"Every four years, the GOP unleashes unrestrained personality attacks on Democrats and exploits cultural resentments. Every four years, Democrats tell themselves that such attacks don't work and are counter-productive. And every four years, that belief is disproven. These "character" issues end up mattering largely because Democrats, in election after election, allow wars over "character" to be waged in a largely one-sided fashion."

"One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.

"And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do that.

"Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.

"That said, the experience of the years since 2000 — the memory of what happened to working Americans when faux-populist Republicans controlled the government — is still fairly fresh in voters’ minds. Furthermore, while Democrats’ supposed contempt for ordinary people is mainly a figment of Republican imagination, the G.O.P. really is the Gramm Old Party — it really does believe that the economy is just fine, and the fact that most Americans disagree just shows that we’re a nation of whiners.

"But the Democrats can’t afford to be complacent. Resentment, no matter how contrived, is a powerful force, and it’s one that Republicans are very, very good at exploiting."

As I have written before if Democrats don't constantly and consistently remind American voters that it is the right wing Republican administration that we've been plagued with for seven years, and a Republican controlled Congress for over a decade (up until last year), and a right wing, corporatist Supreme Court that helped cause the economic, deficit, and other catastrophes that are damaging the United States.  If Democrats fail to lay the responsibility for the failing state of this nation and its people at the feet of the Republicans, especially McSame and Palin, who have ignored accountability, McSame as senator and Palin as mayor and governor, where it belongs, there will be a repeat of 2004.

And as I wrote on Labor Day, "One of the key sentence in [The Guardian's Gary] Younge's article is this: 'Trying to look ahead without ackowledging how you got to where you are is a surefire way to end up wandering around in circles.  And the last place the Democrats want to be is where they were.' "