent goal. Whether it’s about climate change, north–south solidarity, relations with the Muslim communities, social–welfare systems in our own countries or any other urgent matter, Europeans have got to lead. No one else can. No one else will. If we do, other countries from other continents will join. If we don’t and wait for Bush, we’ll wait for Godot and let the planet and its people rot.

It’s a slim chance – our own governments are bad enough – but it’s the only one we’ve got.

Fear is a mighty cement
Todd Gitlin

The Democrats played a bad hand well – not perfectly – while, in the end, Republicans played a good hand better.

Bush would have been a one–term nonentity president had it not been for Osama bin Laden’s exploitations of American weakness. Bin Laden and his squad of mass murderers presented Bush with the opportunity to transform himself into a sort of war president. Embattlement was his strong – perhaps his only – suit.

His presidency found a motif: be very afraid. The wolf pack is coming. Don’t change horses in mid–apocalypse.

Bush and his handlers, launching their calamitous bait–and–switch war, knew what rulers have known since the dawn of time: fear is a mighty cement. Fear makes strong men (especially men) craven and stupidly trusting. Fear makes them want to surrender their judgment to the man who reads them sunny children’s stories.

Bush proceeded to undercut Bush, but he had two advantages John Kerry could never undercut. The first was his readiness to serve as crusader–in–chief. Deftly he exploited the Massachusetts court’s gay–marriage decision by coming forward with a constitutional amendment. His supporters deployed the Swift Boat deception to undermine Kerry’s Vietnam war record. He and his subterranean squads were willing to go low and then lower.

The second was the gullibility and deference of the establishment media, which while poking away – usually late – at one or another administration lie, deception, and secret, were reduced to scraps of catch–up.

Meanwhile, the Democrats and their organisational allies charged forward to register, inflame, and mobilise as never before. They were idealists, they were realists.

They built up a vote–getting infrastructure. They pounced on the internet. They poured thousands of organisers into the battleground states and turned out millions of new voters. Their acumen, discipline, and effort were evident nowhere more than in Pennsylvania, where the Democrats were able to improve on their 2000 margin of victory.

But the Republicans knew how to panic a few million extra voters into the faith under the pretext that their whole way of life – their marriages, their military, even their guns and their Bible – were under assault if John Kerry won. The grievous conclusion is that, in a panicky country, doing well wasn’t good enough.

Reflection and hope
James Crabtree

I watched events unfold at the Kennedy School of Government here in Boston, in a packed and fairly rowdy forum. What strikes me this morning is the depressing familiarity. In 2000 I was also in America. I began watching the election at 6pm confident of a Democratic victory; gradually became less confident as the night went on; went to bed resigned to defeat; woke up to find it wasn’t over; quickly realised it probably was. And now it has happened again. Plans for a victory party quickly dissolving into confusion and resignation; optimism giving way under punditry.

But the choice America made is clearer this time. Bush has won, roughly fair and largely square. The reaction? Reflection and hope. Reflection on why, with a president this unpopular the American people were not convinced of a need to change the guy in charge. And hope: hope that the guy in charge will govern with a moderation and maturity not evident in his first term.

That is all. I feel numbed. It’s a grey day.

Tired but not devastated
Kajsa Klein

My night began at the Democrats Abroad party at the Stockholm Hilton (not as glamorous as it sounds, but I had decided to dress up Dixie Chick–style and play the game). To tell the truth, I was a little afraid they wouldn’t let me in. At the door, they took me for an American and started to chat away: ”Are you from a swing state? The suggested donation is 100 SEK for Americans.” Not wanting to cause any trouble, I introduced myself properly. Obviously, they had heard of me: "You won’t do anything, right?”. ”No", I said, "don’t worry!”

We stayed a few hours, but it didn’t feel like the right place to be. Mostly because I desperately missed my colleagues abroad; but also because of the ambience. In between CNN’s Christine Amanpour declaring that people around the world wanted to have a say in the election, and the discouraging predictions, there were joyless lotteries and auctions.

I went home and got some sleep. When I woke up, I chose to go online instead of turning on the TV set. There, it was alarmingly (but also comfortably) silent. Only two emails; the New York Times home page slowly and seemingly reluctantly being updated; and (on a Swedish news site) our prime minister saying that Bush was alright and that the election doesn’t make a difference for us Swedes.

I feel tired. It aches to envision four more years of Bush. I had hoped for a fresh start. But I don’t feel devastated. Voter turnout was good news. I also think that many Americans are aware that the world is trying to reach out to them – worrying, mourning, sighing, watching.

Personally I’ve learnt a great deal. It’s been fascinating to keep track of all the creative campaign innovations and inspiring to see so many people be passionate about politics. The immediate reaction a day like this is perhaps to pull out, leave the United States to its destiny, encourage reverse brain–drain and engage in some sort of “red–state” boycott as punishment. But that’s probably not the best approach, and what’s the point in being impatient? We must continue to speak out, and find a way to get rid of the fear factor – I’m sick of watching my friends in the US being afraid – but it will take time. It will also take time to demilitarise and denationalise American political culture. Time to grow up!

And the “democracy aid from below” concept? It may well be applicable to other contexts than the US’s 2004 election…

A view from Tehran
Ramin Jahanbegloo

In Tehran, I followed the American elections on EuroNews on satellite television. Unlike most of my fellow citizens who are pro–Bush (because they believe that he is the only person who can change things in the middle east and especially in Iran), I was quite disappointed by the results. I am fearful for the civil liberties of Americans and I truly hope that the nation will not move towards a new McCarthyism in the next four years.

Four more years of the Bush administration could mean a lot to Iranians in particular and middle easterners in general. It could mean an American triumphalism that tends to confuse the export of democracy all over the world (especially in the middle east) with raw power and authoritative globalism.

I have always been highly interested in and deeply respectful of the American democratic tradition. A country that has produced Jefferson, Thoreau, Whitman and Martin Luther King is not a country that could die spiritually. I truly believe that Americans should empower their civic and communitarian culture in the process of building a global civil society. The world does not need an America that is a dominator and conqueror. The world needs an America that can share core universal values with other cultures.

A nasty meal for Muslims
Fuad Nahdi

I got the news Bush had won through a text message sent by a friend in Washington. It read: “Be scared, be very scared. He IS back!” I had just put my phone on during a break at a conference on cultural relations organised by the British Council in central London.

I had declined an offer to spend the night watching the election results live at the United States embassy. They surely are better things to do during a blessed night of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan than participate in a media circus of trying to distinguish between half a dozen and six.

Bush’s victory came as no surprise. If anything it was with some comforting sense of déjà vu – a better- the-devil-you-know kind of feeling. For on immediate issues of concern to Muslims the difference between Bush and Kerry was wafer-thin. As one American Muslim friend told me, on matters such as middle-east peace, the war against terrorism and relationships with the Muslim world, the difference was “like having a choice of burgers – one with cheese, the other without but all with fries; either a nasty meal for Muslims.”

A new American president with no new vision or imagination on issues of Muslim concern would have been even more torturous as he again tried to reinvent the square. Our hopes must now lie within the prospects affordable to a second-term presidency for real change, even if it is based on the need for political legacy rather than genuine change in policy. What we need now is some serious debate about the relevancy and legitimacy of the kind of glitz democracy we just experienced in the world’s only superpower. Is the price of democracy – allegedly $130 million in poverty-stricken Afghanistan and $3 billion in the United States of Amnesia – worth it? Has the time come to confront the ultimate taboo of modern liberal political thought: that democracy is the result of green bucks invested rather than white votes cast?

As a Muslim I am obliged to thank God for the small mercies of the present and pray for protection from the fire that could be coming round next time. Hasta la vista: may he not come back in 2008!

Devastation
Rick Moody

I watched television till about 10.30pm on Tuesday night, but it was so dispiriting that I couldn’t stay up any later than that. At 5.00am I woke abruptly, turned on the radio, and learned what I already knew was going to happen. The voting experience where I am (a very small island off Montauk, New York state) was quite easy and smooth, and there were no problems. It was only after that the really scary business began. How do I feel? I think devastation is a fair word. Not because Kerry lost, but because the bulk of the country doesn’t understand how hoodwinked they are, and does not see that there is a whiff of fascist ideology in the “moral values” formulation, which reminds me so much of the “degenerate art” arguments of earlier fascists.

I’m devastated because I’m extremely worried about what’s going to happen next. On the radio this morning some plutocrat was saying how excited he was because never in American history has government cooperated with business the way it is going to now. I can’t imagine a government could be any more ineffective in reigning in large corporations than this one has already been. Not to mention the Supreme Court. Not to mention a totalitarian foreign policy that attacks foreign nations without evidence and lies to the people about its reasons for doing so. Not to mention 20,000 dead civilians in Iraq (and that’s the low number).

I can’t think of a “sphere of concern” for which Bush’ victory is not incredibly bad news. Unless you’re an industrial polluter.

The one good thing that’s happened in the last eighteen months has been the mobilising of dissent. Ideally – despite all the charges of lack of patriotism, of giving aid and comfort to the enemy – we will keep this process going.

The once–ler returns
Jo Wilding

Four more years. I confess that, whether Bush or Kerry had won, those first three words would have been the same. A vote for Bush looks to the world like a vote of approval; a vote for Kerry would have meant most of the United States public going back to sleep for the next four years, believing that Kerry was the opposite of Bush and not noticing, because he would have done it more smoothly, that Kerry was shafting them too.

Four more years. What will happen? Bush will probably reintroduce the military draft (though, in economic terms, it’s already there). Bush will carry on the war against Iraq, will go on denying military veterans benefits and health care, will maintain his pro–Zionist stance, will likely attack Iran, or otherwise continue the Project for the New American Century. Bush will continue his anti–woman, anti–environment, anti–social policies. Kerry, while a little less anti–woman, would have done exactly the same.

Four more years. Within the next few weeks, Fallujah will be flattened. During the last siege I was in Fallujah, with the ambulance drivers and the doctors, trying to evacuate and save people, removing the bodies of civilians apparently shot by US snipers who controlled the areas of town that we were going into. It will look the same this time. It would have looked the same had Kerry won.

A friend called this “the most class–war election in US history. Yale class of ‘67 versus Yale class of ‘69.”Two men from the same background, funded by the same corporate backers, fight for the right to inflict the same policies. Who won this election? Coca–Cola did. Disney did. The bankers, the oil companies, the already filthy rich did. They always will, for forty or four hundred more years. Unless.

Kerry failed us
Bill Thompson

Perhaps it was John Edwards, a trial lawyer who knows how to manage a jury in the pursuit of exemplary damages, who argued that the odds of overturning the vote were too slim to be worth the attempt.

Or maybe it was Kerry himself, finally exhausted after the months of campaigning and so deciding he would rather be forgotten by history than mount a challenge.

But whatever the reason, we – citizens of all countries who have a stake in the American election - have been let down by the Democratic party leadership and its expensively-suited army of lawyers. They have given the presidency to Bush on the basis of a clearly imperfect, possibly illegal and certainly unfair collection of state ballots whose legitimacy was eminently challengeable.

And they did it within hours of the polls closing, arguing along with the national therapists that closure was more important than the truth. It is an argument remarkably familiar to those of us who opposed the incursion into Iraq, and is regularly deployed by Britain’s prime minister against those who would continue to question his reasoning and integrity.

But the United States does not need closure at this point. It needed, but will not now have, a final push by the Democrats to open up the voting systems to examination, to force electoral officials to account for the bias in the way registers were assembled, to scour the source code of every voting system and read the audit logs provided by every polling booth, to listen to the voices of those who were disenfranchised and obliged to complete paper-based provisional ballots which are not even being counted. It needed a proper counting of votes and now it will not have one.

There is a vast amount of evidence that the electronic voting systems provided by Diebold and others are open to abuse. The software may have “back doors” that allow voting totals to be “adjusted”; the core database can be easily hacked; and there is no paper trail to provide an audit in the case of recounts. Yet the Democracts are simply accepting that all of the votes cast using this inadequate technology were both counted and correctly assigned and that Bush triumphed by millions in the popular vote.

This is, I believe, a less than robust assertion.

Readers of Greg Palast may find his more paranoid fantasies to be verging on the delusional, but even if we discount the more extreme tales he tells there is clearly enough evidence of abuse to merit legal challenge. Yet none is forthcoming.

We needed Kerry to challenge the result, partly because there was a chance he would then become president, but mostly because the Democrats were not just fighting the Republican party in this election - they were fighting an incumbent who had shown his willingness to lie, distort, misrepresent and gerrymander in whatever ways were needed to ensure victory. The post-ballot challenge should have been part of the game plan from day one, the final stage of the campaign.

But Kerry let us down. He gave in too easily. Perhaps he would still have lost, unable to overthrow Bush or simply less popular and electable than the war president. But he could have tried.

After all, putting the US political system through a couple of months of uncertainty, conflict and strain is nothing compared to what will be happening in the next four years.

Grasping at straws
Julianne Malveaux

I stayed up all night on Tuesday, 2 November. Waiting, hoping, hoping, waiting. I have been on the road as a Kerry surrogate and I feel strongly that, while Kerry is flawed, he represents the best hope for our nation. As I drift into slumber at 3am, CNN says they will not call Ohio, but I can do the math. With at most 250,000 provisional ballots out, and a 140,000 gap between the candidates, it is almost impossible for Kerry to prevail.

I am in denial as I sleep, but when I rise, I am in shock. Bush won! Bush won! He wrapped himself in flag, family, and faith, and he won. By 3 million votes. It's undeniable. It's stunning.

I have a medical appointment and I walk back home, without realising that tears are streaming down my face. Someone stops me, tells me that I am crying. Crying. I don't think I have taken an election so personally. I cannot imagine that this idiot is president again, that he asks us to unite, that he asks us to trust him. How can I trust him when John Ashcroft is the attorney general at the Injustice department? When I know that he will not have me in mind when he appoints Supreme Court justices.

I am utterly, angrily, impossibly stunned. And angry at the Democrats who focused on swing, not on base, who put too little money into the black community too late. Angry at the Democrats but disgusted with the prevailing Republicans. And frightened at the prospects for the future.

Bush now has the “mandate” to push an agenda of privatising social security, the continued outsourcing of employment, and the subsidisation of companies like Halliburton at the expense of working Americans. Tax cuts, high tuitions, spiraling health care costs are all features of the economy under Bush. Once he appoints Supreme Court justices forget about affirmative action! And our civil liberties will be eroded, thanks to the Patriot Act. If people think this election was problematic, just wait until 2006, when the Voter Protection Act allows John Ashcroft to demand more ID and create more hurdles – all in the name of voter “integrity”.

Whether Bush or Kerry won, the African American community had to look forward to four years of peripheral economic status, and this election is a wake-up call for black folks, for progressives, and for others who care about issues like economic justice. There must be a focus on education and on economic development in the African American community; and African Americans must continue to push the envelope with the Democratic party so that Democrats can behave like Democrats, not populist versions of Republicans.

Is there anything, in this election, to feel optimistic about? If Democrats use this loss as a defining moment and return to party principles of fighting for those with least and those left out, that's a good thing. And if we build on the historic voter turnout toward greater levels of civic participation, that's also good. Finally, if we confront the issue of faith so that the Bible cannot be manipulated as a Republican tool, that helps us build toward 2008. But I am frankly grasping at straws in an attempt to be optimistic. 2 November 2004 was simply not a good day.

Good morning, heartache
Max Gordon

There is an eerie quiet here in New York City, and a feeling of genuine heartbreak. Amongst my friends, it’s as if someone we all loved is dead.

I’ve never felt like this before about a national incident – the pain is almost physical. Having no idea what the next four years will look like, let alone next week, I’m stunned; past outrage, past crying, past bitterness. This grief is all–consuming and profound.

I’m not sure what hurts most: that a majority voted for George W Bush after everything we know about his administration; that all over the country voters still complained about intimidation; that electronic–voting machines gave no receipts eliminating any way of proving fraud; that the chief executive of Diebold, creators of the electronic–voting machines in Ohio, told Republicans in a fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President”; that (similar to Katharine Harris in Florida in 2000), the Ohio secretary of state was also co–chairman of the Bush re–election campaign; that (again like 2000), Florida continued illegally to drop voters from the rolls; that Kerry conceded within less than twenty–four hours of saying that he would fight for every vote; that Karl Rove’s political ruthlessness – his attacks on Kerry’s Vietnam record, his divisive use of a constitutional ban on gay marriage, and the diabolical implication that a vote for Kerry was a vote for terrorists – once again played on voters’ deepest prejudices and fears. Or that it all worked.

There is a pathological presence in America that no longer hides in the shadows or threatens to take over. It has consumed the country. Our democracy is on life–support.

The only hope that carries me is the belief that there exists a truth greater than politicians, elections, or the policies of any administration. I am concentrating on the civil disobedience and moral courage of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Emmeline Pankhurst, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Lou Hammer, Martin Luther King, Jr. In the upcoming years, this country may play out the most extraordinary human drama that we have ever seen in civil rights and activism. There is also the chilling possibility that the streets will be empty, as everyone closes their doors and, silenced by the threat of the Patriot Act or worse, refuses to speak out for four more years. This election has smashed something permanently in the American heart – I can definitely speak as far as one heart is concerned.

We will either be crushed by this experience, or we will rise up from it with great strength and find a power we never had. Yes, this may be the very definite, tragic end of something we all believed in, but it may also be the beginning of a miraculous, yet undefined, something else.

I’m counting on it.