Reply #115: They are BOTH true -- Voter fraud AND a weak Kerry campaign

[cloudythescribbler]

True, voter fraud may have only cost Kerry a few states, including Ohio (and NM) and the electoral college. However, it may have been widespread enough so that the exit polls were right and he won the popular vote as well.

But the Democrats should have had this in a landslide. Actually, with all the 527s out there, most of those attacks were made. Kerry AND the 527s AND the media mainstream and liberals AND the progressive leadership ALL failed to counter the flimsiness of the flipflop spin (which is completely debunked by Jonathan Chait in the Oct 18 cover story of the New Republic, originally posted Oct 7, and never really substantiated, only drilled in without opposition). They also failed to respond to the distortion by Matt Bai in the Oct 10 NY Times Magazine, which was crucial to the home stretch of the campaign. It suggested (parrallelling with highbrow demagogy the Bush campaign's longstanding spin on the issue) that Kerry was less willing to confront terrorism militarily than Bush, when in fact Kerry had argued repeatedly for a large INCREASE in the special forces to INTENSIFY the struggle with Al Qaeda and the hunt for Bin Laden. The Republicans siezed on the 'nuisance' blooper and the distortions in the article with a sustained wave of protestation, augmented by a tsunami of DAILY columns from rightwing pundits, often exaggerating the distortions of Bai (see eg Dick Morris "Nuisance Nonsense" NY Post Oct 12). The Democrats et al were a pack of hound that didn't bark, failing to respond in a timely way to the flipflop spin or to the distortions by Matt Bai. This is the third presidential election in the last five that the Democrats have DUTIFULLY thrown (at the time of the Democratic Convention 88, the polls showed him ahead by 8 points, and the Village Voice ran a cover story "Will He Blow It?" -- which indeed he did. In 2000, Gore had it going away, (Bush famously cursed about Adam Clymer, whose articles pointed out that on economics, it should have been at least 54-46 Dems) but Gore insisted on speaking as if to third graders and the media did its usual job of justifying the lying down to the astroturf roots -- as in covering for Bush's failure to know the leaders of countries like India and Pakistan.

Progressives need to be willing to call the system on these issues, and to confront the various 'cultural defense mechanisms' like what I call "the pseudo-liberal anti-paranoid style in American politics" turning Hofstadter's phrase around. But between the proliferation of counterfeit or inauthentic progressives, promoted by the system for its purposes (while often made to look grass roots) and the cravenness and respectability seeking of those who are not simply counterfeit, progressivism is kept effectively "occupied territory".