First: Why did Bush end up as our President?

Yes, it's true there was vote fraud, and the stupidity of the Electoral College, and that ought to be addressed. But still, Bush got close enough to his Democratic opponents that very little cheating was needed. How did he get so many votes, and so many vocal supporters?

Saying that "a bunch of idiots voted for him" is a pretty popular idea on the left. But that's begging the question, who was supposed to educate people into not being idiots? Wasn't it a large contingent of people who are mostly liberal - educators, political writers and commentators, the kind of people who write in Salon? Why didn't they reach out to these folks who voted for Bush, to provide them some benchmarks of judgment about who might be a responsible leader?

Were those educators and intellectuals incompetent, bad at their jobs? Or did they want to do the job in the first place? Did they understand that their job in society was to enlighten the common man, not simply turn up the spotlights on themselves?

Second: Why didn't Bush's opponents provide a better alternative?

The only thing going for the Al Gore of 2000 and John Kerry was they were "not Bush." Their resistance to what he was doing was almost subliminal. They were practically frightened to so anything that might offend him. And if any Democrat showed a hint of personality - say, yelling a little loud, protesting lies told about him - he was immediately discredited as a candidate.

Didn't these candidates want to be President for some other reason than padding their resume? Didn't they stand for anything beyond an eventual book deal? Didn't they care about any issues enough to get angry, or passionate, or have some emotion besides smiling blandly at the camera?

Again, a popular statement is that these dishrag campains came from the Democratic Leadership Council, or as someone called it, "the Republican Party for Democrats," the people who would do the same things as Bush but who weren't Bush. Well, after losing twice, how is it that the DLC still controlled the dialog inside the party? Didn't anyone in the apparatus see that the Democratic ship of state kept steering into the rocks?

Those questions should be asked. That this article talking about the post-Bush world didn't ask them might be a clue as to how Bush and the neocons got away with it for so long. No matter how much people may write and scream about Bush, they don't want to accept the fact that ALL OF US are responsible for this travesty.

First of all, I believe the left in general has been the captive of its intellectuals. Where liberal thought used to be focussed on the working class and helping the disadvantaged, for decades it's been focussed on spinning increasingly small circles around philosophy and ideas. Much like Woody Allen refuses to accept that anything of value exists west of the Hudson River, they HAVE ignored the "fly-over" states. (And yes, that's of a piece with my criticism of Heather Havrilesky, only nobody died because she is conceited and elitist. Gore Vidal, on the other hand...)

Those intellectuals need to recognize that the working man has worth, and that the working man is the strength of this nation. The right always says this, patting its slaves on their cute little heads, but rob them blind. The voice of the left should come, not from academia or the pages of the New York Review of Books, but from labor unions, social workers and people involved with ground-level causes.

There needs to be an intellectual element to the movement, but they have to be reintroduced to reality. Anyone from Radcliffe who would wish to address feminist issues, for instance, should have to live for two years in a town like Newark, Ohio and work the day shift in the laundromat. She should face the women who never read Ms. Magazine - and find out what really would liberate those people who never wore high heels or attended a seminar.

In the same way, the aforementioned Mr. Konigsberg should resume his standup career, only before the audiences that the late Richard Pryor faced - in shotgun-shack bars where you have to yell your jokes to be heard. (He and his obsession about anti-Semitism might come up against the hints of anti-black prejudice he occasionally shows.) The real trick is that someone like Keith Obelmann would get along in just about any part of America; he has the "common touch" that so much of the left has lost.

As far as Gore and Kerry "mopping up" Bush...and Bush being declared the "winner" afterwards...that was not so much a total lie as a masterful enhancement of a situation. Gore and Kerry didn't look or sound like common people. They couldn't even fake it with flannel shirts and un-fired shotguns. They were tied to the image of the manipulative federal bureaucrat, who busses your kid forty miles every day to achieve some vague concept of "racial balance." (And yes, there have been country songs complaining about that very subject. Bet you never heard them; I know Kerry didn't and Republican strategists did.)