Reply #17: It was stolen, and it's the basic force that is shaping this campaign [View All]

[BeyondGeography]

You raise a very important point, Q. The election was stolen but this country is politically apathetic. There's a huge gap between the passions of the Democratic base and "mainstream (or white) America," which sees politics in show-biz terms and spends little time thinking about ideological matters.

The rage of the 2000 election is in large part what has propelled the candidacy of Howard Dean. I don't support him (did once) but the real genius of his campaign is that his muscular approach to confronting Bush, and his so-called Bush-Lite opponents, responds on a very deep level to the shame that many Democrats felt at basically being out-muscled in Florida. I mean, our guys were making statements on television and the Republicans were physically storming recount centers.

This wimp factor has been in the air for many years (Ann Coulter calls us wimps, too), but we could always take refuge in our supposed intellectual superiority. If our leaders weren't smart enough to protect an election we actually won, then what good are they? The Washington politicians that Dean has so profitability bashed failed to understand the depth of this rage, and they are paying for this with their own candidacies.

The fact that so many Americans view the 2000 election differently from us, and that they find Bush, who took an electoral loss and governed as an extremist, to be personally appealing, should give us pause. Dean, should he be the nominee, will have a very hard time making the transition from the politics of the personal to a discussion of ideas. It's dangerous for this party to be defined by Bush hatred, because the market is ultimately not as big as we'd like it to be.

This election is about something much bigger than *; our place in the world, the decline of the middle class, the financial future of this country, the role of money in politics, the quality of our public schools,etc. But the media will focus on the show-biz side, and the perceived personal animosity between our candidate (if it's Dean) and Bush is a natural distraction. This will result in typically brain-dead coverage, more mindless partisanship and, most likely, our defeat.