Thoughts During A Tryptophan Hangover

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Ticked-Off Democrats Turn on Their Own

Jonathan Chait is a New Republic writer who somewhat famously suggested that it was necessary and appropriate for voters to hate G.W. Bush. Now, in today's L.A. Times, he has turned his sights on three Democrats who are prominent in early speculation for 2008: John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Howard Dean. Chait doesn't think much of them:

Kerry:

Probably the only worse option than Dean or Clinton, short of nominating Paris Hilton, would be to renominate John Kerry, who, reports have suggested,
inexplicably harbors ambitions of running again in 2008. In a previous column I
compared Kerry's contribution to his own campaign to an anchor's contribution to a boat race. In retrospect, I seem to have given him far too much credit.

On H. Clinton:

Her advisors point out that she's religious and speaks the language of
Scripture. That's nice, but nobody seemed to notice it during her eight years in
the national spotlight. She's painfully uncharismatic. Her only political
accomplishment is that she won a Senate seat in an extremely Democratic state,
where she ran six percentage points behind Al Gore. Clinton's supporters like to
note that she's not as liberal as people think. That's exactly the problem. I
can see the logic behind nominating a liberal whom voters see as moderate.
Nominating a moderate whom voters see as liberal is kind of backward, isn't it?

On Dean:

Dean argued that Democrats didn't really need to engage the cultural issues that Republicans had long used to win white, working-class voters. Instead, Dean argued, it would be better to persuade culturally traditional whites to vote
their economic self-interest. But of course, a candidate can't always decide for
the voters what issues they should pay attention to. Economics is complicated.
Cultural issues are visceral. The presidential election showed pretty decisively
that Democrats can't get a hearing on their more popular economic platform if
voters don't think their values are in the right place. A secular Yankee like
Dean is about the worst possible candidate.

Supporting The Troops: The Web Makes It A Lot Easier Than It Used to Be


This Daniel Henninger column in Opinion Journal is encouraging and informative about how citizens on their own have developed ways to support the men and women fighting in Afgahnistan and Iraq. Henninger notes:

At last for the troops fighting the war on terror, there is a home front.
There are no victory gardens on this home front, no Rosie the Riveter. It's on
the Web.

You simply must read the whole thing and visit the web site listed there.