The New Architecture of U.S. Politics

By Alexander Rogers | Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Now that the recent presidential Children's Crusade has finally dissipated, the 'youth culture' encourages students to keep up with 'the issues.' This time the arena is the post-game soiree, filled with raging pundits, soap-box dramatists, and a cadre of late-night harlequins whose sole purpose is to fill the last year you spent as a victim of the merciless electoral circus with significance. It is going to be a long time between now and the Next Big Thing, but at the very least the campus is off to a pleasant start with David Shribman '76. In a recent lecture, Mr. Shribman commented about the current state of the union sans President John Kerry. He was plain-spoken and eloquent, and his commentary more or less on-the-mark.

Mr. Shribman, who graduated Suma Cum Laude and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, has seen an assortment of prestigious newsrooms in his time. His career has taken him from the Washington offices of the Boston Globe to a position with the New York Times. Currently he serves as the Executive-Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where his pithy editorials have won him many admirers and more than a few adversaries.

Mr. Shribman dissected exactly what happened on November 2nd, and its implications for the next four years. The Filene Auditorium was overwhelmed by an assemblage of locals, professors, alumni, and—I dare say—a few students, but the crowd remained placid while Mr. Shribman promulgated his vision of the future "architecture of American politics." He made it clear that the reelection of George W. Bush "liberated the man" from the stench of the Florida fiasco and "left his rivals in distress, disarray, and distemper." If, as he claimed, "the popular vote is no more than an exhibition game," much to the chagrin of the opposition in 2000, then this year marked an all-around winning season for the incumbent.

Intimately distilling the reasons for this "catastrophic success" is impossible to achieve within a couple hours, but Mr. Shribman argued that one need only glance at the aforementioned structure of politics to see which team was dealt a better hand from the start. In an age where the priest and the politician merge their roles as purveyors of truth and justice, who better to lead the new wave than a unified, on-message party with methods of bridging the gap between itself and the voter? It also helps that the candidate is not merely a representative of the voting bloc he hopes to secure, but a member of it. Mr. Shribman said that President Bush was not a man who merely had the conservative Christian's best interests in mind, but a full-fledged member of the evangelical community. Though turnout was the highest it had been in decades, usually a sign of the Democratic party's weight coming to bear, it was to the detriment of Kerry's regal ambitions that "white evangelicals voted 4-1" in Bush's favor.
Mr. Shribman said that the election only served to further solidify the image of the Democrats as a "party of the blacks, Jews, women, and gays." Senator Kerry, he said, only ended up capturing "the Godless vote."

He did not to suggest, however, that the politically-trounced flee en mass and disseminate themselves amongst the Francophonic peoples of the globe. After a "circular firing squad" amongst the party leadership and a few "retreats at Cambridge" the Democrats will be back in full disheveled form, and ready to peruse the positive elements that emerged from the wreckage of the campaign.

So what great changes await us? Despite almost unprecedented control over two branches of the Federal government, radical change is not a forgone conclusion of the new term. Mr. Shribman was the first to admit he did not possess a crystal ball, though that didn't prevent him from making some predictions. For example, he expected an attempt at Social Security reform, or perhaps the appointment of controversial rabble-rousers to the Supreme Court. If President Bush is feeling particularly rambunctious, Mr. Shribman indicated, he might even reach out to Western Europe and help keep fundamentalist militants under wraps. The crowd seemed palpably disturbed.

Though the room was speckled with a variety of Kerry buttons, 'progressive' badges, and hemp coats, the mood of the audience remained contemplative, drumming up occasional moments of laughter and generating several serious questions. For some, the inevitably vitriolic election of 2008 has already begun, demonstrating that this election was certainly not the death-knell of leftist politicos or the signal that the Bush team has jumped its last hurdle. When the echoes from November 2nd subside, all that will be left to say about the election of 2004, according to David Shribman, is that "just a few more people voted for Bush than for Kerry."

The New Architecture of U.S. Politics

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