As idiotic as this is, the extent of President Bush's limitations escaped the vast majority of Americans until Katrina, for reasons I will never, ever understand. Standing in line at a bakery on the day the Chief Justice died, I heard any number of people who had obviously voted for the the President angrily discussing his and the administration's incompetence, based on Katrina but spilling over to the war and, as news came of the Chief Justice's death, the Court, and cronysim, and so on and so forth. And I stood there, dumbfounded, wanting to scream at these people who seemed to be suddenly discovering the nose on their own faces.
People like that feel betrayed: that they were conned and frightened into a stupid war, and conned and frightened into voting for Bush by swift boating against Kerry and other dumb things concerning Gore. I think the sheep are angry about this---although their gullibility and addiction to cable tv or talk radio garbage is as much to blame as any candidate, and are quite tuned into efforts to con them again.
It is why despite the hysteria on cable tv and talk radio about the Reverend Wright, it went nowhere.
This election, if it similar to any in our relatively recent past, most resembles 1932 (especially in the sense that one party is,rightly so, held responsible for just about everything that has gone wrong.
There is, though, a touch of 1980 here, too. There is little doubt that votes will be lost this year to racism, but the stars are aligned correctly this year, almost as much as they were misaligned in 1980.
There is something about a president being afraid to leave the White House but otherwise doing very little to free Americans held as hostages in a foreign embassy, and another president so out of touch that he does not know the price of gasoline and his response when he finds out is to say that he will asks the Saudis to cut us some slack, that makes it hard for the party responsible for that president to hold onto the White House. As Mark Shields said the other day, if the Democratic party can't win under these conditions they should consider getting into aluminum siding.