Editor Lewis H. Lapham, Blue through and through, notes in his regular "Notebook" section in the January 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine that,

"...the tale of the Democratic Defeat was packaged in both an authorized and an unauthorized version. The mainstream print and broadcast media reported an election decided on "the moral issues"; the Internet blogosphere brought word of an election stolen by God-fearing thieves".

After discussing the pros and cons of each of these theories for two and a bit pages, Lapham ends with this thought,

"...I found myself more at home in the one about robbery. Although not without its flaws, at least it was consistent with what I know of the country in which I was born and proudly count myself a citizen, the story vouched for in the writings of Henry Adams and Mark Twain, in line with the taking of land from the Mexicans and the Indians, with the heroic scale of the government fraud embedded in the building of the transcontinental railroad, with the Teapot Dome swindle, the stock market collapse of 1929, the Internet bubble of fond and recent memory. An American story, true blue and fire-engine red. If the Democrats don't spoil it with a Bible and a flag, maybe they can regain the courage, traditional and culturally conservative, to steal the next election".

Message from Diana Davies