Let's not be spun by their spin.

One of the more pernicious phenomenon of modern day America is the way in which certain little nuggets of fact or opinion are often magnified far beyond their true worth or significance.

The media loves a catchy label, a quick and lazy way to package news, events and trends. Reaganomics. The Teflon President. The Great Communicator. The Wimp Factor. Bimbo Eruptions. Watergate, Whitewater, KoreaGate, TravelGate, Iran-Contra. Year of the Woman. Soccer Moms. Angry White Males. Security Moms, and on and on.

Another facet of this approach to reality, is the way in which the media leads us and themselves to focus on something that would have gone totally unnoticed 75 or 100 years ago. I am thinking specifically about how the media has taken to boiling down presidential elections to just a hand full of states and then pretending that somehow the CLOSENESS of those states is significant beyond who eeks out a win.

Much is made of the closeness of the President's Ohio win, yet in the larger state of Pennsylvania that Kerry won, the vote was closer, and almost NO ONE is pointing that out! Ohio gets all the attention because THE MEDIA anointed Ohio early on as THE STATE TO WATCH. So we watch and we watch and we watch. Poor Pennsylvania is not sexy enough to merit attention.

American presidential elections are ALWAYS close when measured against those held in places like China and Egypt. In the U.S. , a 60-40 landslide is a MAJOR threshold that only a tiny handful of candidates have ever reached or even threatened. Yet in real world terms 40% of something is very respectable. For instance, I would love to own 40% of General Motors and if you were to eat 40% of a pie it might well make your tummy hurt.

So when Democrats and the Old Media make disparaging remarks about GWB's 51% victory, the last thing we conservatives should do is agree with them and further enable their dishonest spinning. 51-48 is a solid win. When held up to the realities of 2004, 51-48 is a VERY solid win.

The 2000 election left many ordinary voters (as opposed to Democratic Party hacks) with a distinctly bad taste in their mouths. Because of Florida and Al Gore's decision to dishonor himself and the system, and the fact that Gore "won the popular vote" (yes, I still owe you an explanation on why I set that in quote marks!) George W. Bush had a very difficult starting position RELATIVE to the other successful incumbents of the last 50 years, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton.

This preamble brings me to my current peeve which is Ohio and the already seemingly set in stone "fact" that "a switch of just 136,000 votes would have made Kerry president". First off you can't just switch 136,000 votes. It is strictly against the rules and would upset people. Secondly however, if the Kerry camp gets to switch 136,000 votes then I insist that we Bushies also be allowed to switch a like number. Let us see.....hmmmm, OK here is how I would do it:

Take away 137,000 Bush votes in Ohio and let Kerry win those 20 electoral votes (EVs) by 1000. (But wait, isn't 1000 votes a LOT less than 136,000 so wouldn't Kerry's NEW win be even more suspect than Bush's? Oh never mind.) Okay back to vote switching, I want to take 99,000 of those former Ohio Bush votes and move them to Minnesota, thus giving the President those 10 EVs. Then I'll take 10,000 votes and move them to New Hampshire thus giving the Pres those 4 EVs. Next I'll move 13,000 Bush votes to Wisconsin so Dubya can claim those 10 EVs. So let's see where we are now: Bush has 290 EVs and Kerry has 248 EVs and I still have 15,000 votes left over to pad Bush's lead in New Mexico and/or Iowa.

See the stupidity and shallowness of this line of reasoning? Many a World Series game is won by a single slender run. The Super Bowl has been won by a single point, or a last second field goal. The Yankees won a couple of blowouts over the Red Sox in the first three playoff games, but they couldn't move a couple of those "excess" runs to Game 4.

Winning is winning. As a party, the GOP must look very hard at the narrowly won "red states" and devise a plan for making them less close in 2008, but in terms of 2004, Bush WON! Period. Mission accomplished.

One final blow to drive the point home: Kerry won Pennsylvania by just 129,000, Minnesota by just 98,000, New Hampshire by 9,000, Wisconsin by 12,000, Michigan by 165,000 and Oregon by only 67,000. 480,000 votes were all that separated Kerry from losing these states and their 69 EVs. Why isn't someone talking about that?