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  3. The most important thing now is for Democrats not to panic. Despite what your gut is telling you, this is not the end of the wor

The most important thing now is for Democrats not to panic. Despite what your gut is telling you, this is not the end of the wor

admin2011-06-24  65
问题     The most important thing now is for Democrats not to panic. Despite what your gut is telling you, this is not the end of the world. The republic survived one run of the George & Dick Show. It will survive another. But I recognize that for those of us who really, really wanted to send President Bush into early retirement, it’s hard to stop sobbing long enough to think rationally about the next four years.
    The disappointment wouldn’t weigh so heavily if the promise of victory hadn’t swirled so tantalizingly close. John Kerry’s finest days, the period when he looked the most presidential, came during the debates, with the campaign finish line twinkling on the horizon. Throughout October, as the race pulled tighter than Paris Hilton’s jeans, Kerry volunteers flooded the purple states to energize their voters—tens of thousands of them newly registered.
    And then ... defeat. Now, with the image of Bush’s victory speech seared into Democrats’ fore-brain, the temptation to abandon all hope is almost overwhelming, especially for those who, right up to the end, refused to entertain the possibility of a second term.
    Just before Election Day, I quizzed some of my liberal friends about how they would cope with a Kerry loss. Their answers were variations on the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Of course, the more politically obsessive the friend, the more anger and depression were emphasized. One die-hard Bush hater couldn’t even contemplate acceptance. "I will be incapacitated," he declared.
    Bitterly divided as the country is, many Kerry supporters instead must simply learn how to function at whatever stage of recovery they can attain. I know plenty of folks who plan to nurse their anti-Bush ire, using it as a motivating tool to work even harder for a Democratic victory next time. Such chronic rage may sound unhealthy—but it did the trick for Newt Gingrich’s troops in the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1992 win.
    For some liberals, the first step forward will be less political than personal as they struggle to repair the damage done to relationships with friends and colleagues who backed Bush, "I’ve sat around listening to people I normally respect talk about how they planned to vote for him, and I just want to shake them," fumed my exceedingly gentle best friend, who spent the summer registering Kerry voters in her suburban Tampa, Fla., neighborhood. But beyond mending fences, my friend had no ideas for how to work through her blues. "It’s not like there’s really anything you can do—other than move to another country."
    Unfortunately, what for too many Democrats will be tempted to do is indulge in the traditional orgy of recriminations over where the party went astray. A strikingly amorphous candidate, Kerry provides more than the usual fodder for Dems’ eternal squabble over what they should stand for: moderates can claim Kerry was too liberal to woo swing voters; lefties will say he was too inside-the-Beltway to energize the angry, disillusioned masses; and the increasingly unbalanced Ralph Nader will declare him another loathsome Republicrat slave to corporate America.
    This sort of infighting may feel cathartic, but it is dangerously counterproductive, serving largely to confirm Republicans’ claims that Democrats lack the core values necessary to run the country. Besides, Kerry’s problem wasn’t his policies; it was his personality. The guy was simply too cerebral, too equivocating and too out of touch with Middle America to wrest enough purple-state voters from even a seriously tarnished Bush. Sure, his Vietnam medals were pretty, but no Democrat who attended Swiss boarding school, hails from Massachusetts and raves about his love of French skiers had a snowball’s chance of unseating good ole W.
    So we ran an unlikable candidate, and we lost. There’s no reason to go nuts and launch a civil war over whether to embrace Al Sharpton or Zell (Mad Dog) Miller as our ideological guru for 2008. However we opt to handle our grief, Kerry supporters need to pull themselves together on Inauguration Day—because if you thought the past four years have been scary, just imagine the policy atrocities to be attempted by a Bush White House freed from the concerns of re-election. With George & Dick on the loose, self-pity and finger pointing are unaffordable distractions for liberals. To paraphrase renowned political sage Jesse Ventura: Democrats haven’t got time to bleed.
According to the passage, which of the following is the reason why the Democrats are so disappointed at the election result?
选项 A、They failed to send President Bush into early retirement.
B、The votes for John Kerry and George Bush were so close.
C、They have to face the next four years with Bush as President.
D、John Kerry was defeated.
答案B
解析 本题答案为第二段的第一句。民主党人之所以如此失望是因为两党的投票数是那么接近。故选项B为正确答案。
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