Election 2012 means more than California  dreaming

The Beach boys were part of my earliest life in the 1960s. I’m unsure whether I wished they all could have been Californian girls when I was six or seven and my sexuality was already leading me towards Tarzan rather than Jane but  I knew enough to know that California was where it was all at – and not just LA. By the time I was 14 JFK was dead.  Anti-war demonstrations filled the TV schedules even in the UK.  There had been race riots in the great American cities. Civil rights was the cause and because I had American relations I felt a affinity to their struggle for identity – though it has to be said my Godmother Sheila Brown and her two sisters were card carrying Republicans who were about to leave Long Island and the troubled suburbs of New York City  and do as generations of immigrants had done – go west to find a new life in California. Nevertheless, as a gay adolescent struggling with my own sexual identity and with my experience as an Irish Roman Catholic living in England I was sensitised to struggles of other minority groups. Their cause somehow seemed my cause too.

At 14, to me it seemed like everyone was Going to San Francisco and I wanted to go there too – with or without flowers in my hair – though I still had plenty of hair then. These flowery aspirations were my personal leitmotif to the big international events which were the funeral marches that were played first in April 1968 for Martin Luther King and then in June  for Robert F. Kennedy.

The Ambassador Hotel is still locked in my mind’s eye –   black and white images of RFK –  his amazing smile, the wave, the victory in the California primary which seemed decisively to make him favourite for the Democratic nomination. Minutes later it was all over. I prayed hard that Senator Kennedy would live. Our headmaster came in class in the afternoon to tell us Bobby Kennedy was dead. I cried at home in my bedroom. When Bobby Kennedy died the Liberal cause died with him. It wasn’t altogether clear in November 1968 that Richard Mulhouse Nixon, the evil genius of the Republican Party, had truly spun electoral gold from the straw of the Old Confederacy but his narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey and Governor Wallace changed the political relationships within both parties for the next fifty years.  In 1968 the Democrats finally lost the entire South and the GOP entered upon its political ascendancy. Nixon’s silent majority turned out to vote and to win elections.

Ronald Reagan – the man whose smile sold cigarettes – gave that majority its most persuasive voice and intellectual ascendancy but if one looks back it was not the election of 1980 that was truly important it was rather the events in California that were determining.

Here one should observe that both Nixon and Reagan made their respective ways into the presidency via California and that this most important of the states was until Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 a redoubt of Republican power – centred upon the middle class voters of Orange County and San Diego in the south of the state.  Democrats had prospered in the great cities – Los Angeles and San Francisco – and two Democrats, father and son, Pat and Jerry Brown won the governor’s mansion but the soul of California remained wedded to the Republicans and to their cause – small government.

In service to that ethos Howard Jarvis led a charge against higher taxes with Proposition 13 which passed by a large margin in 1978 and effectively stripped the state legislature of the power to raise new revenue. Until that time the notion of referenda settling the financial or economic policy of a state was rare as proverbial hen’s teeth. Afterwards middle-America and the GOP fell in love with government by proposition. It put their Democrat opponents on the back foot and on that back foot they stayed – even through the glory days of Bill Clinton’s election. In 1998 the GOP attack on ‘illegals’ with a proposition to limit their voting rights shifted the Hispanic vote into the Democrat column. Last Tuesday the era of small government was consigned to the dustbin of history when California voted for proposition 30 – a proposal supported by Democrat Governor Jerry Brown to raise taxes on the rich to pay for education services in the state. It was a proposition that echoed the President’s election campaign promise to restore tax rates on the rich to help pay down the deficit.

But California hasn’t stopped there. There are 15 Republican congressmen – all white males – returned to the house of Representatives. There are 38 Democrats –  the majority of them drawn from all ethnic groups including Hispanic, Asian; and African-American. In the Democrat group there are more women than men and several of them are openly gay. Diane Feinstein was re-elected to serve in the Senate. In addition the Democrats now hold a super-majority in both houses of the state legislature. This hegemony has been building election by election. The problems of virtual extinction of the GOP in the state’s political life is only its national problem writ large. The winning coalition of minorities assembled in 2008 by Obama has held – and held in the most unpropitious circumstances. The President has won over 50% of the vote (see full result here) and although he becomes the first president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to win fewer states than in his first election he remains only the second Democrat since the civil war ( the first being FDR) to be elected by a majority as opposed to a plurality of votes. Even Bill Clinton in his re-election sweep in 1996 failed to get 50% of the vote.

The Democrats who might well have expected to lose three or four senate seats in fact picked-up two – both in states they lost to Romney in the presidential elections but where Tea Party insurgents had become the GOP standard bearers. The Tea Party’s poison is doing for Republicans what Militant  Tendency did for the Labour Party in the UK in the 1970’s. And although the Republicans retained a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives the GOP did it by the most American of political means – the gerrymander.  In most states redistricting which is akin to redrawing boundaries in the UK – was carried out by state legislators and state governors. The Republican sweep in the low turnout Mid Term election of 2010 was used to great effect. But in those states, like California, where redistricting has been removed from the hands of politicians, the Democrats actually gained seats. And there were actually more votes cast for Democrats than Republicans in the congressional elections. So although the Republicans retained their majority its majority lacks moral authority.

And further all this must be set in a wider context of a changing union. In the four states where there were propositions gay marriage was approved and three new states – Maryland, Maine and Washington became the first states to approve gay marriage by popular vote. Michigan voted down a proposal to put a ban on gay marriage into the state constitution. When I spoke with Congressman-elect John Garamendi and State Senator Lois Walsh both indicated that the Democrats were likely to use their super-majority here to revisit this issue in California They both also were buoyed up by the state result: it felt and indeed looked from here as if this election – more so than 2008- marks the end of the GOP as the majority party in the USA. And over in New Hampshire – another swing state –  all the states federal representatives are women. New England was once reliably Republican. It was the part of the country that gave trickle down economics and small government its first real champion in Calvin Coolidge. It was not that long ago that the Granite state itself was a redoubt of the GOP election to election. Obama’s margin here was also a relatively comfortable 6%.

Another sign of changing times is the victories over propositions legalising the use of marijuana. The so-called war on drugs has effectively been another war lost. Washington State and Colorado voted to legalise recreational use of marijuana. Finally the baby-boomers have their revenge. American’s prisons hold tens of thousands of men and women guilty of drug-related crime;  more than a trillion dollars has been spent on this war to eliminate the use of recreational drugs. Today there are more recreational drugs more readily available than ever before. The war on crime has made drug barons rich much as Prohibition made retailers of hard liquor millionaires in the 1920’s. It seems voters can identify lost causes well before their politicians. And the absurdity of criminalising possession of recreational drugs while it’s legal for us to kill ourselves with tobacco and alcohol isn’t lost upon a gay man. After all the law was used to the same absurd purpose in the case of  gay sex for over a century with the equally predictable result.

This general election then achieved much more than the narrow victory of party and individual: it has reset the tone and context for politics in the US. More young people voted; more Hispanics voted; more African Americans voted; more Asian Americans voted; more LGBT people voted; and added together with the progressive minority used to losing elections they’ve added up to a majority. The angry, old white male vote remains with the GOP but it’s a dying demographic.  In the south 27% of white men voted for Obama – in the rest of the US it was 43%. Society is finally moving beyond the culture wars that have been waged since the 1960’s.

But there is more to this victory than demography there was also organisation. The Obama campaign has not just mobilised small donors to finance big, it has also reached down through the new social media to motivate a new generation of voters and it has stole the march on its opponents by its methods of doing so. The unification of all sorts of data bases into a single moving machine of information has changed the way politics is done. Computers no longer merely number crunch they supply tactical information in each theatre of the political battle. For example on election day the HQ got information that in Davenport Iowa Obama was short a number of promised votes. A bus left from Chicago and drove three hours across the state to release twenty volunteers into a final effort to knock on door. They got out the vote. The campaign had all its databases on servers of the east coast and had in three days to migrate the whole thing over to a series of servers on the west coast in cases hurricane Sandy took them down. In the event everything was OK. But the transferred data was used to send millions of last minute targeted prompts to identified sub-groups of supporters. See a detailed article on all this…..here….

The deftness of  touch and reach contrasts with the tactic of carpet bombing swing states with political advertising by the Romney campaign and its SuperPACS. They ended up with little to show for the billion dollars they spent on old fashioned advertising. It seems elections cannot be bought by money alone. The adverts did not even reach those target (younger)  voters who spend so much less time watching television that their parents and grandparents.  And finally the pollsters themselves – all those pollsters who refused to believe that the decline in the number of white voters between 2004 and 2012 accounted for the appearance of more Democrats in their samples – were duly punished.

On election night Karl Rove, the architect of G.W Bush’s victories in 2000 & 2004, was incredulous when Fox News called Ohio for Obama. He angrily denounced the decision live on air. Rove believed the Romney campaign working with the same strategy he had perfected – eschewed by McCain in 2008 – would pull-off another glorious victory. They had the money and the same mean GOP machine and the same tactics. Their pollsters told them it was all but in the bag. But like the so much in America the demographics had moved on and left these Titans stranded on the wrong side of history and left Mr Rove looking both absurd and also like sore loser.

And thus we end, not back where we began when I wrote First letter of the election almost a year ago, but in another place entirely – a brave new world – and one which may well shape both America and the wider world in new and unexpected ways. I have lived through the great hegemony of the GOP and the conservative intellectuals who seized the political initiative in the 1970’s. A generation on and we are resting on the edge of another era – another great adventure into collective endeavour that characterised FDR’s New Deal and post World War II reconstruction. It may yet keep the USA as the only super power in this changing world for another century. I will probably not live to see its end but it gives me enormous pleasure to have been witness to its dawn….as brilliant as an orange sunrise across the wide blue horizon of California

Are there any lessons to be drawn from these events for British politics?

Robert Browning wrote his poem Home thoughts from abroad whilst in Italy. Yesterday I was in the Napa Valley California sampling wines in the autumn sunshine with two of my oldest, dearest friends Ralph Hexter and Manfred Kollmeier. It seems we’ve known each other all our lives. I met Ralph in 1977 and he met Manfred whilst he was studying for his PhD in Munich in 1979. They’ve been together happily married since.

We had a wonderful day and drove back here to Woodland in the dark on the Interstate Highways which were built in the 1950’s commissioned by President Eisenhower’s administration and which – together with Kennedy’s space program –  are the last great legacies of active government championed by the New Deal.

If these elections mean anything to those in the UK I would venture that a party which gives priority to investing in infrastructure will win the next general election in the UK. I would also venture this US election result  makes it more likely that Ed Milliband may succeed where the received wisdom was, until his speech to the Labour Party Conference in September, that he would certainly fail.

The winds of change are at the backs of the progressives for the first time in a generation.

I close with this clip of Obama’s victory address to the HQ staffers – moving stuff as the President wipes the tears away repeatedly Heartfelt thanks….

Jim Mehan volunteer at Obama HQ

President Obama hugging Jim after his thank you address to staff