Clarification
The other day, I wrote about improving my manners when advancing the liberal agenda. To a great extent, this would be the same thing as bothering to advance the liberal agenda. It certainly wouldn't involve making significant alterations to the liberal agenda for the sake of appealing to illiberal people.
The first lesson in manners is to understand where other people are coming from. That's what distinguishes true politeness from an act. Sometimes, however, one simply doesn't understand where other people are coming from, and in such cases one can only fall back on understanding one's own very imperfect understanding in a way that's not condescending, that doesn't announce the opinion that some people come from places that aren't worth knowing about. (As in: "South Bend! It sounds like dancing.")
So what I'm trying to understand right now - what I've been trying to understand since whenever it was that I grasped that the Kerry campaign was not going to be an easy winner - is the appeal of George W Bush and the appeal of his Administration's policies. These are two very different things. The man inspires the respect of voters who don't understand his policies, while his policies command the loyalty of voters who, privately, can't stand the man. His very unfitness for office gives him an advantage over other contenders, because it widens his constituency to include a mass of resentful conspiracy theorists who are prone to blame others for everything that's wrong in their lives.
Wait a minute. What happened to manners?
I have nothing to say to people who genuinely admire President Bush as man. I don't address myself to them. It's for the voters who like what his Administration is doing - or, to put it better, who dislike what his Administration isn't doing - that I frame what I have to say about the body politic on this site. And this is where I have to leave off, because I'm on the steepest part of the learning curve.
