On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, ravi wrote:
> yeah... though i was in the ABB crowd (somewhat) during 2004, but i am
> beginning to feel that voting for the democrats is like watching foxTV for
> alan colmes.
Okay, since no one else is willing, let me play devil's advocate for a moment:
Arguably the Democrats are perfectly positioned to take advantage of this. The guy in charge of the party right now is the one man they've got who has no trouble expressing anger: Howard Dean. And the last time he made news, it was precisely because he was directing resources to try and win voters among the poor in Mississippi -- before this all happened.
And arguably, he's doing exactly the right thing by keeping his powder dry now. His concern is the 2006 elections, not winning the weekend polls. This is something where if you want to harangue about it on the national stage, you get more credit if it wasn't your first public impulse. This is something you want to be yelling about six months from now, and how it shows in microsm everything that is wrong with the Republican vision of society. Which it does.
As for the people who respond to these polls, there's two things to remember.
The first is that there is a simple explanation for why they react more slowly: they aren't drinking information through a firehose like we are. They watch the news a little every night, they maybe read a paper, but skim over the stuff that seems repetitious. Most of them have as much information now as we had Wednesday night -- and without our partisanship and pre-existing certainties and obsession for producing a narrative. A month from now most of them will know the same amount we know now, and many of them will find it just as obvious as we do.
The second thing is that high gas prices and bad weather have been blamed on every president there's ever been. And these will be record high gas prices blamed on a president who actually is responsible for it. There is no way that won't hurt him.
The real political potential in the NOLA disaster is not the immediate blame. It's the deeper blame, the way it indicts virtually everything Bush stands for, from Iraq to Global Warming, and everything the Republicans have stood for for the last 25 years, from screwing the poor to cutting down the government to defining "security" in such insanely military terms that we spend billions on star wars but nothing preparing for things that might actually happen. It indicts the whole idea of a society where government leaves you on your own to fend for yourself.
That's not a case that gets made overnight. But with gas prices staying high, and being in the news, and the war going worse and worse, and the constitution about to get voted down, and the news media more oppositional than they've been in years, it's the best climate I can imagine for making it. And the fact that people in the center haven't gotten it yet doesn't mean they can't get it. It just means they can't turn around their entire worldview instantly. It wouldn't be a worldview if they could.
Michael "I'm an optimist because it's intellectually more challenging."