Understanding your opponent ...

would seem to be the first and most basic thing that anyone would do upon entering a contest. This would certainly be the case in a political system such as ours. David Frum had a post earlier this week which sheds light on the current electoral difficulties of the Democrats. He notes that none of the liberal law professors who consider themselves experts on the Supreme Court have bothered to read Mark Levin's best-seller, Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America. Frum writes:

Why are these academic experts on the Supreme Court so uninterested in a book that is likely to have a large impact on public opinion about the courts – and incidentally the next nomination to the highest court of them all? People are busy of course, and nobody can read everything, but still …. I’m reminded of something that John Podhoretz said many years ago: The great advantage that conservatives have over liberals is that we are bilingual. We can speak our language and we also know theirs. They however even now still don’t know ours and cannot be bothered to learn.

To repeat, liberals can't be bothered to learn what conservatives are all about. Why? I would guess that once they start from a belief that conservatives are evil, they think they know all they need to know.

I have read a large number of columns by a large number of Democratic politicians, pollsters, consultants and liberal commentators since the 1994 electoral earthquake. Not one has ever come close to identifying the reality facing their party. They don't get it because they don't try.