[W]e need to get real. I can't tell you how optimistic I was going into this election, though, looking back, there doesn't seem to have been a reason for quite such a sunny view. But I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they're you're primary source for information, you're outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works....But he doesn't really "get it":
...We didn't lose this [because] of terror or Iraq or the economy, we lost it on values and wedge issue shit. In the end, Rove was right to spend years playing to his base, and we were wrong to go after the center....So, the left (at least this particular segment of the left) wants the Democrat Party to win by going further to the left. Somehow, I don't think that'll work. Nor do I think that Bill Clinton -- who is the closest thing the Democrats have to a leader -- will allow it to happen.
So much for reality-based blogging.
UPDATE:
Oh, I just found some. But it wasn't on the left. Here's Gerard Vanderluen, quoting his own post of July 29, 2004:
There are millions and millions of citizens who are registered as Democrats and who talk the Democrat talk but do not always walk the Democrat walk when push comes to shove. You might be in a union -- Trade, Government, Teachers, etc. -- that could harm you if you announced for Bush. You might be in a family with deep Democratic roots. You might be a member of a minority in which you would be ostracised if you confessed you would vote for Bush. You might be of a sexual persuasion where you're chances of dates would be severely curtailed if you said you were voting for Bush. You might be working in an office or in a career where you chances for advancement might be crippled if you voted for Bush. You might be at a school where even your grades would be impacted if you said you were voting for Bush.Now, that's much closer to reality than anything I've seen from the left today.
In short there are hundreds of situations in which millions of people find themselves where a declared preference for Bush would not be a wise thing to announce. Much better to simply nod vaguely and stay out of the way of any negative consequences. The idea that everybody is going to vote the way they say they will is very oversold, particularly by the media or the pollsters who have a vested interest in declaring the race "tight." The "stealth vote" is especially relevant in an election where the single most pressing question that will come into a voter's mind after the curtains close behind him or her and they stand ready to vote is: "What's it going to be? Issue X, Y, Z, or my life?"
Sensible people, no matter what they may or may not say, choose life. And sensible people know that that is what this election is about.
