I’ve been thinking a lot the past 12 hours about Tom Ampleman. He’s not a famous political figure; he’s just a regular guy the New York Times talked to about two months ago. For some reason, his comments have been on my mind.
Tom Ampleman, a blue-collar union member who lives near this suburb just outside St. Louis, says he voted for Bill Clinton twice and then Al Gore, but he is now grappling with deep religious misgivings about the Democratic Party.
“I haven’t declared myself a Republican, but if I had to go in there and vote right now I probably would vote for the Republicans,” Mr. Ampleman said recently, sitting in his pickup truck at a public park here.
“I’m not happy with the moral issues at all with the Democrats,” continued Mr. Ampleman, who works as a welder at an aerospace company. “The Republicans will hurt me in the long run in providing for my family, but it’s probably more important to watch out for the unborn and that kind of stuff.”
Ampleman seems to realize full-well that Bush isn’t looking out for his interests. I’ve never met the man, but Ampleman acknowledged that the GOP will “hurt me in the long run.” But it didn’t matter — he’s worried about abortion and “stuff.”
The inescapable fact for me is that voters — the majority of them, anyway — have been conned. Matchstick men like Karl Rove have convinced them that employment, foreign policy, fiscal sanity, health care, benefits for seniors, education, and the environment don’t matter. It’s 2004, but we’re still stuck with an electorate that puts “God, Gays, and Guns” above their self interest. That’s why we’re losing.
You’re no doubt thinking that this doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn’t. Dem voters — and I put myself at the top of this list — need to stop expecting voters to make rational decisions. We live in a bizarro world in which poor, uninsured families who are one serious illness away from bankruptcy oppose “socialized medicine.” Where decorated war heroes can be smeared as “anti-military” by draft dodgers. Where presidents who run the highest deficits in the history of the world are considered “fiscally conservative.”
As soon as it became clear last night that this wasn’t our year, I started trying to wrap my head around how this president and his party, despite their colossal failures in every area of public policy, could make such dramatic gains. The answer isn’t pretty, but it’s true — an uninformed electorate makes poor choices. And most of the voters who participated in the process yesterday are woefully, tragically ignorant.
I don’t draw this conclusion because Bush won a majority. The reality of an uninformed electorate — which didn’t know Bush’s positions, record, priorities, or results — has been documented in recent months again and again and again and again.
Am I saying that voters are stupid? Absolutely not. Stupid people are incapable of learning and understanding. Americans are not stupid, but they have been misled by some of the sharpest flim-flam artists the political world has ever seen.
To borrow an old Josh Marshall line, we’ve had an arsonist in our house setting fires, telling us not to trust the stranger outside with a hose. The metaphor seems particularly apt this morning. Kerry was prepared to help put out the fires Bush started, but the country decided to stick with the arsonist.