Tangled Up in Blue

Through a simple twist of fate and Lorna’s forever love, we spent last Election Night at a Bob Dylan concert at the Johnny Mercer Theater in Savannah. Since I did not want to spend the evening watching Steve Kornacki do his whirling dervish number crunching act while trying to spin earthshaking significance out of early returns from Iowa’s 5th district, getting away from the TV for the night was always, as they say in politics, in play. So I was already prepared to break out a jigsaw puzzle to get me throught the night...but a Dylan concert on a night like this? Absolutely, sweet Marie. 
Bob was great...better than I anticipated actually. His trademark growl was full throated, his classic mumbled delivery was measured, his band was tight and out of sight, and his setlist was outstanding up to and including “Blowin’ in the Wind” which made up a two song encore with Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River”. I took the inclusion of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to be Bob’s subtle commentary on the current political situation.
The prevailing metaphor for the midterm election of 2018 of course was a wave not a wind. Would there be a blue wave of sweeping Democratic gains was how the national media framed it. Anything less than a wave was going to be a loss and another shocking triumph for Trumpism. By the time we got home from the concert, the news was all about the wave that wasn’t. Within 24 hours, the Democratic electoral showing had been demeaned and belittled by the media with a cattiness it seems to reserve for leftish political efforts. The blue wave was mocked as a “spalsh of blue”, more indigo than blue, or “not a wave” at all declared James Carville glumly. While the media was chewing over the metaphor, the results were continuing to come in and the numbers were pilining up in the Dems favor, making Dylan, as usual, the prescient one. The answer was indeed blowing in the wind...in the uncounted, uncollected, uncorrupted ballots that would accumulate over the next 48 hours and certify this as the biggest “wave” election of the last 50 years. (And no matter how much I sympathize with the media in its current struggles to combat an authoritarian presidency, its insistence on creating narratives and forcing its reporting to fit those narratives is maddening and counterproductive to the goal of reestablishing a credible, national source of objective news if not truth.)

In 1988 Theocrat Pat Robertson ran for the Republican presidential nomination. His bid got off to a promising start with a second place finish in the Iowa caucus, but crashed and burned in subsequent primaries. From that experience, the religious right in concert with the corporate right made a conscious decision to build political power from the bottom up, rather than top down. That 30-year effort has been remarkably successful, taking over local school boards, state legislatures, and congressional districts. It’s given them inordinate control over the national political agenda and now the Supreme Court. 

The best results to come out of this midterm election is that Democrats are now positioned both tactically and attitudinally to do the same kind of bottom up building. Much of the gloom that clouded the early analyses of the progressive showing in this election was due to the Dems propensity for being star struck. The apparent defeats of rising stars Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida and Beto O’Rourke in Texas had magnified significance because Dems, whether they admit it or not, don’t have the patience or imagination for small ball politics. To keep with the baseball metaphor, Dem politics have always been about the three-run homer. But this election has changed that...and largely due to the 3 fallen stars, Abrams, Gillum, and O’Rourke (two of which may yet rise again in this cycle...and Beto has probably secured himself a spot on the Dem 2020 ticket). None of the three relied solely on charisma, though all three had plenty of it. They all did the grunt work of registering new voters and getting them to the polls that is necessary to building a lasting and effective political infrastructure. Regardless of the final vote count in this election, Georgia, Florida and Texas are in better shape for subsequent progressive challenges, as are states throughout the Midwest where simllar nuts and bolts politics took precedence over the consultant-driven, poll-focused bullshit of the past that has rendered the Democratc Party a motley crew of divergent, sometimes contrary interests.Whether there is a blue wave to come in the future, we'll leave it to cable news producers to ponder to the level of their pay grade. What's clear now is that the country is sufficiently tangled up in blue.