The Aftermath

Jon Stewart

I never made a big secret out of the fact that I was hoping we were going to have a change of administration. So for me, there was disappointment. Luckily, however, I avoided the roller coaster of emotions that many experienced on Election Day, when Internet reports of exit polls showed a big Kerry win. I am "plugged in" to the Internet, but for me it was about a new Paris Hilton tape, a thirty-six-hour marathon where she's having sex to raise money for muscular dystrophy.

Election night itself I found anticlimactic, since I had been looking forward to a long and drawn-out recount process. When that didn't happen, I had to come to terms with the results. When you're on the losing side, the first thing to do is consider the concession and conciliation speech -- and then blame systematic voter fraud. First you reach out, then you put on your tinfoil hat, talk to the black helicopters and try not to swallow the fact that more people agreed with the other guy.

I have asked myself, "What did we learn about America with this election?" We learned that the media don't have anything to do but speculate and navel-gaze. It was remarkable how quickly the speculation and navel-gazing switched from "what would happen?" to "why did that happen?" Think about it. The media spent the six months leading up to November 2nd figuring out what this election was boiling down to. The minute it was decided, it was as though none of that ever happened -- and it's this stunning surprise.

The electoral map looks almost exactly as it did in 2000, and yet you would imagine, from the expert post-election media "analysis," that there was some cataclysmic shift, that somewhere out of the ground in Idaho and Montana a mass of survivalist fundamentalist End of Days Christians appeared from Middle-Earth to vote.

What actually happened was that some of the people who voted for Gore in 2000 this time voted for the other guy. This time Bush got fifty-one percent of the vote -- and it wasn't all crazy people. Nevertheless, you had the press two days before the election saying that college kids were coming out in record numbers and cell-phone users were going to make polling obsolete. So the one truism that emerges from all of this is that there continues to be zero accountability in the press. There is not a profession in the world where you can be that wrong, that consistently, and still continue to practice your job with greater job security than before.

Now I will confess that as a Jewish man living in a city -- New York -- where eighty percent of the people voted for the loser, I could feel a touch disenfranchised, perhaps. But at what point did Jewish people from New York ever feel overrepresented? So I don't feel angry. Oddly, there seems to be more anger and disenfranchisement in the enfranchised. I don't think I've ever seen a time when the party that controlled the Senate, the House, the White House and the Supreme Court was so out of sorts about how little respect they get. At a certain point you want to say, "OK, Goliath. Stop pretending."

Al Franken

Bush won because the Republicans were good at doing what they do, which is to be dishonest. He made a fundamental mistake going into Iraq, but he was somehow able to tie Iraq with 9/11 in the minds of the people who voted for him. When you ask most people, "Who's going to keep us safer?" they'll say Bush. Even though, leading up to 9/11, he totally fucked up. And leading up to the war, he totally fucked up. The decision was between a guy who was resolute but wrong and a guy who was not as resolute-seeming but kind of right. And evidently America is more comfortable in a time of war with a guy who is resolute, even if he is demonstrably wrong.

Bush supporters believe a lot of things that aren't true. They believe we found weapons of mass destruction. They believe Saddam Hussein gave substantial support to Al Qaeda. There's no doubt that a majority of Bush supporters believe those things. And there's no doubt that they are wrong.

The right-wing media pounds and pounds this stuff about elitist liberal blue states versus the down-to-earth red states. It's ridiculous. I'm from Minnesota. I grew up in suburbia, in a working-class neighborhood. So I think I have some feel for middle America. In reality, all the states are some shade of purple. There's plenty of very conservative Christians in Minnesota, and there's plenty of liberals in Texas. It's not as clear-cut as people like Sean Hannity make it seem when he holds up a map and says, "See how much red there is?" A lot of those red spots are desert. And, as David Owen from the New Yorker said: Acreage don't vote; people vote.

There's a lot of comfort we can take in what we accomplished. We did very well in a lot of state legislatures. That's no small thing -- it's building a farm team. In Minnesota, for example, the Republicans had a twenty-eight-seat margin in the House, and it's now only a two-seat margin. We created a base of activists. We created a fund-raising base. We're a lot further along than we were two years ago. Now we have to keep going and apply our energies toward the midterm elections in two years.

The deepest lesson to come out of this election will be our reaction to it. We've got to keep up the pressure. Don't move to Canada: You're exactly who we need. In fact, we need people from Canada to move here. I don't know why they would, exactly. But, please, Canadians: Move to the U.S. For God's sake, help us!

Tom Wolfe

I'm going out to Kennedy Airport to wave goodbye to all the journalists I know. They're all leaving for London, and I think someone should go out there to see them off. They're taking this very hard. These are people who are as overcome as if one of their parents had just died.

I was surprised by the outcome of the election. I talked to so many Republicans who said, "Loyalty's loyalty, but too many things have gone wrong." A good example is James Webb, a man who I respect enormously, one of the most decorated Marines in Vietnam and, like most military officers, a Republican. Here's a guy who knows the military backward and forward, and he considers the Iraq adventure one of the greatest strategic bungles of all time. He just couldn't vote for Bush, even though his opinion of Kerry could not be lower.

If you look at the voting map, it's almost identical to 2000. I interpret that to mean that the war was not decisive, and the campaigns were not decisive. I think it was a cultural election -- if by cultural we mean ingrained values of different groups of people. I call it "championism." It's when you vote for convictions that represent your people, instead of what's good for you financially or in terms of security. All of us do it. Take the Scots-Irish, the largest unrecognized ethnic group in America. They spread from the Appalachians into the Midwest, and they voted heavily Republican, even though they are by no means wealthy people. To them, gun control is not about guns -- it's an attack on them and their way of life. They're very independent and very stubborn, and they're damn well going to have their guns.

I'm not immune to those feelings of championism either. Right after 9/11, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said that the attacks were punishment for the decadence of the American people, I found myself getting defensive on their behalf: "Robertson went to the same college that I did, and Falwell is from Lynchburg, Virginia. What they said was ludicrous, but these are my people!" You couldn't defend anything they said, but because of championism, I didn't want to see my people abused.

Not that many people in America who are registered to vote want to be lectured to by Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi and P. Diddy. If you're living in southern Ohio, and you're against gay marriage because you're religious, these guys make you feel like you're being treating like an idiot . . . worse, like a primitive. Bush, on the other hand, is very good at feeding the impression that "I'm one of you. I can hunker down with you anywhere you want." He's acquired a kind of rural accent. But Kerry is incapable of doing that. Simply as a public speaker, he badly needed a change-of-pace voice, as do all speakers. Even Muhammad Ali, who was a very funny guy, was not funny for fifteen minutes in a row, because he had no change of pace, and the same is true of Kerry.

I've never seen an election taken so personally by people -- not even Nixon vs. Kennedy. But this country is so centrist, we're not really going to go wrong whoever's elected. Our government is like a train on a track: People yell at it from the left, and they yell at from the right, but the train goes right down the middle where the tracks are.