Fred – It’s not just showing up on Nov 4th, it’s contributing and campaigning so as to influence the squshy middle. By not engaging on behalf of McCain (and the down ticket races) they yielded the middle of the field to Obama and Dems. House races, certainly Norm Coleman and other Sen races… would have turned out differently. How would the Stimulus legislation have looked if the R’s had two more Senators…

Elections, like wars, are often close run things – it’s only afterward that we ascribe a sort of istic inevitability to the outcomes. No, the political landscape would have been much different even if Obama had still been the President with active participation by all Republicans.

I live in Washington state, near Seattle, a hotbed of “netroots” – yet I still have my part to play articulating, in a winsome way, the principled opposition to the madness of the current administration. This is my point – it is a cultural war on behalf of principles – not some Rovian political online game where only battleground states (& Con. Districts) matter. In a battle, the whole front is pressed even though the breakthrough will occur only at a few points. The planners rarely know precisely when or where they will be so everyone needs to do their part.