Rove Summarizes Democrats' Woes

Karl Rove provides a dozen or so insightful paragraphs which should give us some hopey changy for November. Here's my favorite:

Then there is the intensity gap, which is particularly important in midterms. In Gallup, 45% of Republicans are "very enthusiastic" about voting this fall versus 24% of Democrats. This staggering 22-point gap is the largest so far this election year. And in the NPR survey of 60 swing Democratic districts, 62% of Republicans rated their likelihood of voting as 10, the highest. Only 37% of Democrats were similarly excited.

The intensity gap has always been intriguing to me because I'm one of those folks who has voted in almost every election since my 18th birthday. I don't have to feel intense about it any more that I need to feel intense about taking out the trash. I remember the time I missed an off-year primary; I felt awful, like I'd let my country down. Remember Anthony Michael Hall's geeky character in Breakfast Club who had procured a fake ID so he could vote? Yeah, that was me.

At some point I learned that many people don't vote at all and they don't have the least bit of guilt about it. My first thought at that point was "then they really have no right to complain". But I noticed also that these people usually complain the most; they're also the ones spouting the mantra "There's no sense voting anyway; the ________* control everything. That's the elephant in the living room. There's no real difference between Republicans and Democrats. The fix is in as usual...." Yawn. Don't you need to go pick up your unemployment check or something?

Trivia: I cast my first Presidential vote in 1988 for Ron Paul.

(* = usually Jews.)