Mid-Term Movie Review: So Goes The Nation

For our readers who have not seen the new documentary about the 2004 presidential campaign in Ohio, called 'So Goes The Nation', we say: go see it. We heard many excuses after John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential campaign: corrupt Diebold voting machines, partisan use of state offices, unfair elimination of eligible voters, and other dirty tricks. These were self-serving arguments for the Democrats to make. They deflected attention from how poorly the campaign was run. As So Goes The Nation demonstrates, responsibility lay squarely on the Democrats' shoulders. They failed to establish any serious field campaign in Ohio (which turned out to be the swing state); they left most of the Ohio campaign to the disparate efforts of various volunteer organizations; and, perhaps most damning, they couldn't even produce a clear message and vision that volunteers could adopt and make their own during their political canvassing. Democrats seem to have thought they could just bring voters out to vote by...asking them to vote.

The movie sometimes exaggerates its point. The contrast between Democratic haplessness and Republican discipline is overdrawn. The Republicans did have one impressive accomplishment. As Paul Begala, half of the famous Carville-Begala team that got Clinton elected in 1992, notes in the documentary, the Republicans managed to increase their national vote by 11 million in 2004 without raising the President's approval rating one percent. This means they effectively expanded the electorate, drawing out those already favorable towards Bush but who didn't normally vote. Nonetheless, this achievement needs to be kept in perspective. The Republicans barely won Ohio (51% to 49%), and the election (51% to 48%). The deeper point, which the documentary points to, is that Democrats have an oddly passive relationship to their voters. They do little to establish a continuous and dynamic relationship with the electorate, between elections; they then get caught flat-footed during election season; and above all, they seem to believe that all these non-voters are natural Democrats to begin with. Their only explanation for electoral problems, then, is to pass the buck: the voter is presumed to be apathetic or uninformed, or there is some way in which they were cheated out of the election.

So Goes The Nation points to these issues by putting some great interviews together with unique footage of the Republican and Democratic campaigns in Ohio. At times it is a bit vague about whether the problem for Democrats is simply lack of organization or lack of political ideas. But it's hard not to conclude that the world's oldest political party suffers from both problems at once. This raises a set of questions that we will be discussing at our October 21 Teach-In: given these problems, how do we relate to the Democratic Party and the vote more broadly? Can the vote be used constructively, to send a signal? Can non-voting? Or is party politics, for now, simply not a serious avenue for political engagement?