Reply #68: Thank you for your compliment...

[Sir Jeffrey]

but I am fairly certain that there were about twenty other ways for Kerry to handle the whole mess with a lot of success (including post 45 in this thread). And although I would like to lead you into thinking I am a highly paid professional consultant, I am merely a recent college graduate with way too much time on my hands...which should make you wonder why the highly paid elites couldn't come up with anything worth a damn when it mattered most.

As for the "fear" Dems have of standing up to the enemy, I suspect this actually comes from a presumption that the American people are too stupid to understand or follow complex arguments. While this may be true of many, IMO it is by no means true of the majority of voters. I would also venture a guess and say that the average non-voter could be turned into a voter if a politician were to appeal to them in a meaningful and serious way.

This lie about the ignorant voter permeates the academic side of politics. It starts with the Walter Lippmann BS and runs through every "successful" political campaign that uses the worst propaganda and demogoguery. Of course this line of thinking doesn't exert much effort explaining in detail why so few choose to exercise their vote, which I think is where the most potential for real progressive change lies. Instead, those folks "do not count" and should be ignored/marginalised.

As for your Schwarzenegger comment, who knows what the hell the opposition was thinking in that deal. I think marginalising the Terminator would have been easy even without bringing Enron into it (Mr. Schwarzenegger, please explain how taking steroids, lifting weights and sexually harrassing hundredes of women prepared you for the Governorship of the tenth largest economy in the world).