How to win elections and influence people?

What would you do if you gave someone absolute power for several years, and they completely messed everything up?

Not just a few little mix-ups, but seriously laying waste to everything they're responsible for.

What if they turned freedom into tyranny, truth into lies, unity into loathing, safety into fear, prosperity into debt, faith into rage, and pride into shame — what would you do?

You'd re-think your allegiance to them, right?

But what if your identity were wrapped up in theirs? Your innermost feelings about family, faith, and fatherland all tied into a seemingly awesome package of moral, trustworthy power?

And how would you feel about your complicity in having supported them? In fact, the more you feared and despaired, the more slack you gave them... and the worse their misdeeds became.

This may be one of the hardest problems for the Democrats to solve in the upcoming elections: no one likes to be wrong.

Not for nothing does Dale Carnegie start his legendary How to Win Friends and Influence People with the following point: people will do anything rather than admit their own faults, no matter how severe or glaring.

So how do we get through to the Red Staters, now that the plain facts show that their pure-play GOP government is an absolute disaster?

Because it's not that they don't know. It's that they don't want to know.