TAKING THE INITIATIVE

Over at Tapped (link via atrios), Nick Confessore says the following:

Gay marriage was one of the keys. Ballot initiatives banning gay marriage passed everywhere they were up for a vote: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. That includes four swing states, the most crucial of which -- Ohio, where some 50,000 to 100,000 extra voters may have come out for the ballot initiative -- Bush won. Indeed, they were put there by Bush's allies among the religious right in no small part to drive turnout. Elsewhere, the GOP conducted a below-the-radar campaign on gay marriage, linking Kerry and the Democrats to support for same-sex unions. I still believe time is not on the right's side when it comes to this issue. And they may face the kind of backlash that abortion-rights supporters faced in the decades after Roe. But the bottom line is that this issue really helped Bush.

Question: Where were the Democratic wedge issues? Where were the ballot initiatives in Nevada, Oregon, Ohio, and Florida -- home to millions of senior citizens looking down the barrel of the Alzheimer's gun -- legalizing stem-cell research? (California was already in the bag, folks.) What I'm getting at is what appears to be a congenital Democratic inability to think several moves ahead and plant political traps and wedges for the other team, something the Republican Party is very good at doing to Democrats.

My fucking god, why didn't we think of this? Near as I can tell, we thought of the stem-cell issue from the top down, thinking that if the Presidential candidate supported it openly, that would be enough to bring people to the polls for it. But this isn't a popular election; we're slaves to the Electoral College, and must alter our strategery based on it. The Republicans figured that out from the standpoint of ballot initiatives, and they got a wedge issue proposition in the wedgiest state of all, Ohio.

Well, this is something we need to learn how to do, and we'll do it in 2006 to cut into the GOP's congressional majorities.