Hi everybody,
This is a request for a tiny bit of help for writing a short 350 word letter to the editor.
My college, Marist College, is farirly heavily republican leaning politically and is the college newspaper.
The article in the paper was written election night before several races were called and it clearly predicting the future.
I'll drop some quotes from an article that appeared in today's edition and hopefully someone witty can come up with a successful response.
The article drums up the 'the dem win isn't significant' line of thought.
The article is titled:
Democractic win is no sweeping mandate for new policy
The article starts with this gem:
Democractic leaders including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senator Reid are already celebrating what they have characterized as a mandate for considerable change in both domestic and foreign policy.
Have they said they have a mandate? I remember in 2000 and 2004 Bush claimed a mandate after razor thin victories but i don't remember a Peolosi or Reid quote about a mandate -- is that true?
Look at it by the numbers - in all of the key races nationwide, there was an extremly thin margin of votes determining a win or a loss. Perhaps one to three percentage points seperate the candidates.
So a competitive race... was competitive? And thus you can't claim that the democracts swept the house and senate? Err?
In order to merit a mandate, politically speaking, there should have been a broader distance in the polling data... there was not. Recall that... support for the operations in Iraq have appeared to greatly wane. If this election was really a statement by the people about the war voting should have reflected [this]. Going by the numbers this is not so.
I don't know where to respond here -- I'm lost.
If... [the dems] gain the Congress, I can only hope that they ... attempt to legislate based on bi-partisan consensus. Democract lawmakers have said on numerous occasions that they are not weak on national security and the war on terror. They may soon have the opportunity to make good on these promises.
What the hell was that last sentence? Did he just say that dems are lying about what they are going to do in the future and they don't care about security? ugghh.
This is the ending and this is where he tried to drum up the fear:
There will be, however, a caveat to their new-found grasp on power -- they had better not screw it up. This may seem self-evident, but after more than a decade of highlighting republican debacles, failing to deliver in a big way could spell disaster in 2008. More importantly, it could spell disaster for this nation
What?
How can this article even be published? Geez, again with the 'dems will destroy the nation'.
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Sorry this isn't a link but the site that has the paper didn't update their site yet, it is maristcircle.com .
So what do you think? Whats the best way to slap back this type of argument against the wave and trying to scare people against the dems who hate our security?
Please post comments to help me out.
-- MrMacMan