"It's never too late to get involved" (good opinion piece)

[pinto]

It's never too late to get involved
It’s time to find a common ground for America
BY DAVID SWEET

Nov. 2, 2004 was a bleak day for liberals and progressives. Just about everything we rooted for went down to defeat. Rumors of ballot-tampering aside, it seems that this time we weren’t even robbed; we got beat. Their expensive machinery for dis informing the voters outdid our expensive machinery for disinforming the voters. So we are stuck with another four years.

But let’s face it. Expecting Americans to vote for anybody but Bush was irresponsible from the start, and plenty of Americans could see that. Conscientious voters needed to hear some well-articulated, positive reasons to vote for John Kerry. It’s not so much that the Republicans won the election, it’s that we lost it.

The painful truth is that though neither candidate said anything of real substance, more Americans liked what Bush was saying than liked what Kerry was saying. The country voted for empire, for strong-arm solutions to our insecurity, for Christian values, for less taxes and more deficits, for going it alone at whatever cost. What’s going on here? What to do now?

The answer to the big question is that we’ve got to get serious about being and building a political opposition in this country. To do that we’ve got to learn to take the Republican majority seriously, as fellow citizens and as political opponents.

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