While I'm happy Bush won, I will concede that part of me feels that this isn't quite like "the best man won", but rather, "the worst man lost".

This election was somebody's to lose - no one was going to 'win' really. The fact is that Kerry just wasn't a strong enough and convincing enough candidate. If the Dems are looking for someone to blame, they really don't have to look much farther than their choice in candidates.

I think a moderate Democrat from the Midwest would have probably crushed Bush.

Oh well, I'm sure they'll be happy to get behind Billary in '08. I better enjoy the next 4yrs, cuz that's going to be ugly...

Problem was the only moderate Democrat from the midwest (Dick Gephart) was even more of a personality stiff than Kerry or even Gore. His political credentials were there, but his public appeal wasn't.

I don't think Hillary will succeed in '08 unless something catastrophic happens in Bush's second term.

For me personally - I'd like to see John McCain get the nod.

There's no doubt that the Democrats need to rethink what they're about. The number of red states down the middle of the country is astounding, let alone the fact that Daschle got thrown out. I think this article points to a real paradox for the Democratic party.

Living Poor, Voting Rich
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In the aftermath of this civil war that our nation has just fought, one result is clear: the Democratic Party's first priority should be to reconnect with the American heartland.

I'm writing this on tenterhooks on Tuesday, without knowing the election results. But whether John Kerry's supporters are now celebrating or seeking asylum abroad, they should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting - utterly against their own interests - for Republican candidates.

One of the Republican Party's major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires. Democrats are still effective on bread-and-butter issues like health care, but they come across in much of America as arrogant and out of touch the moment the discussion shifts to values.

"On values, they are really noncompetitive in the heartland," noted Mike Johanns, a Republican who is governor of Nebraska. "This kind of elitist, Eastern approach to the party is just devastating in the Midwest and Western states. It's very difficult for senatorial, Congressional and even local candidates to survive."

In the summer, I was home - too briefly - in Yamhill, Ore., a rural, working-class area where most people would benefit from Democratic policies on taxes and health care. But many of those people disdain Democrats as elitists who empathize with spotted owls rather than loggers.

One problem is the yuppification of the Democratic Party. Thomas Frank, author of the best political book of the year, "What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," says that Democratic leaders have been so eager to win over suburban professionals that they have lost touch with blue-collar America.

"There is a very upper-middle-class flavor to liberalism, and that's just bound to rub average people the wrong way," Mr. Frank said. He notes that Republicans have used "culturally powerful but content-free issues" to connect to ordinary voters.

To put it another way, Democrats peddle issues, and Republicans sell values. Consider the four G's: God, guns, gays and grizzlies.

One-third of Americans are evangelical Christians, and many of them perceive Democrats as often contemptuous of their faith. And, frankly, they're often right. Some evangelicals take revenge by smiting Democratic candidates.

Then we have guns, which are such an emotive issue that Idaho's Democratic candidate for the Senate two years ago, Alan Blinken, felt obliged to declare that he owned 24 guns "and I use them all." He still lost.

As for gays, that's a rare wedge issue that Democrats have managed to neutralize in part, along with abortion. Most Americans disapprove of gay marriage but do support some kind of civil unions (just as they oppose "partial birth" abortions but don't want teenage girls to die from coat-hanger abortions).

Finally, grizzlies - a metaphor for the way environmentalism is often perceived in the West as high-handed. When I visited Idaho, people were still enraged over a Clinton proposal to introduce 25 grizzly bears into the wild. It wasn't worth antagonizing most of Idaho over 25 bears.

"The Republicans are smarter," mused Oregon's governor, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat. "They've created ... these social issues to get the public to stop looking at what's happening to them economically."

"What we once thought - that people would vote in their economic self-interest - is not true, and we Democrats haven't figured out how to deal with that."

Bill Clinton intuitively understood the challenge, and John Edwards seems to as well, perhaps because of their own working-class origins. But the party as a whole is mostly in denial.

To appeal to middle America, Democratic leaders don't need to carry guns to church services and shoot grizzlies on the way. But a starting point would be to shed their inhibitions about talking about faith, and to work more with religious groups.

Otherwise, the Democratic Party's efforts to improve the lives of working-class Americans in the long run will be blocked by the very people the Democrats aim to help.

If only working class American's weren't so stupid they would vote Democratic??? The above article pretty much sums up the problem with the Democrats.

Even the poor plan on being rich.....Aint America great!

County Map!
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm

One Last Flip-Flop
November 3, 2004



I guess John Kerry went into the primary without a plan to win the election.

The Democrats threw everything they had at this election. They ran a phony Vietnam War hero and a phony Southerner. They had middle-aged women executives at MTV hawking "Rock the Vote" to entice the most uninformed young people to vote for Kerry. They had Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews and New York Times darling Eminem. They had documentaries, books, the universities, Hollywood (and the French!) on their side.

They had liberal thugs ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters, stealing Bush-Cheney signs and slashing the tires of Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day. In Colorado, they traded voter registrations for crack cocaine. In Ohio, they registered Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy. In South Carolina, Emily's List called Republican households and gave them incorrect information about the location of polling places.

The media campaigned heavily for Kerry with endless Abu Ghraib coverage, phony National Guard documents and, days before the election, false news reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq.

The Democrats' cheating never stopped. The big story of this election is the fraudulent exit polls on Election Day. Strange as it seems to me, it is well acknowledged that people are more likely to come out and vote for a winner. Early exit polls showing Kerry the clear winner could be expected to depress the vote for Bush.

Stunningly inaccurate exit polls released around noon on Election Day convinced news anchors, talking heads and even the campaigns that Kerry would win walking away. But at 9 p.m., when the first actual results began to come in, the election flipped to Bush. It was the first Kerry flip-flop that actually served the national interest.

The exit polls were absurd: They showed Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20 points and Bush tied with Kerry in Mississippi. Only monkey business can explain the wildly pro-Kerry exit polls – admittedly hard to believe with a party that has behaved so honorably throughout this campaign. Michael Barone speculates that the sites of exit polling were leaked to the Democrats, and Democrats sent large numbers of voters to those polls to take exit polls and throw the results.

But for all their chicanery, vote-stealing, Hollywood starlets, fake polls and faux patriotism, the Democrats were wiped out on Election Day.

Bush won the largest popular vote in history with a 3.5 million margin. Indeed, simply by getting a majority of the country to vote for him – the left's most hated politician since Richard Nixon – Bush did something "rock star" Bill Clinton never did. Bush maintained or increased his vote in every state but Vermont. Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate, and continue to dominate state governorships. Also making history of a sort, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle lost his election, marking the first time in half a century a Senate leader has been defeated.

To Michael Moore, George Soros, Terry McAuliffe, Dan Rather, Al Franken and the whole gang at Air America Radio – you were great, guys! Thanks for the help! We couldn't have done it without you!

Of course, we could have done it a lot earlier on election night but for "Boy Genius" Karl Rove. It's absurd that the election was as close as it was. The nation is at war, Bush is a magnificent wartime leader, and the night before the election we didn't know if a liberal tax-and-spend, Vietnam War-protesting senator from Massachusetts would beat him.

If Rove is "the architect" – as Bush called him in his acceptance speech – then he is the architect of high TV ratings, not a Republican victory. By keeping the race so tight, Rove ensured that a race that should have been a runaway Bush victory would not be over until the wee hours of the morning.

As we now know, the most important issue to voters was not terrorism, but moral values. Marriage amendments won by lopsided majorities in all 11 states where they were on the ballot. Even in Oregon, the state targeted by gay marriage advocates as their best shot of defeating a marriage amendment, the amendment passed by 57 percent – a figure noticeable for being larger than the percentage of votes cast for Bush in Oregon. In the great state of Mississippi, the marriage amendment passed with 88 percent of the vote.

Seventy percent to 80 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage and partial-birth abortion. Far from appealing exclusively to a narrow Republican base, opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly. There were marriage amendments on the ballot in Michigan and Ohio. Bush won Ohio narrowly and lost Michigan by only 2 points. How different might that have been if Bush hadn't run from the issue.

But Rove concluded Bush should stay mum on gay marriage and partial-birth abortion – contravening the politicians' rule of thumb: Talk about your positions that are wildly popular with voters. "Boy Genius" Rove decided Bush shouldn't even run radio ads on gay marriage, and at the last minute, Bush started claiming he was in favor of civil unions, just like John Kerry.

Amazingly, it was the Democrats – the ones who support gay marriage – who used the gay issue for political advantage, most famously when Kerry gay-baited Mary Cheney during the third debate.

The one toss-up Senate seat lost by the Republicans was Pete Coors in Colorado, where the Democrats did not hesitate to run commercials of a bacchanalian gay festival in Canada sponsored by Coors Brewing Co. The most narrow Republican win in a toss-up Senate race was in Alaska, where the Republican candidate was another "progressive" on the social issues.

When contemplating a former New York mayor as their next presidential candidate, Republicans should remember: This election should have been over sometime in August, not 1 a.m. election night.

Ann Coulter.....I know I know....you hate her but she makes a couple of good points

GP: I thought you were done with this stuff. Don't be flip flopping on us again.

Wow! That County Map looks even more impressive than when I originally posted it!

Square miles of counties won:
Bush: 2.5 million
Kerry: 511,700

I just hope the Kerry voters realize that them 2.5 million square miles of voters are the stewards of the land.

I just hope the Republicans realize that them 2.5 square million miles of voters are the stewards of the land.

Come on Dave I know you like Ann's journalism so I figured I save you the google search and put it here for you and Eddie