Election Post Mortem

Ann Coulter, as usual, tells some painful truths:

Have you ever noticed that whenever Democrats lose presidential elections, they always blame it on the personal qualities of their candidate? Kerry was a dork, Gore was a stiff, Dukakis was a bloodless android, Mondale was a sad sack.

This blame-the-messenger thesis allows Democrats to conclude that their message was fine — nothing should be changed! The American people are clamoring for higher taxes, big government, a defeatist foreign policy, gay marriage, the whole magilla. It was just this particular candidate's personality.

Republicans lost this presidential election, and I don't blame the messenger; I blame the message. How could Republicans go after B. Hussein Obama (as he is now known) on planning to bankrupt the coal companies when McCain supports the exact same cap and trade policies and earnestly believes in global warming?

How could we go after Obama for his illegal alien aunt and for supporting driver's licenses for illegal aliens when McCain fanatically pushed amnesty along with his good friend Teddy Kennedy?

How could we go after Obama for Jeremiah Wright when McCain denounced any Republicans who did so?

How could we go after Obama for planning to hike taxes on the "rich," when McCain was the only Republican to vote against both of Bush's tax cuts on the grounds that they were tax cuts for the rich?

And why should Republican activists slave away working for McCain when he has personally, viciously attacked: John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans, National Right to Life director Doug Johnson, evangelical pastors Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and John Hagee, various conservative talk radio hosts, the Tennessee Republican Party and on and on and on?

As liberal Democrat E.J. Dionne Jr. exuded about McCain in The Washington Post during the Republican primaries, "John McCain is feared by Democrats and liked by independents." Dionne proclaimed that McCain "may be the one Republican who can rescue his party from the undertow of the Bush years."

Similarly, after unelectable, ultraconservative Reagan won two landslide victories, James Reston of The New York Times gave the same advice to Vice President George H.W. Bush: Stop being conservative! Bush was "a good man," Reston said in 1988, "and might run a strong campaign if liberated from Mr. Reagan's coattails."

Roll that phrase around a bit — "liberated from Mr. Reagan's coattails." This is why it takes so long to read the Times — you have to keep reading the same paragraph over again to see if you missed a word.

Bush, of course, rode Reagan's ultraconservative coattails to victory, then snipped those coattails by raising taxes and was soundly defeated four years later.

I keep trying to get Democrats to take my advice (stop being so crazy), but they never listen to me. Why do Republicans take the advice of their enemies?