Guest Editorial
VALUES? DICK MORRIS? C'MON!
by Howard Dansky

Nov. 9, 2002 (APJP) -- The subtitle of Dick Morris' speculative and spurious spinful spit-up-cum-insider-analysis concluded, "... winners ran on values." ("A new day with new leaders," Nov. 7).

Ignoring the absence of exit poll data -- or more likely capitalizing on the void of voters' reports of their voting motives -- Morris, the disgraced political spinner, remains true to his intellectually amoral roots by representing his speculative inferences as factual information about voters' perceptions and aims.

His conclusions are spurious in that none of the speculations in the body of his essay -- i.e., that voters ignored economic and social welfare concerns and were moved by a 9/11-driven desire to put Bush supporters in office and by Bush's "often overlooked personal charisma" -- has a remote connection to "values."

You gave Morris his say.

Now here's mine.

My polling data was gathered on October 31, when at the end of the night I found myself left with a huge amount of Halloween candy. Less than half the usual number of trick-or-treaters ventured to our suburban door. People are afraid.

The bottom line: the Bush administration cynically wagged the electorate, feeding 9/11 fear with visions of a mad Iraqi leader. Bush pinned the Democrats into confused submission by a strategy of equating disagreement with lily-livered treason. In the Georgia Senate race, Saxby Chambliss took this strategy to repulsive depths in attacking Senator Max Cleland for a lack of "courage" in his homeland security votes.

It makes me sick that Chambliss won.

Wednesday morning, sho 'nuff, we read that there is a new compromise Iraq resolution before the U.N.! Gee, maybe we don't have to go to war after all, especially now that they've got the Senate as well as the House in pocket. What a country.

That an election could be run and won this way in the U.S. reinforces what Democrats like Ed Rendell have been saying loud and clear, despite Morris' failure to notice -- our first priority in this country should be the strengthening of public education. Clearly, we're not getting the job done now.

Howard Dansky is a clinical psychologist in Laverock, PA. He can be reached by e-mail at fairstarhd@earthlink.net