A democrat who gets it

Ed Rendell, together with the Daley brothers in Chicago, seem to be the last coherently sane people in the national Democratic Party. Rendell gave a speech yesterday mundane only in its clarity that's been lacking from the Diebloldalliburton DU types and sufferers of PEST.

Rendell's take on the election?

Gov. Ed Rendell says the outcome of the 2004 presidential election is a lot simpler to interpret than many analysts have made it.

It wasn't Evangelicals alone who turned the tide, or that the country has shifted far to the political right.

"I think George Bush was reelected for two reasons," Rendell told an audience of Arcadia University students and faculty Monday afternoon. "One, because he was a wartime president. And he was the first president post-9/11."

The governor said "people are reluctant to change in the middle of a war." And, he added, "don't underestimate the power of being a wartime president in the incipient stages of that war."

Pennsylvania's governor dropped by to share some of his views on the recent elections, the campaigns waged by the major-party candidates and where Democrats go from here.

Rendell, who was national party chairman in 2000, called President Bush's campaign "a textbook case" and gave it an "A plus" grade, while Kerry's deserved a "B minus, C plus."

He said Bush did a good job getting across that his administration was fighting terrorists abroad rather than at home - a "coded message" that there had not been another terrorist strike on American soil.

The decision not to talk much about Bush at the Democratic convention was "probably a mistake."

Rendell said that if anyone believes the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth acted independently of the Bush campaign, he had a bridge in Brooklyn he'd like to sell them, drawing laughter from the crowd. Sen. John Kerry's campaign took too long answering the Swift Boat veterans' attack, he added.

And Democrats registered lots of new voters, but Republicans did a better job of getting people to the polls.

That's about the size of it, except he's grading on a curve.