...or wish to have at a later time.

Yes, it will be truly wonderful, come the millenium, when the voters no longer process what they hear from their leaders thru the filter sets of gender. And we have truly made great progress toward that goal, with the first-ever woman Speaker. (And I'm not at all intimating that Speaker Pelosi's elevation is not worth the hits that she, and we, are taking from the troglodytes in the MSM. For that matter, with women as the majority of the voting population, it's entirely possible that the more they attack Pelosi -- and Hillary -- with ridiculous and offensive gender stereotypes, the more of a net gain to us among the voters overall.)

But we are a long, long way from that millenium still. And until that time, communicating with voters as if they were the ideal electorate of the future instead of the actual electorate of the present will send us back to the minority in a New York minute. Were you happier then? (Since there are obviously at least a few "leaders" and consultant-types who truly seem as if they were.)

Enough of the Naderite purity. We should all appreciate now just exactly where that nonsense gets us. It's a luxury that the nation, and the world, cannot afford -- and the truly powerless of both our own country and of the rest of the world can afford it even less. Let's do what actually works, and if that includes continuing for a while to play to outdated patriarchal stereotypes to some degree (as in the choices of certain spokespeople for certain issues), well so be it.

Some things -- like full civil rights for everyone, including marriage equality -- are worth the fighting for. But worrying about what sex our spokespeople are for different specific issues? Please.

We can't change the world if we don't first win the elections... and then keep on winning. But it should now also be crystal clear that, with the media as they are now (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican corporatocracy), we can't even get our voices heard at all if we don't win, and keep winning, those elections. Let's never, ever forget that again.

Haans: "No matter how much the right complains about the 'liberal' media, it is really just a smoke screen to give credibility to their mouthpieces."

Indeed. And even more than that: it's a way of manipulating both the media and the audience, a/k/a "the big lie." And, credit where it's due, it's worked big-time.

Two decades of constantly claiming left-wing bias in the MSM -- based primarily on the near-total non-sequitur of the voting and social preferences of the reporters (which have as much to do with the politics of the "journalistic" enterprises as the party memberships of the line workers and janitors at Ford have to do with the politics of Ford Motor Corp) -- has succeeded both in considerably discrediting the media with the average reader/viewer *and* in getting the media to willfully become the propaganda-distribution system of the right. (Yes, of course media concentration in corporate hands hasn't helped either. Still.)

When we have New York Times reporters going on record that they durst not challenge their President in a time of war; when we have the decisionmakers at ABCNews (I think -- pls forgive; at work, no time to google) sending memos telling their staff to give [even] more weight to conservatroid voices; what we inevitably wind up with is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the one hand (having their lies disseminated unchallenged by 90% of the MSM, even as a tiny number of reporters -- in stories filed weeks later, and in the back pages only -- found that all the major SBVfT claims were unsupported by the Navy records, and all the Kerry rebuttals -- such as they were (WHAT were we thinking?) -- were borne out); the Iraq War on the other (last poll I remember, the %age of the population STILL believing Iraq was involved with 9/11 was still in the 60s, maybe even the 70s -- when even Bush doesn't try telling that lie any more); and gobal warming on the third (at this point, quite literally the only actual scientists (not to mention "scientists") dissenting in the essential recognition that the problem is real, is dangerous, and is, in part, driven by human action, are bought and paid for by the energy industry.

Credit where due: It's been a brilliant campaign.

Since, as the cybergeeks teach us, garbage-in-garbage-out, it's pretty much a miracle that any Dem anywhere ever gets elected, since the data the voting populace are working with are so far from truth.