I believe that this election is the most important in American history, because it's a referendum on the Bush Agenda, which pretty much comes down to extremist policies (economic and otherwise) that favor private interest at the expense of public interest. I don't know if we, as a nation, will ever be able to recover from four more years of Bush.
In just four years, the Bush administration has squandered much more than just our budget surplus and thriving economy; George W. Bush has also severely undermined our nation's standing with the rest of the world. More people, in more countries, hate America than at any other time in our history. And they don't hate us for our freedom, as the republican talking point would have us believe. They hate us because of George W. Bush and the Neo-con agenda.
I believe that we must change course, and I believe that John Kerry and John Edwards will take us in the right direction.
It is against this backdrop that I have been listening to all the major cable news orgs talk about the double-digit bounce for Bush after the convention, and I'm sick . . . with fear.
--More after the fold --
I couldn't understand how Bush could have such a huge lead, so quickly. I mean, did Americans just not pay attention? Did we ignore Zell Miller's hateful, angry, lie-filled rant? Did we not pay attention to the new data on Medicare premiums jumping 17%? Or the mounting death toll in Iraq? Did those Swift Boat Veterans ads work? The ads which have been thoroughly debunked, and tied
directly to Karl Rove and the White House?
"What in the world has happened?" I thought, "How did we go from a statistical tie to a huge Bush lead so quickly? This is the most terrifying 'convention bounce' I've ever seen."
I emailed these concerns to a friend of mine who is politically savvy and very smart. I told him how I'm beginning to despair, not because I believe the apparent bounce is insurmountable, but because I fear that the media has picked up the story that Kerry is finished, (the same way they picked up the story that Al Gore was a 'serial exaggerator,') and if undecided voters hear that story enough, they'll either stay home, or back Bush so they can back a winner.
Here's what he sent back to me, from Electoral Vote dot Com:
"'Rasmussen has started publishing a 3-day rolling average every day. For Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, (all post-speech), Bush's lead nationally has shrunk to 1.2%. Rasmussen looked at the Time and Newsweek polls we had yesterday and said
the samples had too many Republicans in them. When he corrected for this effect, he concluded that the Time and Newsweek data might support the conclusion of a
3% Bush lead, not more.
This observation is noteworthy because it is relatively rare when one pollster says that his colleagues blew it.'
Rasmussen is a republican pollster."
This makes much more sense to me, and helps me feel less sick to my stomach. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I heard the lead was 11 points, I came straight to DKos so I could get ideas on how to fight back, and enlighten people like my parents . . . and I found lots of them on the main page and in diaries, too. So now we can continue to fight, and fight hard, because -- despite what a lazy media is telling us today -- we are still in this, and the RNC hate-and-lie extravaganza certainly didn't help . . . and if there's any justice in this world, it will come back and hurt them, just like it should.