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1. I think there is some truth there. I think it was a function of the fact that the Republicans are so much more on message and focused than we are most of the time, so the result is they appear to have a detailed message and we don't as much, also Kerry clearly had issues with plain speaking and the ability to simply distill things that say Clinton has. Still, it is puzzling that she could see that to kerry it was a principled stand to vote against the 87 million and yet it confused her. I mean you understood the stand, so how was it confusing? And how did she not understand there is nothing mutually exclusive between it being the wrong war, place and time but also understanding that now that we have made the mess we have to clean it up? I think it is a function of speaking in simple terms, "we are there now, we cant go back in time, so we have two choices pull out and leave our mess, or clean it up"...that simple meme over and over again would have stood Kerry well I think.
2. I dont understand this one. Why is treating something like a crime somehow less than treating it like a war? I think the crux of this psychologically is that the former is treated as something you minimize while the latter is treated as something you wipe out and defeat, and people dont want to believe that terrorism can only be minimized, they want to believe it can be defeated. Don't really know how you counter this unless you advocate a different war. Perhaps the theme should have been "we should have 150K soldiers in Afghanistan looking for bin laden, not in Iraq"? At any rate, this is a rather unsophisticated argument that this "sad American" makes.
3. Well, the real question is, if you were turned off by the Kerry Served mantra why werent you moreso turned off by the SBVFT mantra? For someone who later says she is intimately familiar with PNAC, one would also think she was intimately familiar with the lie that was SBVFT. I don't think this is a valid criticism at all.
4. Another one I dont get. First she mischaracterizes it as being concerned about "opinions" when the real thrust was being concerned about having help! I think I will agree though that the argument about the "rest of the world" was probably high risk, low reward for Kerry and in hindsight this theme was probably way overplayed.
5. I think the thing with this is not that I agree with her characterization that democrats demonize the rich, but that it is possibly evidence that we arent enough getting across that we are empathizing with the poor and that we want to give the poor the tools to one day become the rich. I think we might do well as a party to start focusing on what we want to do for and with the poor and middle class, and talk much less about the rich.
6. This is the one of the main problems we have. We, as Democrats, have been labeled the "nice guys". The Republicans get the pleasure of having the "bad guys" label. That means that if they go over the top and are "mean" its almost expected and less criticized, but let us do it and we reap voter dissatisfaction. I dont know how we overcome this exactly. Perhaps it involves either shedding our nice guy label, or simply playing it to the hilt by trying to rise above it all. But both options have their risks, and nice too often translates into weak.
7. She's got a point here. She really does, and part of me doesnt wonder if 1-6 arent in many ways just her way of logically validating the fact that the emotion of 7 is what really got her to vote against us. We do a LOT on the left attack those on the right as stupid, we attack them for their religion, we attack their morality (and yes many on the right do the same to us I know) but it certainly affects the chances of us receiving the votes of those conservative democrats and almost democrats who lets face it WE NEED! Self Described Conservatives make up what over 30% of the country while self described liberals make up a little more than half that. There has got to be a way to somehow focus our attacks so that they arent so sweeping as to make people like this person feel they are caught up in the attack.
I think the argument she presents is, I think both parties are "devils" so to speak, but the devil I know is Bush, I know how he is going to work things, I know what he is going to do, and with you guys, it could be anything. So i am sticking to the devil I know.
I think we messed up this election by trying to outRove, Rove. Instead of dumbing it down and trying to outperform Bush, we should have been thick into clear, concise but specific policy. What will we do in Iraq, what will we do with the economy, specifics. That may have gone contrary to normal political wisdom in a presidential election, but I think it would have worked.
At any rate, it's not wise to take one or two elections and try to use that as a basis for wholesale change. We were very close to winning last time and this time, so no need to "trade the entire team", but we do need to tweak things a bit, and perhaps by listening to some of what she presents and tweaking things accordingly, we can pick up the few tens of thousands of votes we need next time around to be on the other side of the slim win.
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