Greetings From the Lone Star State

Well, it looks like a minor mission has been accomplished: I am in Austin, blogging to my heart's content. I have commandeered a computer at an AMD processor display in the airport to write this, which is about as close as I will ever probably come to real gonzo journalism, but I'll take it.

By the way, this computer really sucks. The return key and the tab key don't work, so I am forced to write in one continual paragraph. I will try my hand at writing in some HTML code when I am done that addresses the lack of carriage returns. Hopefully, you will not have to suffer through a similar trauma while reading this post. But, I make no promises 'cause I am relatively new to building web pages.

So, onto the thoughts running around in my mind. On the plane, I was reading "The Best Political Writing of 2004," which has excerpts from books and whole articles from magazines on the last year of politics. It's a good read because invariably you miss worthwhile articles.

I read an article by Joe Kline that was originally published in Time, which described what the Democrats need to do in order to beat the Republicans. The article was titled, "How to Build a Better Democrat". (I apologize for not providing a link to the article. Aside from not allowing me to use the return key, this computer will only allow me to have one window open at any one time so I can't search for the website without losing what I have written here. Sorry.)

The article talks about the Dems three problems: being weak on national defense, being depressing as all get out, and suffering from an acute case of consultantitis. I agree on all three scores. We need to be inspired by our leaders. We need them to have big ideas and speak with bold words. In this way, Bush clearly has it over the Democrats. Howard Dean captured our imagination and our hearts and, in retrospect, seems to have been the best possible candidate to have defeated Bush. And, even if he had eventually lost, at least we could have felt like we went down swinging for the fences! Sweet Jesus, we didn't even take the bat off our shoulders.

Hey, the code worked! Sweet!