I continued listening to the George Washington University panel and Celinda Lake goes further to keep Democrats in the wilderness for a generation. A student from Prague asked a question about how Europe sees the "War on Terror" as a phony construct and what Democrats could have done to combat this:
I mean, I think you ask a really important question and I think it’s a question that can’t be answered in the immediacy of a campaign which is how you prefaced your question. I would say a couple of things, I agree with Mark completely (a well reasoned response that 9/11 affected all Americans and the number one job of the President is to protect the people), I agree with you that it is a construct, I agree with Mark completely. When you say there are people who don’t believe in the war on terrorism I was thinking to myself, yeah unfortunately not in America.
Some cross-talk where the questioner can’t be heard.
…The people in America who don’t believe in the construct you can count on the fingers of one hand.
That's funny, I have about 20 readers a day and all 5 of these non-believers have commented on my blog.
And I must say to you that honestly there are times when I feel sometimes and this is one of them, deconstructing security and the war on terrorism that you need psychologists up here not pollsters, that it’s so fundamental, it almost, in fact I read over the course of the election a series of books written on stages of change which was a concept developed actually to break patterns of addiction. Because I think that this construct is so fundamental, I think the American psyche is almost addicted, at least I think women voters are almost addicted to it know.
Celinda Lake meet MP Parrish, here's a shovel, keep digging.
So I think it’s a very interesting question to ask post election, how do we deconstruct this, can we come up with a feminist model of security, that is a different kind of construct that leads you to different kinds of choices.
What the heck is a feminist model of security? President Bush received majority votes from married women and almost completely bridged the "gender gap". Women with something to protect showed the model they wanted and you could call it the masculine model.
…my own personal view of it is that people do not expect their member of congress, their governor, their mayor, their state legislator to solve the war on terrorism either way
But they want their President to do so and the American people expressed their opinion on who more up to the job on this.
...so I think we are going into a set of elections – that’s one of the reasons why I think
we were able to escape this tide at the gubernatorial and state leg [sic] level, people were almost compensating and saying ok if I’m going to have my national scene people fighting the war on terrorism then who the hell is going to get my grandmother’s prescription drug price down.
At the end of all that Mark Melman, head of the Senator Kerry campaign whispered in the ear of Bill Greener, a Republican party strategist. Of course I don’t know what he said, but I can speculate that it was something like, you guys must love that answer or if we don’t ditch that way of thinking we are screwed.
