If George Bush were to choke on a pretzel, bang his head on the coffee table and somehow wake up as a decent, progressive, liberal sort of guy, I would never know it.
I wouldn't know it because I can't stand to listen to the guy and I would be deaf and blind to just about anything he said that contradicted my current picture of him. His very image in a newspaper is enough to make me turn down the corner of the page so I don't have to look at him. And if he did somehow manage to penetrate my anti-Bush filters and say something decently humanistic, I'd just assume he was lying and it would only harden my feelings against him.
Aside from the falling down part, of course, this is an unlikely scenario. But nevertheless it points to a blind spot in my worldview that makes me less open to seeing the world as it is. If I have this blindspot for George Bush it is also likely that I cannot see some of the good in many of the Democratic candidates that, for one reason or the other, just don't appeal to me.
I suspect that most of us have this kind of filter working and as a consequence we tend to selectively hear good things about our favored candidate and to lock obsessively on the bad things that are mentioned about the candidates we don't like. Yes of course, I'm talking here about Slacker.
Our friend Slacker has, here on the dKos pages, made perfectly clear his disgust for Howard Dean. He has chronicled at length his reasons for believing that Dean is some sort of Devil incarnate, a lying, narcissistic opportunist that will lead the Democratic party to ultimate defeat in November.
But as I read his comments on the matter, I find myself wondering if he's talking about the same Howard Dean, or if perhaps there is some Joseph Goebbels version floating around out there that I'm unaware of. Slacker goes on about how Dean is destroying the Democratic party when I see the Democrats around me being energized with newfound confidence and hope. He repeats accusations and negative spin from dubious sources, accusations that have clearly been debunked right here on Kos. He condemns Dean for not being Paul Wellstone and accuses Dean of being a right wing, political hack, while I see a candidate with liberal views where liberal views are appropriate. In short, he seems to be astonishingly and factually wrong about Howard Dean.
My first impulse was to dismiss Slacker as some hateful and negative naif. But as I considered his posts, it occurred to me that he is a lot like me. We both have our blindspots, his are just in a different direction.
My point is to neither praise nor bury Slacker, but to bring to everyone's attention that we all need to look out for our own blindspots and for multiple reasons.
For one thing, we still have a primary season ahead of us and selecting a Democratic candidate in a clear-eyed fashion would benefit from taking off our blinders. I don't think I'll find myself a Lieberman fan but I should at least listen to what he has to say and understand his message fully.
But more importantly, whoever the nominee is, we are going to be facing an electorate that is defined by blind spots against the Democratic party. Winning will require that we understand the ways in which they filter out our message and replace it with those manufactured by Rove and Company.
The first step to understanding and dealing with the blind spots of others is to understand and deal with ours. Slacker does us a great favor by issuing us that challenge. How well we do in the general election may hinge upon how well we learn to understand each other.