Is Sarah Palin stupid? No, says former Ms. Magazine editor

I promise not to ever do this again, but here is a former editor in chief of Ms. Magazine, writing in the Daily Beast, on Palin's critics:

It's difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again
this week, doubts about Sarah Palin's “intelligence,” coming especially
from women such as PBS's Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not
herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism
moniker.

That's one of those comments you always imagine someone blowing the smoke from the end of her pen after she finishes writing it.  Elaine Lafferty makes some very interesting observations about Palin after spending some time with her.  "What is often called her 'confidence,'" says Lafferty, "is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is."

What McCain's and Obama's tax plans will do for your incentive to work

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw using the Walls Street Journal's analysis of the the tax plans of Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama to explain what each plan will do for your incentive to work:

Let me try to put each tax plan into a single number. Let's suppose Greg Mankiw takes on an incremental job today and earns a dollar. How much, as a result, will he leave his kids in T years?

The answer depends on four tax rates. First, I pay the combined income and payroll tax on the dollar earned. Second, I pay the corporate tax rate while the money is invested in a firm. Third, I pay the dividend and capital gains rate as I receive that return. And fourth, I pay the estate tax when I leave what has accumulated to my kids.

Let t1 be the combined income and payroll tax rate, t2 be the corporate tax rate, t3 be the dividend and capital gains tax rate, and t4 be the estate tax rate. And let r be the before-tax rate of return on corporate capital. Then one dollar I earn today will yield my kids:

(1-t1){[1+r(1-t2)(1-t3)]^T}(1-t4).

For my illustrative calculations, let me take r to be 10 percent and my remaining life expectancy T to be 35 years.

If there were no taxes, so t1=t2=t3=t4=0, then $1 earned today would yield my kids $28. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Under the McCain plan, t1=.35, t2=.25, t3=.15, and t4=.15. In this case, a dollar earned today yields my kids $4.81. That is, even under the low-tax McCain plan, my incentive to work is cut by 83 percent compared to the situation without taxes.

Under the Obama plan, t1=.43, t2=.35, t3=.2, and t4=.45. In this case, a dollar earned today yields my kids $1.85. That is, Obama's proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent.

The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place. I expect to spend more time playing with my kids. They will be poorer when they grow up, but perhaps they will have a few more happy memories.

Educators for Bill Ayers

3,000 educators signed a statement in support of Bill Ayers. Does that say more about Bill Ayers, or this country's educators?

"Just a guy in my neighborhood"

The Acorn controversy

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an editorial on the ACORN controversy. Along with Stanley Kurtz's exposé on the group in National Review, the two articles can serve as a primer on why this matters. But whether Obama had a past association with the group seems to me to be a secondary issue. The primary issue is whether he is being honest about it. There is an inauspicious history of presidents who had a tendency to cover things up.

Here is (to me) the key paragraph in the Journal's editorial:

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

Why are Obama's people so angry?

Stephanie Cutter, a spokeman for the Obama campaign, was on Fox News Sunday feverishly complaining about the anger she is seeing in the McCain campaign.

And it really made her mad.

I could swear the veins in her forehead were showing. In fact, she was extremely exercised over the fact that there were people who disagreed with her. What made angr... er, what got her so upset was that the McCain campaign was pointing out things about her candidate that, well, made them angry.

Like the fact that Obama has had past associations with a guy that set of a bomb at the Pentagon and doesn't feel bad about it.

Cutter--and the Obama campaign--can't figure out why anyone would be upset that a guy is running for president who has associated with a known, unrepentant, proud left-wing terrorist.

And it really makes her...

...Angry.

Obama getting a pass

Only in a media severely stricken with Obamamania (and in a campaign that knows and takes comfort in this) is a candidate's past association with a guy who bombed the Pentagon not an issue.

Could Obama get a security clearance?

Obama's past proximity to William Ayers would cost him a low level security clearance, but we're ready to hand him the leadership of the free world.

Go figure.

Why the Republicans will lose in November

Nobody has come right out and said it, but the Republicans are going to lose in November for one very simple reason: they are divided among themselves on the most important issue in the election, the economy.

The bailout debate simply splintered the Republican Party. In my state of Kentucky, the six most prominent Republicans in the state are right down the middle: three-three, with the two senators, Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell, finding themselves on opposite sides. This is going on around the country.

The split is not only the effect of confusion, it is the cause of confusion among the electorate, who are sensing that the Republican Party doesn't know what it is about. You simply can't win an election without a coherent message, and you can't have a coherent message without a coherent philosophy--and the Republican Party no longer has one. The Republican Party uses the image of Ronald Reagan the way Kentucky Fried Chicken uses the image of Colonel Sanders: not because they cook food the way he did (they don't), but because his image give the general impression that they do.

In the case of the bailout plan, a Republican president proposed the plan; on the other hand, a Democratic Congressional leadership helped promote it. On the one hand, the majority of rank and file House Republicans opposed it; on the other hand, the Republican nominee for president supported it. And both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates took the same position on the issue.

The only recipe here is for total electoral confusion, a confusion the Democrats benefit from because at least their consistent--consistently wrong, but consistent.

The Republicans had nothing politically to gain from supporting the bailout. Support for the plan just means that they are indistinguishable from the Democrats. They can talk all they want to about how the Democrats were responsible, but confused voters will still wonder why they both have the same solution.

Here's the chief problem for the Republicans: their chief domestic policy themes for decades have been fiscal restraint and free market economics. These were the positions that marked them off from their Democratic opponents and that brought them success with Ronald Reagan. But George W. Bush scuttled the first issue by massive increases in federal spending during his two terms in office, and McCain, although feigning support for fiscal restraint, has scuttled the second issue by supporting the bailout.

Republicans are left confused about what exactly they are supposed to stand for economically, and why they should vote for Republicans over Democrats. The Democrats on the other hand, with a few exceptions, they are united on the bailout bill. And why shouldn't they be? It is a pure big government solution--completely consistent with everything they have stood for for years.

How can the Republicans win when the chief economic crisis of our times (which crested, ironically, right in mid-presidential campaign) was resolved on liberal Democratic economic principles, and half of the party that supposedly stands on conservative principles joined arms with them?

Sarah Palin may or may not have beaten Biden, but she did beat Tina Fey

Tonight's debate was interesting for a lot reasons, first and foremost in regard to whether Sarah Palin was going to continue as a viable political presence. What Biden did was largely irrelevant: he doesn't help or hurt his ticket. In fact, he did just fine, although his Washington-speak can't have won over any converts in middle America. As Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine put it about Biden's remark about the time he spends at Home Depot, "What’s he doing there — trying to find someone to deliver a lecture to?"

Sarah Palin may or may not have beaten Joe Biden in the debate, but the fact is she didn't have to. What she had to beat was the media image of a political newcomer out of her water, and this she did in spades.

This debate wasn't about beating Joe Biden. This debate was about beating Tina Fey.

Sarah Palin not only exceeded expectations, I think she saved her political career. She was in danger of becoming a political joke because of poor performances in unadvisable interviews the geniuses at the McCain campaign unwisely put her in. This debate completely rewrites all of that current wisdom. I think it was Fred Barnes who pointed out that he could not remember any vice presidential debate that rewrote the future of a partipant. This one clearly did.

The only comparable such event I can remember was the second presidential debate between Reagan and Mondale, when Reagan, after a lackluster performance in their first debate, and facing questions about his fitness for office because of his age, made the remark about "my opponent's youth and inexperience," and hit it out of the park.

If you are scoring a debate card, I think it was a draw for Palin at best, but we all know these debates cannot be scored that way. They are about much more than the words the candidates say. Debates like this come down, not to who has the better arguments (and there were cogent arguments on both sides), but to who is more appealing. On this criterion, Palin won hands down.

Palin exceeded expectations, which is what the current wisdom said she had to do to win. But she not only exceeded expectations, she exceeded the expectations by more than she was expected to exceed them.

What really told you about how this debate went was the remarks of the opponents, and you could detect the talking points Democrats had prepared in the case of a Palin win. Paul Begala (who you can always count on to follow his orders) said it best: Palin may have helped herself, but she didn't help McCain. When you can't say what you want to say about something you just saw, say something about something no one could see.

Begala and the Democrats might be right, but I suspect not. Whether the McCain/Palin ticket converts the unconverted as a result of the debate isn't really what you would expect anyway. But what the Obama campaign has to be equally concerned about is what this does for Republican turnout. Palin had energized the base, and that energy was eroding.

It is back now.

Bringing back the hockey mom: Sarah Palin needs to declare her independence

The mishandling of Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign could go down as one of the greatest lost opportunities in modern politics. The squandering of the political benefits of a potential political folk hero has been painful to watch. All the promises Palin's convention speech held out for conservatives are in dangers of being lost unless the campaign can turn a corner in this week's debate.

Don't get me wrong. Palin's appeal is still strong among white women even though her appeal outside those bounds has been tarnished by the bungling Bush handlers who have had her ear since the convention.

The mistakes the McCain campaign made are plain as day: I can see them from my house. According to reports, McCain himself is fully aware of the situation and has dispatched several competent hands to salvage the situation.

What went wrong? More importantly, how do you fix it?

Palin's greatest appeal was her normal person credentials. She was mother of five who had upset the political powers of an entire state. She was the female Mr. Smith going to Washington to stand up for the little guy. So what do McCain's handlers do? They take her behind closed doors and fill her with political, economic, and foreign policy arcana and try to turn the Hockey Mom from Wasilla into Brainiac from Alaska.

If it had worked it would have failed.

As it is, they have produced a vice presidential candidate whose words don't fit her speech. It isn't that what she says is necessarily inaccurate or embarrassing per se--you have to go visit the other party's running mate if you want to get a taste of that. The problem is that she appears to be trying so hard to sound like an expert. Her remarks have the earnest ring of someone's first high school term paper on current events.

Every question elicits a stream of disconnected facts you can tell have been drilled into her in interminable quiz sessions on the campaign plane. Her coaches (all candidates have them) should have been telling her to do what all good PR coaches tell their clients: answer the question you wish the interviewer had asked and to do it in a few words as possible. Instead, her presentation has all the feel of being beaten over the head with an almanac. Anyone who has seen the footage of her performance in debates running for governor knows that, before the Bush advisers got to her, she was perfectly competent in such an environment.

Is it Palin's fault? She has to shoulder some of the blame here, but let's face it, when you get picked to be a presidential running mate, you're in a position of having to do what the guy at the top of the ticket tells you. It's a hard position to be in no matter who you are. That Biden has not been kept on as close a leash is more a function of no one caring what he says than the actual quality of what he has to say.

What where they thinking when they decided to have her play to her weaknesses rather than her strengths? Why in the world would you play on your opponents terms rather than your own? Did these people fail Politics 101?

From the last word of her convention speech it has been downhill. The decisions made by the McCain campaign in using her are simply inexplicable. On the one hand, they keep her from making small talk with reporters on the campaign trail where she would have easily acclimated to the national stage, and then they thrown her in the lion's den with people like Charlie Gibson and Catie Couric. I'm surprised they didn't send her to Jon Stewart first thing. They might as well have.

This is simply political malpractice. Who made these decisions? Find them and send them packing: they don't belong in politics. Give them their walking papers and whisper in their ears as they leave headquarters, "Electronics."

Palin should have gotten a good night's sleep after the convention and headed straight over to Sean Hannity's studio. Then maybe Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren. And when a full week had been spent at Fox News' studios, get on the talk radio circuit. Spend an afternoon with Rush. Go see Michael Reagan. Visit the studios of every conservative talk radio host on the air.

And when the mainstream media complained that she was being kept from them, she could have adjusted her hood and told them what nice teeth they had, but that they needed to get out of the way because she had a basket of goodies to deliver to the next conservative interviewer. Every conservative would have cheered her on.

To put it simply, Americans were promised a normal person, but they have succeeded only in giving Tina Fay new notoriety.

If Palin is smart, she'll run away from the campaign in the dead of night and refuse to tell her handlers where she is or what she intends to do. She eloped once. She knows how to do this. Then she can go out scouring the countryside for like-minded populists, gathering an army of peasants with pitchforks, and serve the only legitimate role of a community organizer: raising Cain. In the wake of the financial crisis, enthusiastic followers should be easy to find.

She can tell her inept advisers she'll see them at the debate. Maybe.

McCain should spend the rest of the campaign reinventing her image back into the mold of the hockey mom. They need to forget about trying to make her look more experienced than she is. Palin's appeal was never that she was experienced. In fact, her appeal was that she was like most Americans few of whom are experts on anything in particular.

Right now there are millions of Americans inexperienced in economics who have been told one thing by one set of experts and another by a different set of them. Sarah Palin could voice their frustrations--the frustrations of normal people who don't know who to trust. If she comes out trying to sound like another expert with a solution (and not doing it very well), she loses. If she comes out voicing the fears and frustrations of people who have watched their "experienced" leaders demonstrate their ineptitude even in trying to do what many Americans think was the wrong thing anyway, she wins.

Palin needs to drop the expert act. It isn't convincing, and isn't what she should have allowed her handlers to foist on her in the first place. She needs to act like who she is. This is the woman who said, "I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion." The problem is, that's what it seems like she's trying to do. To try to become the very thing you got into politics to oppose in the first place is an idea only political experts who have lost touch with normal people could have come up with.

Anyone interested in the what has happened to Palin needs to see Frank Capra's classic film "Meet John Doe," starring Gary Cooper. It is a movie about a man who is picked off the street and who, through the skills of people who have neither his nor the people's best interests at heart, becomes a political hero to millions because he is just like them. After reluctantly going along with the plan, he finds out that his sponsors are going to use his tremendous popularity for their own selfish purposes, and he rebels. But in the course of their exploitation of him, he has become the very person they have portrayed him to be--the everyman who identifies with normal people. No longer reluctant, he refuses to go along with their plan, and strikes out on his own, giving his own speeches. As a result, they try to destroy him. Rather than betray those who loved him for what he was portrayed to be--and what he in fact has become, he risks his own life to save the country from them.

There are obvious differences in Palin's position, but the contrasts to Palin are as instructive as the comparisons. John Doe's handlers, unlike Sarah Palin's, actually understood what image they wanted to project. They knew the power of populism. And John Doe's enemies are in fact his own supporters, not a hostile media. Palin's problem is not being manipulated by evil benefactors, but incompetent advisers.

But she is the female version of John Doe, and if McCain's campaign is smart, they'll go watch the film and see how to develop a populist personality, not try to turn her into something else. If they don't, the Palin should do like the movie hero, who, in everyone's best interest, strikes out on his own.

That's what a real maverick would do.

Joe Biden gaffes still flying under the media radar

Going relatively uncovered in the salivating of the major media over every Palin hiccup that goes awry is the trail of embarrassing statements Obama's running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden is leaving. You can start here.

The Democrats double standard

Why is it that when liberals want to put a woman in a position of importance, her gender is the only important consideration, but when conservatives want to do it, qualifications are all that matter?

Who got the "Bush Doctrine" wrong?

Several conservative writers have already weighed in on the question of who made a mistake in Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin--Gibson or Palin.

One was John Podhoretz:

For the record, when a distressed friend called to say he was made nervous by her failure to identify the Bush Doctrine off the bat, I had to stop for a moment and think about it because I wasn’t instantly sure whether the Bush Doctrine was the policy of preemption or the democratization of Arab lands. And I wrote an entire book about the Bush presidency. She answered it, after a pause, by assuming it was the “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” line Bush promulgated right after 9/11.

It turns out Charlie Gibson meant the preemption doctrine — but then, he didn’t know what he was talking about either, since he told her in the weirdly patronizing voice in which he interviewed her that it was enunciated in September 2002.

The doctrine of preemption was, in fact, enunciated in June 2002 at West Point; September 2002 was when Bush declared Saddam Hussein in violation of 16 U.N. resolutions and declared that it was the responsibility of the U.N. to unseat him.

In fact, ABC News' own site has several different versions of the Bush Doctrine.

Now comes this, from the person, as the author states, who first coined the expression, Charles Krauthammer:

The Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, he grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard titled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

...If I were in any public foreign-policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about Bush’s grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda.

Not the Gibson doctrine of pre-emption.

...Yes, Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the phenom who presumes to play on their stage.

Part of the significance of Krauthammer's remark comes from the fact that he has not been a terribly enthusiastic supporter of McCain's choice of Palin.

Newest slam on Palin: She's not really a woman

That's right. Thanks to Rod Dreher for pointing out this interesting article by Wendy Doniger at the Washington Post's On Faith:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

Oh brother. And I love Dreher's retort:

Well, useful to get that learnt. If there's anybody I trust to define womanhood and to be sympathetic to the lives of working-class women, it's a divinity school professor in Chicago who has constructed womanhood ideologically.

Just more evidence that the reason they don't like Palin is the shattering of their ridiculous illusion that the women of this country really share their feminist resentment of Western civilization

The article is also interesting as a good example of all of the liberal shibboleths about Palin:

But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin's views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.

Where did Palin bring up religion? It seems to me that it is people like Doniger who are constantly bringing it up--and then only to bash other people over their heads with it. Isn't it strange that is the people who charge other with being obsessed with religion who are really the ones obsessed with it?

As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.

Outing her pregnant daughter? The woman was being attacked for supposedly covering up her daughter's pregnancy of Trig. Was she supposed to think they weren't going to go after her daughter for really being pregnant? Does it matter that she actually increased the funding for the transitional home for teenagers rather than reducing it?

Is Palin a rebuke to feminism?

One of the raging ironies about the Palin nomination is that for years the media has been trying to foist feminist women on the public as the appropriate models of what women should be, an attempt that has been met mostly by a collective feminine yawn. Now a conservative woman has been set before the public and many of those women who are supposed to harbor a secret desire to be like Gloria Steinem are enthusiastically joining the Palin bandwagon.

Obama third leading recipient of contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Barack Obama was the third leading recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The mortgage buyers contributed $105,849 to his campaigns since 1989.

This won't help his already imploding campaign.

The Democrats strange charge against Palin on the Bridge to Nowhere

The Democrats are accusing Sarah Palin of lying about opposing the "Bridge to Nowhere" on the grounds that, before she opposed it, she didn't oppose it. That's a rather strange argument. On that logic Barack Obama never stopped using cocaine, since, before, he stopped using it, he used it.

Here is South Carolina Sen. Jim Demint on Palin's record on the Bridge to Nowhere and a few other things.

YouTube pulls McCain "Lipstick" ad. Are they trying to help McCain or whut?

This campaign gets more interesting by the second.

I put up a post this morning that included the McCain campaign's ad attacking Obama for its "lipstick on a pig" remark. But this afternoon, when I got on to show a student of mine who wanted to see it, the link had disappeared. Come to find out, YouTube has pulled it because of complaints from Katie Couric, who appears in the ad. Someone else put it up and I changed the link, but who knows how long that will last.

Of course, all this does is to draw more attention to the ad. It is one more excuse for the McCain campaign to charge the media with being pro-Obama. Sheeez. With all the help his enemies are giving them, how can the McCain/Palin campaign lose?

Hell Hath No Fury: Watching the Obama campaign alienate half the electorate

The Democrats are in a very serious strategic bind: if they attack Palin, they anger women voters. If they don't attack her, they have to stand by helplessly and watch as her political star continues to rise. This is why the Palin pick will, in the end, prove to have been a political master stroke.

The Obama campaign strategy had been premised on completely different political fault lines. They had solved their woman problem when Obama defeated Hillary in the primary. But defeating Hillary was a manageable problem. Many women did not identify with Hillary. There was simply little danger that a significant percentage of women would ever see her--Washington insider that she was, as like them. That, and Hillary was a good girl and fell in line with the Obama campaign at their convention.

Besides, the Republicans wouldn't nominate a woman anyway. They thought.

Then came the Palin nomination. Now the Democrats are in a fix. The political realities have utterly changed, and the campaign strategy that they spent the past year formulating is completely obsolete. Still they appear loathe to discard it. If they don't, they're cooked.

The political world is totally different than it was just two weeks ago. There are things you could have said then, that you simply can't say now. Despite this, however, they just keep saying them. I have already said that I think Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was not an intentional slam on Palin, but a gaffe--but it's looking now like it could be a very costly one. Just Palin's appeal to women could put the Republicans over the top in the fall, but it is mistakes like this that could ensure it.

If you combine Palin's appeal to women with the anger at Obama's campaign that is already palpable because of what are perceived as unfair attacks on her, there is already enough momentum to propel the Republicans into the White House once again.

Take a look at this:



I'm tellin' ya folks, this could do the Democrats in. You can talk all you want about Palin's lack of experience and qualifications, and for all I know that may be right. That still remains to be seen. But all of that will be irrelevant if, because of politically inept Democratic attack rhetoric against this woman, the tick off half the electorate.

If it keeps going the way it's going, she won't have to win her debate with Biden. There will be millions of women rooting for her. If she wins, they cheer Palin; if she loses, they boo Biden. If there is one person in this campaign I would hate to be right now, it's Biden. He is in a no-win situation.

I literally don't know how the Democrats escape from this pincher movement the Republicans have performed.

So here's the question: Assuming I'm right (and my analysis isn't too much different from that of Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco), what should the Democrats do? If you were advising the campaign, how would you tell them to proceed from here?