Michael Totten points out a few retrospectives from Democratic bloggers:
Ezra Klein: I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they’re you’re primary source for information, you’re outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works…
Putting aside the grammatical errors and the ludicrous idea that someone like Kos has positive intentions, the point that everyone is susceptible to the echo chamber is a salient one. That’s why it is so very important to constantly remind yourself that not everyone thinks the same way you do. Look at the extreme skewing to the right on this blog, where a candidate who received less than 400,000 votes was nearly tied with the candidate who received 60 million.
The truth is that the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with me and probably never will. They like big government and they want it to work for their benefit. The idea that expanding central power only ensures that it will eventually be used against them either does not occur to them or the possibility is outside the time frame in which they think and is so not a concern. This, of course, is why people will keep getting killed by governments the world over, even those like Leon Trotsky who are not stupid, know perfectly well the uses to which government can be put and even helped put that lethal government in place.
This is also why I never think in terms of winning, I only think in terms of standing by what I believe to be right. It took hundreds of years for the apostles to have any significant effect on the Roman empire and Western civilization (unless you count serving as torches and lion food as a significant effect). That does not mean that they were wrong to stand by there beliefs, quite the opposite really.
Kevin Drum: MOST IMPORTANT EVENT….RECONSIDERED… I’ll plump for the Massachusett’s Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage. The result was nearly a dozen initiatives across the country to ban gay marriage and a perfect wedge issue for Republicans. For the second election in a row, it looks like the president was chosen by the courts.
I very much agree, as I said, I have been pointing this out ever since that fateful, legally and strategically moronic decision. Karl Rove should be sending roses to each of those justices, because without their crass foolishness George Bush does not see millions of social conservatives coming out to vote and John Kerry wins the election.