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Originally Posted by pan6467
Was tried with Mondale and Dukakis won't work. Yes, you need to differentiate yourself but people look for 3 qualities in a President.... Charisma, can he speak to the common folk, and being centrist. That's how Clinton won he was liberal where he needed to be and moderate where needed, he had a down home appeal and he had charisma. Kerry had the moderate/liberal down but had little charisma and would shit his down home look away.
Rekna, obviously you haven't read my posts about a recount is fine but it won't change the results of this election, hopefully it could change elections so that there is no question like this again.
But in all seriousness the dems better look toward '06 and '08 if they plan to win anything and not harp on the past.
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pan, I'd be more worried whether the "down the middle" shot can work anymore. The failure of that move might be one of the residual products of these polarizing 8 years. Maybe driving a wedge down the middle was intentional, but it certainly seems to be the case now regardless.
Clinton won, yes, but I didn't see him as particularly liberal. He won a slice of the electorate. I'm suggesting that democrats may be losing the battle over fighting over a piece of the slice of population that traditionally votes. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the other half of the electorate has actually been sufficiently motivated to go to the polls yet.
It could be because both candidates have just been too far right for them. The "middle" could be the people voting democrat nowdays. Of course, the flip-side is that the "middle" could be people voting republican these days, but Rove aimed his sights on the crowd furthest to the right he could see. I would be surprised if there were large amounts of people even further along the spectrum to the right, because then even Rove and Bush wasn't able to net them.
But it could be the case that there are 40 million "liberals" (basically, people who just want to be left alone to live their lives, is what I suspect, actually--who actually knows what politicospeak they actually will respond to) out there to be called upon to vote with the right message (which doesn't so far seem to be to keep moving further to the right or perceived middle).
But hopefully democrats will realize these things that sociologists have been saying for a long time: we have a very pernicious myth in this nation--the one about personal responsibility.
It's not as though one shouldn't be personally responsible, but that it doesn't account for everything. The myth is employed to explain away structural reasons for: poverty, inequality, crime, education's results, and success. In this case, the inverse, that kerry failed due to personal deficiencies rather than an onslaught of carefully crafted (and otherwise filtered) messages via the media. He was running against a warped view of the current state of global affairs, as well as a misdirected domestic focus. I don't put too much stock the idea that he didn't have charisma or any other personal defeciencies. That isn't something one has inside them anyway, it's built up by the followers (and that connects to the conduit of the message and how it's framed and delivered).
In short, unless we see someone in person, and even questionably then, we don't really know the personality of someone given that the images presented to us go through a variety of scripts and filters before we even get to receive them. Then, they go through a series of filters in our minds (also built up within a social context, and subject to be shaped by social structures, not autonomously in our minds) before we decide to view someone a certain way.