By: Rudy and Jeanne-Marie Baron

We will leave the recriminations, the 20/20 hindsight and the Wednesday morning quarterbacking to others. The most important thing is to look forward. What are our options as we look down the barrel of a second Bush term? It may be helpful in this regard to give some thought to what Bush did right.

We don’t like to sound bitter, but it is time we acknowledged that the bare majority of our fellow Americans are not all that bright. They like Bush because they perceive and believe that he is just like them. Shallow. Elemental. Kind of uneducated. Unreflective. Simple-minded.

He has a tiny handful of key messages and all of them can be summed up in simple, declarative sentences. "Our enemies hate freedom." "People ought to take responsibility for themselves." "I'm for a culture of life." In every speech, at every campaign stop, he repeats them over and over again. And people all over the red states are nodding their heads. "He's so honest," they marvel. "You really know where he stands."

It is time we just looked long and hard at ourselves in the mirror and acknowledged that close reasoning and IQ points and courage and human decency and embedded clauses just do not work anymore. Because John Kerry has those things in spades, and to people in Nebraska, he might just as well have been speaking Chinese. What they understood was "He'll raise your taxes." What they understood was "Hillary-care."

Is it sad? Yes. Is it the triumph of the woefully mediocre that writers from George Orwell to Kurt Vonnegut warned us about? Yes. Is Thomas Jefferson rolling over in his grave? Yes. Do we still need to win? YES!

The odious reality -- as we see it -- is that we must take a leaf out of the Republican playbook. We must run a candidate who can boil everything down to simplistic declarative sentences about values and actions (Our vote is for John Edwards -- "There's two Americas! One for the wealthy and one for the rest of us. And it's WRONG!"). Let's start positioning that candidate for the top job now -- not wait till the primaries in '08.

And we must start reshaping the key policy and social debates as the Republicans did through the Clinton years. From 1992 to 2000, we prospered and waxed liberal, and they bided their time and put their people in place and disseminated their simplistic rhetoric in the public sphere, over and over again. And when they were done, the media was cowed and red-staters stared with Zombie eyes, chanting "partial birth abortion" and "stay the course" and "the ownership society" and they have now elected George W. Bush to a second term.

People as allegedly smart as we are should be able to figure out a way to beat them at their own game. Let's get started today.


Rudy and Jeanne-Marie Baron are the Editors and Founders of "The Peach." You can read their political commentary at www.thepeach.blogspot.com.