Perhaps my memory is failing me but I seem to remember Al Gore WINNING in 2000...by 543,000 votes !

Yet, author Westen presumes to show us video footage of Al Gore "demonstrating" why he lost !

Now let's revisit 1988, and Dukakis.

Which paragon of emotive heat did Dukakis lose to ?

Oh, that's right.....John Barrymore himself..George H. W. Bush...world famous for his ability to inspire emotion !

HAHAHAHAHA

All this post demonstrates is how totally banal, trite, cliche-ridden "ideas" , can be dressed up on the printed page, on videos, and on the internet, and be taken seriously because somebody utters them.

By the way.....Kerry lost by less than 2% to a "wartime" incumbent, the worst showing by an incumbent since Woodrow Wilson squeaked by similarly in 1916. And please remember, it took an unprecedented "swift boat" SMEAR campaign to get the moronic bush his less than 2% "mandate".

The real point of this post is to demonstrate the capacity of some media types to demonstrate their silly pretensions to "profundity" while psyching out Democrats and non-conservatives into destructive negative thinking.

1988 had scumbag Lee Atwater, 1992 and 1996 had victorious Bill Clinton depite avalanches of smears, hate, and even a criminal impeachment !

Republicans are not invincible.

They are not even strong.

They require cheating on an epic basis to "win" squeaky close "victories".

Let's not beat ourselves.

The most ominous thing about this post is that the author, Westen, will probably get himself a mega consulting contract on the basis of his "genius" and therefore cause his unwary Democratic client to lose unnecessarily.

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I keep seeing articles analyzing why the Democrats lose elections, lost the last election, lost the last two elections. The false assumption that Cheney/Bush won the last two elections underlies all the reasoning in these articles.

I would love to see this comment made into an electronic rubber stamp and put at the end of every one of these articles: “Try to remember this: We didn’t vote Cheney/ Bush in. The Supreme Court awarded them the first election after questionable election tactics were used in Florida. The second election was stolen through disenfranchisement and hacked electronic touchscreen voting machines.

When we consider how many liberties have been lost under this administration. in addition to our engagement in a preemptive war and danger of one with Iran, we realize the significance of what, in total, has been stolen from the American people.

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their stranglehold on the minority vote.

Poor white people used to vote for the Democrats out of sheer economic interest and now they shun the left.

Whatever the left is offering - affirmative action, environmentalism, gay marriage, abortion rights, feminist agenda, gun bans, etc. just doesn't appeal to working class white Americans.

Thus the Democrats will continue to lose. If they run Hillary in '08 they are essentially throwing the election and truly showing how little they understand about the country they supposedly would like to represent.

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We need to Impeach Bush and Cheney NOW! Then focus on Barack and Hillary. Elect A Democrat people!

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The Dems didn't lose either election. We need to forget about psyching them out and pay attention to voter registration, making sure people don't get purged from the voter lists and getting people out to vote in record numbers. If we get the vote above 35% for a change, the Dems could win by a landslide.

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What kind of 'framing of the issue' is revealed by this phrase:

Westen believes it's the role emotion can play and the fact that candidates from Mondale to Kerry were too dispassionate for the American public's tastes.

How about an alternative set of frames, including:

What role does the ownership of the press play in the election process? Do media owners (who tend to be wealthy) give free positive coverage to candidates who support their agenda?

What role does election fraud and manipulation play in the outcome?, Here we have rigged voter rolls, insufficient and understaffed voting centers and privately owned, proprietary electronic voting machines.

The combination of a corporate media that won't even report on the stolen elections, and a privately-controlled voting system (Diebold, Sequoia, etc.), means that US election results are currently about as untrustworthy as they've ever been.

Consider also that the corporate media has abandoned exit polling, which provides an independent check on the accuracy of the recorded vote. Their justification is that the exit poll called it for Gore in 2000, and they don't want to 'make the same mistake again'. The fact is, exit polls are pretty accurate if you ask enough people - unless the election was stolen.

Corporate media coverage of the rigged elections in the US is essentially nonexistent - meaning that much of the media, especially the likes of O'Reilly, etc., is really an active participant in election fraud.

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The first assertion in this video clip is that Democrats choose candidates based on their stands on the issues - since when?

At no time in recent memory has the Democrat with the most clear, unequivocal stands on the issues -- the stands with the most resonance among the Democratic Party base -- received the nomination. No amount of marketing, posturing, sound biting and manipulation can overcome the handicap of a candidate who doesn't share the policy stance of his/her party's base, or who is equivocal in their support of key policy goals.

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Republicans seem to be able to count on their politicians to stand firm on certain special issues dear to evangelicals, even if they screw the country over on every other issue. We cannot rely on leading Democratic candidates for president to hold firm on any issue, which is why I think there are so many independents.

I keep hearing the spin that Democrats lose because they are too liberal. Rubbish! Gore, Clinton and Kerry might talk a modestly liberal agenda, but when push comes to shove they sell us down the river. Who can get behind people like that? Yet Democrats like Senator Feingold, who seems to have conviction and integrity, do not run for president. If we are going to draft a better candidate than those already declared, draft Russ Feingold not Al Gore. I would not even trust Gore to stand firm on environmental issues no matter how much publicity he generates for Global Warming. The environment was shortchanged plenty while he was Vice President. Nobody wants a spoiler, but I do not blame anyone for dreaming about a progressive third party that could represent us better than Democrats have.

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I have thought this for years -- the Republicans long ago perfected the marketing of their candidates by appealing to the emotions of voters, sometimes with hope and pride (Reagan), more recently with fear (Bush). The Democrats have not done this, whether because they are more noble or just less effective, I don't know.

This is largely what Al Gore's book Assault on Reason is about. He points out that the founding fathers assumed that voters would stay informed through a free press, and would use their reasoning ability to vote for politicians who would support their interests. Since the advent of TV, campaigns instead rely on commercials that fly under the radar of reason, and appeal to voters' emotions, in the same way that advertisements manipulate consumers to buy products they don't need.

The Republicans are better at this than the Democrats, which is why they do so well in elections, even though their policies are detrimental to the majority of the voting public.

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Democrat or Republican it does not matter because they are just owned by different set of rich people. The needs and the desires of the not wealthy do not matter because we are living in a plutocracy. Democracy in this country died long ago.

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I've always been a liberal. I have always detested conservatives. But you gotta admit one thing: the Republican Party is better funded, better organized and more adept at making fun of Democrats.

The Democratic Party, however, falters in many ways. About the only way they can score an electoral victory is if the majority of the electorate wants change badly. By going with Hillary Clinton only shows how desperately Democrats need to get some new blood in the party. I'd support Obama except he's against the FairTax, an idea I hope will catch on. Hillary is old school now. I'd give John Edwards a shot.

On the GOP side, Ron Paul is their best bet, but I'm worried he won't be the guy in the GOP primary. All the other GOP candidates are woefully sub-par.

Personally, I'm becoming more of a blue-state secessionist. I'm through with all the shenanigans in D.C. I say let's us blue states go our own separate way. We'll be much better off.

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The Democrats are losing because they are so averse to a genuine and go for broke confrontation that they avoid taking a stand on major issues like voter suppression, untrustworthy vote counting mechanisms, impeachment, cutting off funding for the war, how to transform the economy to provide for people when the oil markets become even more volatile after U.S. troops are withdrawn from a fragmented and inflamed Middle East, single payer health care, the offshoring of good paying jobs and the decline of wages and the value of the dollar, etc. Instead, they stick to safe issues, as in the "First 100 Hours" agenda, or they compromise on what are outrageous and wrong ideas on their face, such as confirming Alito or Gonzales because they said they would be fair.

The Democrats have been losing elections for these reasons for decades. They should be cleaning up, given that Republicans' core messages and issues are mostly those of a minority of Americans. But, no, they keep making it close by losing many of what should be their own voters by not standing up for what they claim to stand for.

Many of the ideas and outright lies put forward by the Republicans would be easy to expose and capitalize upon if the Democrats had any killer instinct. Instead, they pick at details, have months of hearings to learn less than half of what anyone reading a wide variety of news input knew long ago, and generally wimping out when a group of people with spine and ambition to do the right thing instead of court the next corporate dollar would be kicking butt right here, right now.

In sort the Democrats are losing because they are losers and the Republicans are winning more than their fair share because they play dirty and get away with it, given that they are playing against losers to begin with.

Someone mentioned Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. In the introduction, Gore makes a point of who the TV media remains fixated on non-issues and empty personalities like Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, K-Fed, etc. He could have just as easily used Romney, Obama, Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, and most of the current presidential candidates as examples. They present vague and attractive (to some) images and a certain style and television watchers project their own ideas onto them and away we go. There is nothing very real there, not the sort of things that people might agree really matter to them most were they to turn off the TV's and check in with themselves. But as Gore says, the eyes remain glued to the TV sets, the mind remains transfixed and transformed by the pap it is being fed, and these make believe characters become as real as the Iraqi hijackers co-led by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are to a near majority of TV watching Americans.

Clearly, TV watchers can't resist a good story with some drama, risk, shame, and glamor. Actually standing up and speaking one's mind about the major issues of the day and then taking dramatic action in support of one's clearly presented ideas and intentions just might provide some of that and get some meaningful and highly valued results, too. Unfortunately, all but a few brave and mostly lonely Democrats have no sense of any of that. They are losers.

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You'll get no disagreement from me either that Gore was robbed in 2000 or that the election results in Ohio looked awfully odd in light of the exit polls. But both of these are examples of how Democrats repeatedly allow themselves to be outflanked--not just during the election but immediately after it. In 2000, Gore yet again "took the high road" by not counter-suing in several counties where there was blatant vote tampering, as in Seminole County, where, as I recall, absentee ballots were treated differently if they were Democratic or Republican. Kerry conceded Ohio despite clear evidence that Democratic precincts offten had waiting lines of 5 hours to vote. I write extensively in The Political Brain about how Democrats have suffered not only from the wrong vision of mind--constant appeals to reason, policies, and positions--but the wrong state of mind--fear and complacency in the face of attacks on the most fundamental democratic institutions, most importantly, fair elections. See Michael Tomasky's review of the book in the NY Review of Books, where he quotes some passages from the book on just that issue.

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Let's take just one example of how this works, using the media empire of Bush confidante William Dean Singleton, the head of Media News Group. You can see the huge newspaper holdings of MNG.

Here is a list of stories which reveal how papers owned by Dean Singleton and MNG have been killing stories critical of Bush, and buying up monopoly positions in various communities.

1) Still Hiding the Bush Bulge: Spiking of story an “internal matter,” Pasadena paper says

2) Bush Buddy, William Dean Singleton, buys up almost all Bay Area newspapers.

3) Citizen Dean aka "Hatchet Man"

4) Feds refuse to intervene in Bay Area newpaper deals invovling Hearst and MNG

5) Media News Group refuses to cover any mention of election fraud, 2004.

This firm now controls almost all papers in the Bay Area, and is in bed with Hearst.

So, this is just one example of what has been going on all across the country - corporations with very close ties to wealthy Republicans have been spinning the media in favor of their candidates.

Democratic candidates believe that they can't directly attack the corrupt conglomerated media, because of the backlash effect. While the corporate press doesn't do investigative journalism any more, they'd certainly try and dig up as much dirt as possible on any candidate who pointed out that the US corporate media system is, in reality, an enemy of democracy.

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