Someone here wrote recently "Remember John Kerry got 36% in this district, Hackett got 48%" in support of the idea that the tide has changed in American politics.
Here is the problem with ALL of this. (Please...no flames. I am VERY happy that Hackett did as well as he did. I am just trying to figure out why, how, so that we can replicate and expand upon his success.)
Read on.
This was a DREAM matchup. An intelligent, real American hero against a ditzbrain. You might say "Well, almost ALL Republican candidates are ditzbrains." And you'd be right. So how come we keep losing? Answer? The Democratic Party suffers from a lack of great candidates. It is said that all politics is local. Well, all politics is personal as well.
Especially now, during the info-blitz age. You cannot fake image. The Republicans have successfully done so with Bush
only because he has had no GREAT opponents against whom he could be compared one on one. Kerry was as false as the convention that nominated him. He let himself be massaged and shaped by professional spinners. The few times he actually behaved like a human being, he showed some promise. But soon there he was back in talking points hell once again, and he lost.
Gore too.
By mere percentage points. Both of them.
One, two...DESPITE the voter intimidation and fraud efforts of the Republicans.
The last time the Democrats nominated a candidate for President who had some personal juice and refused to be other than who he really was (For good AND for not so good, eventually...Clinton, of course.), they won. I still maintain that if the Democratic Party had not acceded to its spinners during the 2003 primaries, Dean would have mopped the floor with Bush. Even now, Dean is the ONLY nationally recognized Democrat with Presidential possibilities who isn't a pre-composed stick figure, a poll-driven "personality" rather than a flesh and blood human being.
So now we narrowly miss a win in a heretofore red district, and we are crowing about how the tide has turned. Well...it has not only not TURNED, it has not really even appreciably changed. We simply (Finally!!!) RAN A BETTER CANDIDATE!!!
Duh.
Had we run a round-up-the-usual-suspects Democratanimatron in that special election, we would have lost by a larger margin. Yes, it still would not have been as large a loss as the percentages in the 2004 election because indeed the Rats are in SOME sort of trouble in the media right now, but given their proven expertise at both manipulating the media and stealing elections through the use of vote fraud and voter discouragement, they are not in enough trouble to guarantee that they will lose in either the 2006 elections OR in 2008.
UNLESS WE BEGIN TO NOMINATE HUMAN BEINGS TO RUN FOR OFFICE.
Which I do not see happening.
Hillary Clinton has gone off to hide her light under a DLC barrel. She has become SO centrist that the mass of centrism in which she resides these days functions as a black hole, pulling ALL light and humanity back into itself by its sheer gravity.
And those SUITS!!!
Clarke, brilliant though he may be, looks to the average voter as if he is total construct. Not an OUNCE of real, unconsidered humanity appears when he speaks. He is too perfect. The robot who could, but won't. General Android. (Sorry, Clarkies. He may very well be the greatest man on earth. He just doesn't have the magic.)
And who does that leave, once again? Who has national exposure, national credibility and a real, human sheen and presence?
Why, Howard Dean, of course.
With Reid as an outside choice. IF he runs. (Dean/Reid. GREAT ticket, by the way. Talk about a SCRAP!!!) Gore seems to have recovered some of his juice, but he caved in to the Braziles of this world once, and I believe he would do so again.
They call it charisma. (From Gk. kharisma "favor, divine gift," from kharizesthai "to show favor to," from charis "grace, beauty, kindness," related to chairein "to rejoice at," from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] base *gher- "to desire, like.")
The early American spinmmeister Sam Goldwyn (Hollywood division) used to say: "The most important thing in acting is honesty. Once you can fake that, you're in."
Well, when fake honesty meets real charisma...you are O-U-T OUT!!! (Nixon vs. JFK being the perfect illustration of this fact.)
If Democrats wake up to this ONE political law...no less true now than it was when JFK mopped up the floor with Nixon during the debates, when Truman (True man) made the false little Dewey man on the wedding cake into a trivia question despite ALL prognostications to the contrary, and when that TRUEST of all candidates Jimmy Carter beat that dumb old Warren Commission liar Uncle Gerald...THEN this loss of Hackett's will be a real victory.
Until then...2006 will be yet another battle of the spinmeisters. 2008 too.
And the other side is better at lying than we are.
Same tactics; same story; same result.
Or...
Dean in 2008.
Charisma.
No one else has it.
Not people in the right position to use it, anyway.
Dean in 2008.
Or...what?
Charles