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It is not an exaggeration to say today that the most powerful nation on earth is in the grip of an ideological administration – backed by a vast network of right-wing think tanks, media outlets and attack groups – that can neutralize any political enemy with smears, such as the Swift boat ads against John Kerry’s war record, or convince large numbers of people that clearly false notions are true, like Saddam Hussein’s link to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The outcome of Election 2004 also highlights perhaps the greatest failure of the Democratic/liberal side in American politics: a refusal to invest in the development of a comparable system for distributing information that can counter the Right’s potent media infrastructure. Democrats and liberals have refused to learn from the lessons of the Republican/conservative success.
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Plus, the evidence is that wealthy progressives still don't "get it." Even with Election 2004 looming, Air America, a promising AM radio network to challenge Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk radio monopoly, was hobbled by the refusal of rich liberals to invest in the venture. In a new book, Road to Air America, Sheldon Drobny, one of the network’s founders, describes his frustrating appeals to East and West Coast “limousine liberals” who didn’t want to engage in the project(emphasis added).
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Yet, instead of joining this ideological battle, the liberal/Democratic side largely divided up its money between do-good projects, such as buying up threatened wetlands, and spending on activism, such as voter registration and get-out-the vote drives. While there’s nothing wrong with these activities, the outcome of Election 2004 has demonstrated again that in an age of media saturation, street-level activism isn’t enough.
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Link to rest of essay by Robert Perry
I'm bummed, I'm down but we got to look at what we did well and not what went wrong. And I agree that progressive, liberals, Democrats or whoever believe that the the political philosophy represented by George W. Bush, Richard Viguerie, Rush Limbaugh and Richard Mellon Scaif is unAmerican and anti-democratic need to bring the fight to them. It's not the time to call pointless general strikes and withdraw. It's time to learn, like the Romans, from our adversaries and turn it against them.