Declaring defeat

Josh Marshall is absolutely correct. All this talk of, "Ooh, how are we going to defend outselves against that nasty Karl Rove and his machinations this fall?" is the talk of a party already defeated. Democrats need to remind voters, early and often, that despite the crazy talk from Iran's president (who is cooking up confrontation in order to distract Iranian voters from his dismal record), the Iran "crisis" is merely a crisis of Bush's poll numbers. On this, the third anniversary of Commander Codpiece's Mission Accomplished moment, Democrats need to declare that Iranian nuclear talk is just that, something that can be managed...just as Iraq's "WMD" could have been managed if not for the Cheney administration's decision to make this a "war presidency" 24/7/365.

As Marshall concludes, Dems need to confirm for voters what they instinctively know, that "double or nothing" is not an effective foreign policy.

In any case, I was struck by Marshall's reflection that defeatest talk will result in Dems being defeated in November, and was reminded by this brief article in "The Reading File" in Week in Review.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, James M. Breslow reports on a paper published in The Journal of Research in Personality, which suggests that one advantage President Bush had over Senator John F. Kerry in the 2004 election was that he sounded older and less depressed.

In the 2004 presidential campaign, President Bush was often described as coming across like a cowboy, while his challenger, Senator John F. Kerry, was labeled a flip-flopper. An analysis of the candidates' linguistic styles, however, shows the president spoke more like an older person, while Senator Kerry spoke like a depressed person, says Richard B. Slatcher, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Aided by three other researchers, Mr. Slatcher used a computerized text-analysis program to measure how the candidates for president and vice president differed in the linguistic patterns associated with cognitive complexity, femininity, depression, age, presidentiality and honesty.

Mr. Slatcher says the president's language was most like that of an older person, because, as people do when they age, he used fewer first-person singular words, more positive-emotion words, and had "a greater focus on the future." ...

Mr. Kerry's style was more like someone suffering from depression, Mr. Slatcher says, because of his high use of first-person singular words, physical words like "ache" and negative-emotion words like "hate," along with low use of positive-emotion words, like "happy."

Allusions to Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding, snap out of it, Dems!