Adam Nagourney: Why I cancelled the NYTimes!!!

DEMOCRATS ENTANGLED
So What Happened in That Election, Anyhow?
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WITH the exception of a few Democratic outliers in Ohio, few people dispute that the election for president is done and decided: President Bush won and John Kerry lost.
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The confusion, in part, is a result of the hasty - and often flawed - analyses that have come to mark politics in the age of the Internet and nonstop news cycles. The urge to explain immediately why Mr. Kerry lost was aggravated by what many pollsters viewed as flawed exit polling that led analysts initially to overstate factors like the role of values and the number of Hispanic voters who fled Mr. Kerry for Mr. Bush.
"We all have come up with our individual thoughts, but as far as coalescing on what happened - I don't think there's been a determination about what really happened," said Harry Reid, the new Senate Democratic leader. "It's not that easy to figure out."
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The so-called values issue was the first widely-used explanation for Mr. Kerry's loss, after 22 percent of respondents in exit polls listed "values" as the main factor in their presidential votes. For a while after Election Day, it was rare to hear a Democrat talking without hearing a mention of God, church or the need for the party to learn how to talk about abortion rights and gay marriage.
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Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said that Democrats, despite their best efforts, had been outgunned on voter turnout by Republicans and that they didn't push back hard enough against what she described as false attacks.
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This was, the argument goes, an election shaped by the fears and memories of Sept. 11, and memories of Mr. Bush's steely performance in the days after the attacks. Voters were averse to changing presidents in what was effectively a time of war - and Mr. Kerry, never a particularly likable candidate, never gave them a reason to do it.

"and memories of Mr. Bush's steely performance in the days after the attacks."