is a good emotion to try to work with, but it makes me nervous as the foundation for an argument.

lately i have been thinking a lot about what it means to have an agenda of our own. what do we really stand for?

another way to put that is, what would we be talking about if they didn't exist?

Would righteous indignation be enough or at least a start to defuse that particular line of questioning so it isn't an arguement. In 2002 I worked for a very Conservative Democrat who came out early saying he fully supported any plan President Bush proposed to fight terror including invading Iraq or any other nation that looked at us cross-eyed. He never wavered from that point, in fact when Al Gore came to town we stood outside the room and handed out press releases about how Gore was wrong to say we needed to wait and see when it came to protecting national security. Needless to say it was 2002 and my candidate lost. When we asked people why they chose his opponent it was largely because they just weren't sure where my candidate stood when it came to supporting the President in protecting the country. After all, he said that he would vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker so how supportive could he really be. Idiots.

This happens all the time in local races and Congressional races. Part of our problem is that beween July and November the press never turned the page on these questions. We couldn't talk about taxes, we couldn't talk about Social Security, we couldn't talk about government spending because all the press wanted to ask about and write about was the war. So, when you have to deal with that kind of environment, how do you (besides saturating tv and direct mail) make your case crystal clear without making that the center of your message. I don't know the answer, but three years later it's the one thing about that race still stuck in my craw.

That means senior retired military officers, especially combat veterans. Look for those unflappable few who can quietly project masculinity.

BTW, relying on righteous indignation is a sign of weakness - "thou doth protest too much".

spoke on John Kerry's behalf at the Convention and that didn't help him overcome that gap. Max Clelland is a decorate war hero, but that didn't help him. Clearly actual military service and respect for military traditions is divorced somehow from people's popular image of national security and whether you're tough on it or not. So then what?

We have no desire to be the party of defense, there's too much going on with people's feelings about the war and the conduct of the war for us to be belivable in that role. So, in an age where the so-called Terror Moms are jumping to the GOP, how to we get them back? So how can we take this issue, which is a very important and salient issue, talk about it in a way that people understand and not cede our message? Is that possible?

This election cycle was a about one question: Who will do anything to defend America? Who do you trust more to kill for America, and do it without apology?

Kerry was disqualified from that contest the moment he tossed his medals.

Kerry had a better plan to defeat Al Qaeda, but having a better plan was completely irrelevant. The vote was about perceived guts, not brains ("guts" being squeamishness over killing innocent bystanders while in pursuit of terrorists). Endorsements mean little if people sense YOU won't walk the walk.

The election was not about who has the better plan to defeat Al Qaeda and bring Bin Laden to justice, it was about who has the intestinal fortitude to kill for America. And Americans, rightly, sense great ambivalence in our party about the determination to kill.

The corporate media and administration collude on much for the sake of keeping Americans uninformed. But on the matter of war and peace 51% of Americans chose Bush with their eyes wide open and are getting exactly what they asked for. One pro-Bush voter I know (a Southernern atheist, a veteran of both Vietnam and Iraq) termed Dubya "the lesser of evils". This man, like the 51%, has no qualms about laying waste to a village of foreigners if he believes it will spare one American.

These Americans will turn away when neo-con failures impose too high a cost on them. Until then we have to keep banging away, but our message will be more credible if our messengers are viscerally credible. I don't know who that is, but I know who it's not.

i have similar misgivings about Kerry and many other leading D lights right now. I was impressed by Clark, but he was too little too late.

I really do think we need a big message institute, a la Heritage, that just pushes out our messages on defense. we need to be pouring money into changing this knee-jerk narative that R's have guts and D's have brains.

i agree with most of your insights on kerry. however, i think even more important than that was the fact that the man was just not likeable (sp?).

i don't think we're a 50/50 country... more like a 40/40 country. those 40 would never vote for the other side, and about 20% are in the middle. some of those are educated and thoughtful voters, and some just pick someone they'd like to have a beer with.

you can see by looking at bush's numbers after the election and during his first 100 days in office for his second term that the country never really wanted to re-elect bush, but the didn't really like kerry.

another important question is why D's picked someone they thought was "electable" even though they didn't personally like him and weren't drawn to his vision or personality.

I, too, was a Clark supporter, and was quite active in his campaign here in WA.

That he only got 3% of delegates in the WA caucuses tells you much about the gulf between WA Dems and red America.