“It Doesn’t Get Any More Bleak Than This”


The news moved slowly through the crowd. There were no boos, no hisses, no dropped glasses. Country singer Jamie O’Neal and the band had just finished the last song of their set. But there was Fox News anchor Bret Baier, on the big screen at the Republican National Convention’s election night party in downtown Washington, soberly delivering the news: President Obama was projected the winner of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes.

“That’s the presidency,” Baier said.

“It’s over,” added Fox White House correspondent Ed Henry.

Tom Lea, a tall, suited Republican from Southern California, was standing near a table piled high with baked pretzels and mini-slices of cheese and mushroom pizza when the call was made. Lea was angry—at the voters who’d inexplicably handed President Obama a second term, at a Congress divided by gridlock, at the direction of the country as a whole.

“It doesn’t get any more bleak than this,” Lea told me. “This is not hyperbole: This country is done. The writing’s on the wall. Dead.”

Lea said he believed newly elected Senate Democrats like Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and returning Democrats like Claire McCaskill would do nothing to fix what he called our “divided government.” He also hammered the president for doing nothing to bridge that partisan divide. “This president has not reached across the aisle to work with the members of the House,” Lea said. “This government isn’t working. We just inherited a worse government than what we had in 2008.”

The RNC’s election party was expected to attract 2,500 to 3,000 guests, RNC spokesman Tom Kise told reporters early in the night. And the main space at the Ronald Reagan Building did indeed fill up fast as polls closed across the country. The party roared with the sound of rollicking country tunes and chatter among the crowd. The guests nibbled their snacks and sipped their cocktails and watched the returns, the men dressed in suits, the women in tight dresses.

As the news trickled in—big Democratic wins in Senate races in Massachusetts, Missouri, Indiana, and Connecticut—the energy ebbed. At just past 11 p.m., the night’s emcee urged partiers to keep their spirits up, wait for all the results to come in, and to have “one or two more drinks” while they were at it.

But the party had thinned by the time Baier called the race for Obama. Half an hour later, it was abandoned but for a loyal few. A few couples still danced to the sound of the band while the catering crew cleared the food and the bartenders began stacking their cocktail glasses. Guests streamed toward the exits, arms interlocked, dressed in wool coats and scarves against the November chill.

DC residents Jonmarc Buffa and Liz Kelly made for the exits as the party died down. Buffa held a miniature American flag, and an “I voted!” sticker was affixed to his jacket. Buffa was at a loss to explain why, say, a working-class single mother in Cleveland would vote for Obama. “You have to admit: If you’re unemployed right now, continuing what we have currently is not going to get you very far,” he said. He added, “I think Democrats this time were able to convince people to vote against their own self-interest, which to me was shocking.”

Buffa did give the Democrats some credit. He said their get-out-the-vote operation was superior, and GOP voters just weren’t as motivated. “Republicans once again didn’t do what they should’ve done, which is show up.”

Kelly, Buffa’s spouse, had her own take: Republicans from Mitt Romney on down let themselves get too entangled with social issues like abortion. “Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot,” she said. Conservatives are “completely right on economics, but they’re completely wrong on social issues.”

Kelly said she’d recently graduated with a master’s degree in social work. The job market she entered was bleak—and she didn’t see President Obama doing anything to improve it. But so long as Republicans fielded candidates such as Missouri’s Todd Akin or Indiana’s Richard Mourdock—both candidates tripped up by controversial gaffes about rape and abortion—the party wasn’t going anywhere, she said.

Buffa was even grimmer with regard to the next four years. “I think at the end of the day,” he said before heading out into the cold, “people are going to regret this day.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate