So, there’s a lot of talk about who’s to blame, for the disastrous election results we saw this week. A lot of Kerry supporters are blaming Kerry, or saying that we need to appeal more to the center, or that we need to tap into religion, or we need to have some wedge issues or ballot provisions or whatever bullshit excuses they can think of.

Here’s the problem, as I see it.

It’s easy to be lazy, and most people, most of the time, are lazy.

Laziness in many senses of the word. Not that many people care about politics. They’re too lazy to vote. They’re too lazy to understand what the candidate’s positions are. They’re too lazy to sort what the media tells them into truth, and fiction. They’re too lazy to draw their own connections between what’s happening in the world and how policy affects that world. It’s easy.

There are a lot of people out there, for instance, who believe that Bush being anti-abortion is good. Bush tells them that he is against abortion, and it’s easy to say, look, he’s against abortion. It takes effort to see that abortion rates have actually gone up under Bush’s presidency. It takes effort to make the connection between increased poverty, decreased education, decreased availability of contraception to those who need it most, and the rise in abortion rates.

So the problem is that it takes effort to discern the difference between what someone says, and what they do. So if Kerry was going to do the right things, and I think he was going to, he failed by not being able to say them in a way that was easily understood, and sounded good. Too much nuance, too much detail, too much of an adherence to trying to communicate information. People have shown that they don’t want information. They don’t even care about truth. What they care about is an easily digestible message that sounds good, that they don’t have to think about.

Get the Democrats to create a message like that. We should be able to. Our messages, fundamentally, are better. They’re better than “ownership societies.” They’re better than “a culture of life.” They’re better than “tax relief.” Our ideas are better than theirs. We just need to learn how to communicate them without shirking from the things that make us better than them.