Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I Haven’t been able to get my head wraped around the election as yet so I’ll just keep quoting better bloggers. Here’s Athenae

Here’s what I propose: A statute of limitations on depression, bargaining, etc of Friday at midnight. A weekend off: go see your spouses, your kids, your friends, go sit in the sun and have a drink. Go do whatever it is you do when you’re not here.

I’d like to sleep for a while, and remember not only what I did, but why I did it. The things that are important to me: keeping my brother and sister out of the war, improving our journalism, supporting good candidates, those things are still out there, and I still care about them.

Here’s Kevin Drum:

I sure hope all the liberal energy that came together this year doesn’t dissipate. After all, the real problem has never been George Bush, the problem has been that a bare majority of Americans agree with George Bush. That’s not an academic distinction, either: just as movement conservatives built up their machine in the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s loss in 1964, liberals need to continue building a long-term machine dedicated to changing popular opinion. And it’s hardly a herculean task: a switch of only 3 or 4 points in public opinion is a virtual landslide, and if we can pull it off it means that guys like George Bush can’t get elected anymore, even if they are the kind of people you’d like to have a beer with. It can be done.

Here’s Josh Marshall:

Well, here we are. And this is the test for people who care about this kind of politics and these sorts of values — making sure that what has been started is not allowed to falter. This isn’t 1964 or 1972 or 1980. This wans’t a blow-out or a repudiation. It was close to a tie — unfortunately, on the other guy’s side. Let’s not put our heads in the sand but let’s also not get knocked of our game. Democrats need to think critically and seriously about why this didn’t turn out 51% for Kerry or 55% for Kerry (and we’ll get to those points in the future). But it would be a terrible mistake to stop thinking in terms of those ten years Simon described.

Take time to feel the desolation and disappointment. But I remain confident that time is not on the side of the kind of values and politics that President Bush represents. It took conservatives two decades to build up the institutional muscle they have today. Though I was always nervous about the result, I thought we could win this election. But it was always naive to believe that that sort of institutional heft could be put together in 24 or 36 months.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Election 2004. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.