How to win elections and influence people?

What would you do if you gave someone absolute power for several years, and they completely messed everything up?

Not just a few little mix-ups, but seriously laying waste to everything they’re responsible for.

What if they turned freedom into tyranny, truth into lies, unity into loathing, safety into fear, prosperity into debt, faith into rage, and pride into shame – what would you do?

You’d re-think your allegiance to them, right?

But what if your identity were wrapped up in theirs? Your innermost feelings about family, faith, and fatherland all tied into a seemingly awesome package of moral, trustworthy power?

And how would you feel about your complicity in having supported them? In fact, the more you feared and despaired, the more slack you gave them... and the worse their misdeeds became.

This may be one of the hardest problems for the Democrats to solve in the upcoming elections: no one likes to be wrong.

Not for nothing does Dale Carnegie start his legendary http://amazon.com/gp/reader/0671723650/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-9257970-3238545#reader-link">"How to Win Friends and Influence People" with the following point: people will do anything rather than admit their own faults, no matter how severe or glaring.

So how do we get through to the Red Staters, now that the plain facts show that their pure-play GOP government is an absolute disaster?

Because it’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t want to hear it.

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Hey, the liberal light is always on at the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Please stop by and say "hi!"

So how do we get through to the Red Staters, now that the plain facts show that their pure-play GOP government is an absolute disaster?

For starters, I think you need to reconsider what people in the red states view as "absolute disaster". For many of them, a honest look at the facts does not reveal an "absolute disaster" but movement toward what they think is right: lower taxes, a powerful military that struts its stuff, conservative morality poised to ban abortion and gay marriage, etc. I'm sure all these things look like disasters to you and I, but for many they don't.

There is a profound weakening in support for the President, and virtually no support whatsoever for the policy-setting Vice President.


They're nervous and dismayed about Iraq (look at how many rats are jumping off that ship, even Papa Rat William F. Buckley).

They're disgusted by the Katrina fiasco.

Their heads were spun around by the Dubai affair.

They were mocking about Cheney's gun incident.

They're now frequently disparaging Bush and his Congress as "not conservative" due to their runaway spending.

And they just might start to wonder if Bush's swaggering lawlessness about FISA isn't their cup of freedom.

They also consistently poll much less against gay and abortion rights than their party leadership wants us to believe.

Sure, they're not exactly DUers at this point, but they are starting to smell that smell. Will they act on it? Well, that's the question.

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Hey, the liberal light is always on at the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Please stop by and say "hi!"