full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes

* (april04) "As he watched the Bush press conference with his strategists, Kerry exclaimed: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11300506%255E2703,00.html

* tomwolfe: "Jonk is a man no one should worry about, because he has no beliefs at all. He is not going to introduce some manic radical plan, because he is poll-driven, and it is therefore impossible to know where or for what he stands." is that really true? or did everyone get brainwashed? i watched jonk in the election pretty closely, and the idea that theres no there there simply seems wrong to me. and separately, the idea that jonk is polldriven - and the implicit thought-couplet that 43 isnt polldriven - or base-panderer - is patently absurd. we live in a world where 43 unashamedly thanks 'karl - the architect' in his aceptance speech, and yet jonk is somehow polldriven. odd. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1340473,00.html

* separately, we now apparently live in a values world and the red heroes are arnie and rudy (and rush and oreilly etc). go figger.

* "The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small. Based on preliminary turnout estimates, 59.5 percent of the eligible voting population turned out in marriage-ban states, whereas 59.1 percent turned out elsewhere. This is a microscopic gap when compared to other factors." http://www.slate.com/id/2109275/

* " Bush improved his share among suburban voters (51 percent in 2000, 54 percent in 2004) and among urban voters (35 percent in 2000, 44 percent in 2004) while doing worse among rural voters (60 percent in 2000, down to 54 percent in 2004). Similarly, while Bush gained among all categories of educational attainment, his biggest improvement was among those holding postgraduate degrees (47 percent, up from 43 percent) while his smallest gain was among those with high school or less (46 percent, up from 45 percent)." http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/11/index.html#004734

* btw - amongst all the noise about moralvalues and redpeople actually voting against their economic interest, the real point kinda gets lost. the real story, which was apparent even way before the election, is that redvoters literally, demonstrably voted because they believed things that werent true, and their votes would have been different if they had known the truth - at least at the margin to the degree that it would have flipped a few states - including florida *and* ohio. its been well documented that the 'saddam did 911' and 'saddam had wmd' memes are still pervasive - and they are voteflip issues. this is important cos the dems are all trying to work out how to speak religion and whether they should abandon the gaymarriage thing and how to get a better candidate and all that are redherrings - parsing exit polls at the margin and lurching left or right or whatever is simply the wrong response. they didnt even need to show that the egadmin lied about nukes or any of that - if most people knew those 2 very simple, verifiable facts, jonk would have won in a landslide.

im not suggesting that its easy to educate americans, or that itll be easy to counter the repug mediabeast, or that we can stop them lying - but the dems have to realise that this is the core problem. and surely this fruit hangs low. a lot lower than '20% believe the moralvalues thing and therefore vote red', and the constituency is something like twice the size. and even worse, we've known since *before the invasion* that lots of people thought that saddam did 911, and overwhelmingly those people would vote red. and the same with saddam/wmd. and we saw reports just months ago that showed the same thing. the dems had 2 years warning. and thats just sad. again, im not saying the dems sh/could have done anything differently - but it does suggest that they dont need to change anything in terms of their platform or whatever - if they'd done everything exactly the same, and more people were aware of empirical facts, then they would have won in a landslide. categoric.

the sad fact of course is that reality doesnt necessarily eventually take hold in the brains of the masses - as we've seen with this enormous swathe of the population that simply believes things that are categorically untrue about important issues. and itll probably be near impossible to change the minds of these people who have believed these things for so long - but the dems are to blame in part for actually letting these errors/ideas become entrenched in the first place. they
need to take the lesson and do their best to ensure that the repugs arent allowed to repeat this sleight-of-hand - cos they will surely try. and if they succeed, they'll win in 2008 as well. and 2012. and 2048.

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Four more years. Seriously.
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