Want to know the #1 way bushco screwed their own campaign???

[Moonbeam_Starlight]

They didn't even TRY to get any undecided or swing voters. I know, I know, he's been talking his ass off in all those swing states. But loyalty oaths, pat-downs before entering, and tickets that are next to impossible to get does not exactly inspire anyone besides your most hard-core base to come out and HEAR those speeches!

Another way they alienated the swing voters? Their convention. At the convention you usually want to keep the extremists in your party safely locked away somewhere, or at least STRONGLY persuade them to tone down the rhetoric. You put on a nice, feel-good middle-of-the-road show that voters who are still looking around get a good feeling from. Your farthest reaches of the party should like it, but not get all frothed up, screaming and yelling that they LOVED IT! If you do that, you've done something wrong, convention-wise. You don't have speakers spitting all over the podium, shouting about evil and terrorism and Jesus in schools, and homosexual marriage, etc. Moderate swing voters just get SKEERED by that kind of stuff. I know. I know a lot who were scared off by that.

Next, the debates. Yet another chance for the GOP to show, through bush, that they are the party that won't scare the children, the party you can vote for. Nope. In the first debate, bush apparently turned off women faster than a drunk husband demanding his wife take her clothes off, and in the second debate, he apparently scared EVERYONE. He only looked presidential to his hard-core base. Even my moderate friends planning on voting for him refuse to discuss these debates. They have, to be quite honest, been a disaster for the republicans.

Have they just decided "aw, screw it, just fire up the base?" It sure seems like it. Because I sure am seeing a lot of moderate, unaffiliated people turning their haunted eyes to Kerry and seeing a man who looks and acts sane and Presidential, in charge and knowledgeable.

[rogerashton]

1. I hope you are right.

They think they lost in 2000 (and they know very well they lost) because not enough of their fundamentalist base turned out, and they are petrified that it will happen again, even moreso. Don't dare go for undecideds.