George,

In the immortal words of Walt Kelly, "we have met the enemy and he is us." Where was the coherent Democratic message to counter W's wag the dog tough talk? Telling the voters that the GOP is going to privatize social security is not enough. The economy is floundering and few, if any, congressional Democrats talked about repealing the Bush tax cuts. We can now look forward to Bush packing the federal bench with far right ideologues, drilling in ANWAR, repealing the estate tax, and who knows what else. We can only hope that the GOP overplays their hand as they did following the '94 election and that the Democrats spend the next two years developing real proposals that give the voters real choices.

Jeff Fracher (electronic mail, November 6, 2002)