Ghost Of The Duke

I agree with a lot of what Dan Munz has to say in this Herald piece explaining the Bush victory.

I'm struck, however, by his unintentionally ironic touting of the Kerry campaign as premised on "competence over ideology." That was, of course, Michael Dukakis's slogan. There are obvious superficial resemblances between Kerry and Dukakis---both were moderate liberals from Massachusetts caricatured by their opponents as extreme leftists, and Kerry, in case you didn't already know, was Dukakis's lieutenant governor. Beyond that, it's fair to say that the Kerry campaign really was a stronger, more aggressive, and more optimally positioned reiteration of Dukakis-ian technocratic managament principles. The reason Democrats claim that Kerry didn't have a theme isn't that he didn't have one; he did, and Democrats are largely unable to come to grips with the fact that Kerry's theme was 1988 redux.

I for one have no huge problem with the "competence over ideology" rallying cry, at least relative to some of the others I've heard. If there were indeed a possibility of non-ideological governance, I'd be all for it. But the lesson of 2004, as in 1988, is that no matter how well conducted, a campaign for steady, unbiased, market-friendly regulation and tinkering is just not a winning proposition for the advocacy of liberalism (or anything else).

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OTOH hand, I completely agree with Dan about this. My inbox is full enough as it is, and I have precisely no use for any further copies of the idiot map.

UPDATE: The antidote to the idiot map, here's an electoral map with landmass distorted to be proportional to population. Looks a tad more blue. (Via Crooked Timber.)