Like so many New Yorkers and fellow citizens across the United States, the recent presidential election gave me incentive to volunteer in a swing state. My vote, cast as an absentee ballot, supported a win for Kerry/Edwards. This outcome was a foregone conclusion in New York. During the last week of the campaign, my choice was to monitor phone banks where callers aimed to get out the vote in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This was a key area in a battleground state. My experience, like that of others who chose to participate, is revealing in several ways.

Citizen engagement marked the 2004 election and accounts, in part, for the high voter turn out across the country. During the last three days in Scranton alone, over 30,000 calls were made to reach voters. The re-election of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney says a great deal about the nature of the election campaign and the influence of September 11th, 2001 on the American society. A few observations from the field are worth sharing with our friends abroad as we enter the second term of a Bush Presidency destined to impact strongly on their fates as well.

The large voter turnout must be analyzed in terms of an election that highlighted the importance of a minority of battleground states. The votes cast in the battleground made the difference. This was a Bush-Cheney victory that polarized red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) states in a divided union. The 2004 election reconfirmed that the United States is not a democracy. America is a republic. The dictates of the Electoral College and the race to reach 270 electoral votes turned the candidates’ attentions to no more than a dozen states, with Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida highlighted as the most coveted prizes.

This campaign emphasized the tension with which the Founding Fathers grappled in The Federalist Papers between the federal (states) and the national (peoples) influences in the nation. Although Senator Kerry lost the election by 3.5 million popular votes, an additional 135,000 votes in Ohio were all that was necessary to assure him victory in that state. His losses in New Mexico and Iowa were by margins of less than 15,000 votes in each case. In other words, a decisive Kerry victory in the Electoral College would have required only an additional 200,000 votes.

Amidst calls for “one person, one vote” reforms to the election system, there is also the question of more fundamental voting improvements. Images of citizens waiting hours on lines to vote suggest that further change is necessary. The presence of OSCE monitors, and their experience observing the vote, underscores this point. The results of election 2004 in terms of challenges to democratic participation urges Americans to support an evaluation of the voting process. The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia has a professional staff with substantial experience monitoring elections around the globe. This is one institution capable to prepare a public document outlining for US citizens, and their counterparts abroad, the issues at stake in the American democratic process and the options for voting reforms. It is time that America looked more closely at its own electoral system and refocused its energies on necessary improvements at home as it speaks of freedom in the world.

The issue of voting reform is only one of the issues democrats must confront. Their political party also faces the challenge to understand clearly and constructively the reasons for the Republican victory. In the 1992 election, Clinton and Gore, both southern Democrats, won on the basis of a message of hope as the Cold War ended and clearly articulated values with which Americans identified. The Clinton/Gore message spoke compassionately and vibrantly to the person who felt left out and left behind in American society. The fact that the South voted decisively and solidly Republican in 2004 illustrates the extent of the sea change in American national politics.

The Republican Party’s electoral success in 2004, like that in 2002, was due to a large extent on its ability to focus the public’s attention and energize its base after 9/11. The war on terrorism was central to a campaign strategy that framed policy choices as a matter of national and personal security for American citizens. Bush spoke plainly in black and white terms as a politician of conviction who, whether right or wrong in his views on Iraq, tax-cuts, and gay marriage, sticks to his choices despite unpopular ratings at home and overseas.

While viewing the Democratic National Convention on television this past summer, it struck me that the emphasis on traditional Democratic values was lost amidst a parade of generals. Senator Kerry’s Vietnam record is admirable. Yet, valuable time was lost in conflicts exacerbated by media attention regarding a war fought over a generation ago in a very different place and time from Iraq today. The Democratic Party would do well to return to its core message and resist the temptation to run on Republican themes. If we look ahead to 2008, a politician of conviction has the most chance to succeed. S/he must possess the singular ability to communicate passionately a belief in family values and a sense of faith in God and humanity to unify the country and explain its mission in the world.

In the meantime, there is much work to be done to achieve campaign finance reform, which, after this campaign’s excesses, is urgently needed. Whether we are speaking of a media society or a republic of entertainment, American citizens must identify a way to protest the prospect of future presidential campaigns that place more emphasis on negative attacks than substantial and thoughtful debates. There is a more constructive option for the Cable TV generation to voice their concerns about the state of the union than that of Howard Beale in the film satire Network (1976) who urges all the television viewers to yell out the window “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!” It is generally acknowledged that there is too much money, read corporate influence, and too much entertainment, in American politics. Also striking is that, in the midst of staggering budget and current account deficits and mounting casualties in Iraq, the Republican focus on core values persuaded those in distinct groups, Christian evangelicals, Hispanics, and married women, to view President Bush as a representative figure to safeguard their national and personal security.

It is even more noteworthy that, in a campaign run largely on the fear of renewed terrorist attacks in America, faith and values played so large a part. For if life’s experiences teach us anything, it is that faith and fear cannot co-exist. Ohio, the state that suffered the greatest job losses under the first Bush Presidency, voted to keep President Bush in office. This outcome, which decided the election, suggests to some that people would rather pray than work.

What it suggests to those of us in search of the meaning for the nation in this election’s result is otherwise. For the majority of Americans, the outcome was about the need to give a public voice to moral values. Contrary to the view of Americans as captives to materialism, the 2004 election demonstrates that values in the family trumped commerce in the heartland and conflict in the world as the national concern. If we look back in American history, the nation was founded as a way for its settlers to escape religious persecution. The 2004 election shows us clearly the extent to which, in the public sphere, Americans of all faiths are likely to grapple with morality and religion in the years ahead.

Colette Mazzucelli
New York

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