For months, I'd looked forward to this day. Despite being registered in Richmond and working in Virginia Beach, today was a 204-mile round trip to vote for Howard Dean.

Needless to say, my enthusiasm for the trip waned in recent weeks.

I don't know if there's a prescription for electile dysfunction, but I know this much.

It's a bitter pill to swallow.

***

Being no fan of the Bush imperial presidency, I've watched with great interest the events of the past few weeks.

Once again the major media covered the horse race instead of the horses, and once again the Democratic establishment seems hellbent on jumping off a cliff.

First things first. The Virginia Democratic primary is not a story. Just because it's next on the schedule doesn't give it any weight. This state has gone 40 years without voting for a Democrat for president, and you could hold a number of county caucuses in a phone booth. Pretty ridiiculous that Virginia carries weight in a selection process that will be over before California -- the sixth-largest GDP in the world -- even has a say.

Secondly, there's an old rule of politics that if you don't define yourself as a candidate, other people will do it for you. That pretty much sums up Howard Dean. He became a hard-core left-winger before he had a chance to talk about being endorsed by the NRA, about 11 years of balanced budgets. He was as centrist a Democrat as the party had seen in a long time, and now he's irrelevant.

Just wait til the GOP gets finished with John Kerry. Who knew he believed in abortions performed by gay married terrorists?

Third, a lot of Democrats are missing the point about having a Southerner at the top of the ticket this fall. The conventional wisdom is the GOP will win the South anyway, so the focus should turn to other key Electoral College states.

Folks, it is not about which states you pick to run in, it's what you say in those states. By picking a fight in the South, Democrats force Republicans to bring up all their old bug-a-boos -- school prayer, gay marriage, abortion -- all the things that turn off the moderate voters in swing states. It's a different candidate George Bush if he's challenged for the mud-flap trucker vote.

Perhaps Democrats should consider thinking a step ahead every now and then.

***

Since my thoughts today are on electile dysfunctions, I just have to weigh in on my favorite disclaimer flying around nowadays, the one for the ED drug Cialis -- "erections lasting longer than four hours require immediate medical attention."

Since I'm losing my political priapism, I'd like to suggest that any election longer than four months needs expert attention.

There's a reason the primaries are months and months ahead of the general campaign. It gives candidates time to raise money.

It's an interesting process. They spend two months listening to people, spend six months taking money from special interests in large part opposed to the will of the people, and then spend that money only on ideas that can be expressed in three words or less (war on terror, right to life, pro capital punishment.)

Imagine this kind of debate in the field of medicine, imagine doctors having such a limited vocabulary. You'd go into the office for a mysterious fungal growth on your foot and the answer would be "amputate the leg." Political debate isn't that much different.

***

Before I can seek a cure for electile dysfunction, I'll have to assess the symptoms.

And right now, while it's manifesting itself in an aching head, I have a feeling it really stems from an aching heart.

-30-

2-3-2004
Your Own Lying Eyes

You've probably heard the old story, the wife bursting in to find her husband in bed with another woman. He denies it right in front of her, then asks "Who you gonna believe, me or or your own lying eyes?"

Welcome to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election.

***

I need to start by saying I've taken the Howard Dean flameout hard, and I don't dismiss it, as many pundits do, as a case of right message, wrong man. Dr. Howard certainly made some mistakes, but every candidate makes mistakes, and they are not always this fatal.

Secondly, to quote that great philosopher Dr. Phil McGraw, "You either get it or you don't." Dr. Dean's hard-core followers most certainly get it, but they also register near single digits in most polls. So how do you explain it?

That lying eyes thing.

***

To boil down campaign issues in the year 2004, you need just two words -- Wal-Mart. On one hand, it's the greatest retail success story in the history of the world. The free-market system, thanks to great efficiency, has delivered lower and lower prices, and gained and gained market share.

On the other hand, there's a cost -- a high cost -- to those Wal-Mart low prices. All the mom-and-pop stores that got run out of business used to keep their profits in the local economy; now those profits go to out-of-town executives and shareholders.

All those Wal-Mart workers who can't afford health insurance, who pays for their emergency treatment? Taxpayers. All the American jobs that are lost because Wal-Mart is China's biggest frontman? Who pays the cost there? Taxpayers, through unemployment insurance and welfare.

Under Republican economic theory, or rather, Republican economic mythology, business unrestrained will create jobs. Well, Wal-Mart has destroyed thousands of small businesses, and all the jobs that go with it. Throughout American history, the nation's largest employer has always paid above average wages. That is, until Wal-Mart. Now grocery store chains are hard-balling their unions; why should they pay more than Wal-Mart?

If you believe Wal-Mart is a success story, you'll probably vote Republican. If you think it's a classic case of the profits staying private and the costs getting shifted to the public, you'll probably like a Democrat in the 2004 election.

***

Consider, for a moment, the most underreported fact in U.S. politics.

Poor white people have more in common with poor black people than they have with rich white people, but they still vote with upper-class whites. This may be weird, but it's also the secret to the Republican political stranglehold in the South.

My term for it isn't racism but race-itis. Forty years after the Civil Rights Act, most whites are okay with equal rights, but a whole lot of them are uneasy about unequal rights. It's why affirmative action and quotas are such wedge issues in the South.

Now the perversion here, the lying eyes thing here, is that the American political-industrial complex doles out far more help to rich established elites than it does to poor people. It's a long list -- tax breaks, fat government contracts, regulatory loopholes. The people who preach a free market are actually actively manipulating it.

Realize, too, that a central tenet of American mythology is self-reliance, the personal responsibility preached endlessly on conservative talk radio. There's something downright un-American about needing government help.

Republican pundits and talk show hosts routinely sneer at Democrats wanting to wage class warfare. This is an absolute classic. Class warfare has been the name of the game for the last 25 years, and it's the rich against the poor. You need an example? Look at the capital gains tax. The people with money, thanks to their political connections and PR spin, have made it official U.S. economic policy. Money made by money is more important, and therefore taxed less, than money made by labor.

Ronald Reagan and his supply-side economics fellow travelers said 24 years ago that prosperity will trickle down. And to quote Al Sharpton: "I ain't seen the trickle, but I sure have seen the down."

Theory versus reality, myth versus facts.

Our own lying eyes.

***

There's another problem facing opponents of the Bush Administration. The American populace respects authority -- they want to give cops the benefits of the doubt and not dwell on the occasional brutality case. They want to respect their soldiers, and they want to respect their president.

It's a hard sell for a politician to call the president a bold-faced liar, whether it's over trumped-up charges to go to war or the idea that his prescription drug benefit magically balloons in price $140 billion a few weeks after passage. It may be a fact that the president spun a lot of PR on Leave No Child Behind, but it becomes political, it becomes disrespectful, to point out that he forgot to fund it.

The United States of America clearly needs some clarity in its vision, but pardon me for not being very optimistic. The most biased right-wing news outfit, Fox, gets to pass itself off as "fair and balanced," and the most old-school conservative news outfit, CBS, gets derided as "Rather Liberal."

Our own lying eyes.

***

One final thought. When Howard Dean talks about there was no such thing as a Bush middle-class tax cut, he comes across sounding looney. Most Americans saw their taxes go down. (Not me, being childless, unmarried and in an odd in-between tax bracket, but I digress.)

Thing is, if Dean had argued about the myth of the tax cut, he'd have done much better. He would not have been denying what most people took as a demonstrable fact. He would have been reframing the issue instead of trying to refute it.

Federal taxes may have gone down, but state taxes have gone up, local fees have gone up, school tuition has gone up. It's a wash. Dean is absolutely correct.

But if nobody buys it, what's the point?

***

I'm reminded of an old song by The Eagles.

You can't hide those lying eyes
And your smile is a big disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
You can't hide those lying eyes

Democrats should realize that if George Bush makes his next campaign expense a set of Ray-Bans, it won't be to hide his lying eyes. It'll be because his future's so bright, he's gotta wear shades. He's got $200 million from fat cat contributors to unleash against a Massachusetts liberal, and that's a play the GOP has performed well in the past.

The first president Bush lost reelection because he didn't have "the vision thing."

The second president Bush will win if the American public doesn't have it.

-30-

For the record, Mr. Marshall's presidential votes, including primaries, have included three Republicans (if you count John Anderson), two Democrats, two Libertarians, one no-show, one independent and one Green.