Karl Rove and minions are worried on their small margin in this election: they had three simple strategies that should have netted more than 60% of the vote, and yet they barely managed to get a measly 2% advantage, even after allying themselves with the fringes of their party, a freak "Coalition of the Willing", that included the likes of DeMint and similar deranged minds.
The strategy came in three fronts, as I see it. First and foremost, Divide and Conquer, that old maxim, was implemented brilliantly by Rove, Cheney, et alli. The theory was sound, and the implementation absolutely brilliant! By dividing the country, setting up irreconcilable differences as the definition of the party ideology and structure, the Republican masterminds set up a stage for a mumbling Kerry to fail and trip. Where they appeal was undeniable yet logically flawed, a bunch of dirty debate techniques, making any kind of intelligent and honest conversation impossible, it also served the purpose of obscuring the Dems message, muddling their response and focusing it into answers to the press, rather than focusing into the values and messages that they advocated. So, even though Dems appear to value life much more than the elected President and his advisors, Bush's discourse went precisely to demonstrate that he was the protector of life, and made a boogeyman of Kerry's elongated face: in reality, it is Bush the governor that has sent more people to the electrical chair, and a president that has managed to kill 231,400 people in his three years of wars. Where Dems cared for the deficit and wanted a prompt fix, top avoid a country weak both politically and commercially, Bush again made Kerry look like a spendthrift, simple by associating images and words on the voting public. Where Bush attacked Kerry's variability in decisions, he set himself as the only purveyor of the truth, when in reality the case is the contrary: Bush ins the incompetent one, the one that sold his soul to corporate and foreign interests, and Kerry the one brave enough to revise his own opinions to be true to his principles: Kerry changed points of view as he found the truth different from what he know. Bush never had the privilege of thought, much less that of an opinion. But back to that first strategy: by dividing, no matter how falsely, how foully, Bush and advisors managed to alienate one group from the other, the only president that actually managed to divide the country while at war. Had the attacks been received here in US soil, you Americans would have lost land, liberty and life. As it is, you have only lost liberty.
His second strategy was the vote obscurity, a process so secretive and dangerous that Rove and associates might as well have sent a lackey to each precinct and have them, most likely a male (because they are tradition enforcers, and as so they can not believe in women in roles of authority) declare that the winner was Bush, just because he said so: are you not convinced? first, traditionally Dem neighborhoods and counties face the challengers, and propaganda to keep them away from the polling places, and all kinds of intimidation; second, the software and hardware used in the voting process are all completely dark to the public - there is no scrutiny, no accountability, no examination possible: just a black box that tells you whether you won or not. Oh, this in itself is brilliant as well; you see, Rove can not have armed men turning people away, and certainly the vote has to be known within a few days, within a few hours. Otherwise, it is inviting disaster, a public embarrassment, international attention, and an audit. No, the boxes are perfect: nobody but staunch Republican supporters have access to them, nobody but Republicans know how they work, and certainly they are hackeable and open to attacks. Plausible deniability? Anyway, instead of turning the vote immediately, it is possible that some of these boxes, in key areas, were programmed to turn a Kerry vote into a Bush one. Not many, mind you, say that while K>B then B=B+1, K=K-1, slow and almost imperceptible, so as to ensure that no matter what you would end up with a completely red map in all counties, just allowing for a few votes difference but still ensuring a complete victory.
Again, just speculation, but see, there were incidents of machines doing precisely that, diminishing their count, and the result all across the nation is one of uniform redness by a small margin. So there.
And the last strategy, and oh the most important one, was the form of the discourse, the appeal that was being made to the masses. Kerry talked to the neocortex, all high processes and completely rational. His appeal was a sound one, completely logical, supported by facts.
It fails miserably.
The Reps went after the mammalian brain! They talked about territory, hierarchy, threats! They appealed o a baser thing that simply values or morals or life: They went for the gut instincts.
Place Kerry's oratory and facts next to the macho display of Bush, complete with hollering and aggressive expressions. Kerry wins.
Now create a fictitious tiger as background. Who do your basic primate animal wants, the scholar or the caveman with a club? You choose with your millions of years of evolution, you react to the danger looking for the muscle, not the glasses and frail physique.
Never mind reality, do not even consider the fact that when Bush was confronted with a clear danger he ran AWOL, and Kerry was the one that actually stood and fought the VC enemy. That is not what this is about. This election was about perception, and Bush managed to heap all of his defects and shortcomings on Kerry. Bush (or better, Karl Rove, the Fouche of this century) created a monster in the background that forced a lot of people to vote with their instincts. You know, Bush's backers may not believe in evolution, but Bush's puppeteers surely know how to manipulate our deepest survival responses. There is no war, yet they created an impression of one. Abortion is no more of an issue as it has ever been, yet they made of the other candidate a child killer. It is, actually, the other way around: Bush is responsible for the deaths of some 200,000 Iraqis, a great percentage of them innocent civilians, and Bush and Rove and Cheney are responsible for the big number of children killed, abused, tortured, and raped. The economy is getting close to being nonfunctional, with an unprecedented deficit, and enormous projected expenditures. The gap between rich and poor is widening to alarming levels, and civil rights are, effectively, disappearing in a sea of security reforms.
Yet all this vanished behind an efficient smoke curtain, giving the monsters that we have in office now the appearance of legitimacy for which they were so desperately looking these past four years.
The Dems? New real leadership, different discourse, and control of their own message. Perhaps in 2012.
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We are all doomed. Bush 
Achieving closure after giving in into the general sense of 
Forty years today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced his famous speech, 
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