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SNIP..."People were angry, and they were cynical. They were depressed. They were caught off balance and confused -- by the lies and manipulations of the Bush administration, and also by the fact that so many of the pillars of our society had proved in recent years to be so fragile. The Catholic Church scandals, the Florida recount, the Enron fiasco and other corporate corruption cases of its type: These were crises that went far beyond politics. They'd shaken up people's ability to believe in the essential rightness of our most basic institutions. Even the Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken a lot of people's hearts, because they'd seen not just their president but the presidency itself profoundly weakened.
People were aware of living in a world of anything-goes ethics. They were aware of being vulnerable to unpredictable catastrophic acts of terror. All of this made them doubt their leaders, doubt their future, doubt themselves. Young people -- people too young to remember Watergate or Vietnam -- were particularly hard hit psychologically, once the irrational confabulations that had led us into the war in Iraq were exposed. They'd grown up trusting in the basic good of the American government and the basic moral decency of its interventionist policies abroad. Now all this was crashing down around them, and they were at a loss to reassemble the pieces of their pride and their patriotism.
This general crisis of confidence was something that no one -- not Democrats, and certainly not Republicans -- was finding words to address. Even the media, which sensed it, didn't get it...."END SNIP
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