Absolutely true

Last week, you may recall, I quoted Bob Kerrey - not the Kerry who was running for president, but a fellow senator and Vietnam veteran and a big backer of his near-namesake. This Kerrey was on television a couple of days before the election and claimed to have the pulse of the man in the street.

'I was in Gallia, Ohio, down in the southeastern part of Ohio,' he said. 'They don't give a damn about the war in Iraq. They're terrified about the loss of their job, health care, their pensions. That's what's bothering them.'

I begged to differ: 'In fact,' I wrote, 'the people - in Gallia, Ohio and many other places - understand the relevance of Iraq and Afghanistan to their well-being rather more clearly than the Democratic leadership do.'

Just for the record, on Tuesday, in Gallia County, Ohio, George W Bush won 62 per cent of the vote.

It wasn't the economy, stupid. It was the stupidity, stupid. No man is an island, but the Democrats expect voters to act as if they are. Don't think about national security and war and Iraq and Iran and North Korea - that's all way beyond a loser like you. You're too 'terrified' about your job to be bothered with the foreign pages. It's practically the Depression out there.

OK, it's not. But it's a recession. OK, it's not. But there aren't any jobs out there. OK, there are. But they're not like the jobs you used to have, when you could go to the mill and do the same job day in day out for 45 years, and it made it so much easier for us come election time because there were large numbers of you all in the same place when we flew in for the campaign stop. But the point is: you are an island, stick to "pocketbook issues", think about yourself.

The Left always used to accuse the Right of appealing to the voters' selfishness, but this year the Dems did and it got them nowhere.