Why the Democrats aren’t doing their job
I was inspired to share the following I wrote in response to the thought "if I just did a little bit more (and by extension if everyone did a little bit more), maybe Kerry would have been elected".
My response was this:
That’s wishful thinking on your part. Yes, the grassroots are powerful, sometimes surprisingly so. But I think the blame for this loss goes squarely on the Kerry/Edwards campaign managers. It’s not like they didn’t have enough money or enough volunteers. They simply failed to grasp, on a nationwide scale, what factors bring people to the polls to vote for a particular candidate. The Dems have been getting this up the ass in spades at least since the primaries. That Kerry was a surprise going in is the root of the whole problem. There’s no consistent message, there’s no organization, there’s no coordination, and there’s a lot of uncertainty and misreading of opinion.
Granted, it’s not clear to me that the results are even remotely accurate. But if they are, there are a number of messages there that the Dems don’t get. One of them is that there are a lot of single-issue voters, who really just don’t seem to care about much else (which I personally find very alien). Another is that every
attempt to portray Bush as an idiot, even by himself (think "internets") only gets him more support. Yet another is that telling people to vote for you is much more effective than asking them.
