“It’s a good day today,” Milwaukee pharmacist Cary Rothman said Wednesday morning upon receiving a call from The Chronicle.
Indeed, Rothman, president of the not-yet-official Wisconsin chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition and one of the political activists profiled in the Oct. 22 Chronicle, had much to feel good about.
President George W. Bush won re-election in a fierce, bitter and, in some places, close contest. To Rothman, the incumbent’s qualities as a leader were the prime reasons for victory.
“People thought Bush was a strong leader who will protect this country,” Rothman said. “We are at war, and the American people looked at both guys” — Bush and challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) — “and asked who was the stronger leader.”
Moreover, though the Republican gain in the Jewish vote was modest — about 24 percent, compared to 19 percent in 2000 — Rothman felt confident that the future will see “a shift in the Jewish community toward voting Republican” because of the party’s and Bush’s “very strong support for Israel.”
Obviously, Jews politically to the left of Rothman felt very differently. Long-time Democratic Party activist Jerry Wallace felt very down Wednesday morning, joking that “I haven’t turned on the radio or television since midnight and probably won’t again for four years.”
Wallace attributed Bush’s victory to the influence of the religious right and “cultural values,” and said he “can’t think of a logical reason to think otherwise.”
“When you look at the pockets of places” like southeast Ohio, central Florida and West Virginia, where people live “on the edge of poverty,” one might think they would know they would benefit from Democratic economic and social policies, he said. “But their belief in God and opposition to things like gay marriage overwhelm their economic interests,” he said.
And for the American Jewish community, this portends “nothing good,” he said. “Not that I see anti-Semitism sweeping the country; I don’t expect that to happen. But the cultural values that the average Jewish family holds, we won’t see in the national government in the next four years.”
Nevertheless, “I’m discouraged and disappointed, but I’m not going to give up,” Wallace said. “Somewhere on the horizon is a Democrat who will capture the imagination of the American people.”
Milwaukeean Ruth Weill, a state and national official with the Green Party, felt even more troubled by the results. “I can’t believe this country is getting so conservative,” she said. “It scares me a lot.”
Her party’s candidate, David Cobb, did “as best as could be expected,” she said, with full results not available by press time Wednesday.
She added, “None of the third party candidates affected the outcome,” including independent consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Large voter turnouts didn’t seem to boost any of the third parties. In fact, she said, “many progressives were scared and voted for Kerry.”
As for the Greens, the results mean “we have a lot of work to do,” Weill said. “It’s going to be difficult in the next four years.”
Shane Steinfeld, a former leader of Milwaukee’s chapter of the Libertarian Party, also thinks it will be a difficult next four years, but it would have been so if Kerry had won as well, he said.
“It’s a matter of which rights we’re going to lose next,” Steinfeld said. A Kerry administration might have instituted mandatory military or civil service, an idea Steinfeld said had been floated but dropped during the campaign; a Bush administration might “make the Patriot Act permanent,” authorizing arrests without charge, trial or counsel, he said.
The party ran Michael Badnarik as its presidential candidate and, while he did not win many votes (his totals were not available at press time), Steinfeld said that the campaign “has been a learning experience.”
“Every year we run a candidate, educate people about who we are and get a little stronger,” he said.
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