Quoting Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>:
> Well, all of this exit poll excitement on the list shows that leftists
> can be as irrational as rightists.
>
> People who make a business of polling (like the Mystery Pollster) say
> over and over that exit polls are not to be used as predictors of the
> results, and it seems that the exit polls were especially unsuited for
> that purpose this time -- if you took them as predictors, they were
> wildly inaccurate in favor of Kerry.
>
> As of this writing, it seems practically impossible for Kerry to get
> Ohio; therefore, Bush is re-elected.
>
> Everyone should look at Meteor Blade's reflections this morning on
> DailyKos.com: "Don't mourn; organize!" It's time to take a hard, sober
> look at where we are and what to do about it.
>
> One thing exit polls can do is suggest why people voted the way they
> did. It seems, from the analyses the TV gurus are making this morning,
> that the most important issue was "moral values," where Bush clearly
> triumphed, followed by economic issues (Kerry won there), Iraq (again,
> Kerry won or did very well, because there was a lot of dissatisfaction
> and disquiet about the Iraq situation), and terrorism (not so important
> as the other issues, apparently, but an issue Bush got a lot of mileage
> out of).
>
> It seems clear that the Left (both inside and outside the DP) will be
> out of commission for quite a few years until it can figure out how to
> neutralize the "values" issues (conservative religion, homophobia
> (reduced but still active), "pro-life," etc.). There seems to be a very
> large and (for now) immobile part of the country that resents secular
> people, "latte drinkers," "liberals," etc. These folks yearn for
> emotional security and will pay any price they need to to ignore
> reality -- they have dug in their heels in support of a world-view that
> we leftists consider delusional. We need to understand this fact and
> figure out how to deal with it, or we will be outside in the political
> cold for a very long time.
>
>
> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
> __________________________________________________
> It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have
> suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an
> inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we
> didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God”
> is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a
> language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the
> fact that the word is used so much.
> — Richard Rorty
>
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