Bullets and the ballot box

[T_i_B]

Philip James, former senior Democratic party strategist seems here to be arguing that the Dems should not be pushing too much on Iraq. Make of this what you will.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1183887,00.html

Is this war in Iraq worth the loss of American lives, now topping 600? Was America taken to war on a pretext? If this was a fake war, why are real Americans dying? These are the questions John Kerry has to frame if he is to unseat this president.

It won't be easy. While the Falluja video ranks alongside the images of US servicemen dragged through the streets in Mogadishu, the reaction of Americans to it is likely to be quite different.

Somalia was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission. When it went bad, no one could explain why Americans were there in the first place. Iraq is a different story. Americans were well prepared for this war. And even after 10 days of Richard Clarke-generated headlines, the latest polls - taken before the latest Falluja attacks - show a majority of Americans supporting the war.

The Falluja killings are a seminal moment in the public perception of the Iraq conflict, but the Democrats cannot expect that the event will favour their case. The images are as likely to galvanise support among those who have supported the war so far. The Bush White House will try to use the atrocity as a rallying point to make its case: that it's the US against the crazies.

[H2O Man]

1. Interesting, yet it

overlooks the simple formula of the "three groups": (1) those who always vote for you (example: anti-war, pro-Kerry); (2) those who always vote against you(pro-war, pro-bush); and (3) the undecided who will decide every close election. We can safely determine how both groups 1 & 2 feel about the terrible images of the war from this week. So it's group 3 that we need to appeal to. Do they have teen-aged sons? Because a vote for bush increases the chances that their sons will be spending time in the Middle East, to prop up the bush "peace" plan. Think of those images, and look at your sons, nephews, and the boys on your high school sports teams.