Willow: The icon's called the Mark of Gachnar. I think this is a summoning spell for something called...
Xander: Gachnar?
Willow: Yes! Somehow the beginning of the spell was accidentally triggered. Gachnar's trying to manifest itself. To come into being.
Buffy: How?
Willow: It feeds on... fear.
Buffy: Our fears are manifesting. We're feeding it. We have to stop.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season IV, “Fear Itself.” 

Alright everyone, your self-appointed morale officer has arrived to tell you that our “get a grip” moment has arrived.  Napoleon may, or may not have said “morale is to material as is the ratio of three to one,” but its bloody true and its time for Democrats to get a damn grip. 

McCain has always been what he accuses Obama of being: a pure media creation.  The MSM shielded the public from McCain's true sub-mediocrity with a solid wall of freshly laid bullshit but, under the harsh light of a national campaign, that wall  is drying up and blowing away. Well now, he has more or less completed his Kubler-Ross cycle of grieving for his solid wall of MSM protection (with frequent lapses back into the “anger,” stage, of course).  He's been forced to acknowledge his own inadequacies as a politician and a human being, and what that means to his long-thwarted but always feverish ambition to be president.  And then he did what all of us always knew he would do: he scrolled down to the contact for “Mephestopheles” on his cellphone and hit the “dial” button. 

Oh, being a noble and honorable national hero and a man of impeccable character, and all that, he first had to convince himself that Barack Obama is  a vile, contemptible, evil threat to our nation's honor and security.  But, hey when some handsome new kid shows up at school and bumps you from your position as starting quarterback and steals your best pals who used to sit with you on the bus, that's easy to do.

So now, here were are in August, and he's doing what 99% of us have always known he would be doing.  He's opened up that musty old  Atwater-Rove campaign playbook, hired himself a sleazy Republican DC Beltway Consultant to implement it, and opened up the spigot on the vast Republican above-ground cesspit.  This is how its going to be, people, and how its going to go, until sometime after Labor Day when, according to the Rove-Atwater All-Purpose Plan for Victory calls for him to turn down the flow-volume on the toxic waste, put on his clean white suit and step forth as the Hero who will deliver the nation from the person of low moral character that the Democratic candidate has been exposed to be. 

Naturally, of course, the Beltway media are all agog, and manyRespectable Liberal Bloggers  are expressing deep concern.  This is, after all, The Way to Win, the dark supernatural path by which the forces of good are invariably and inevitably vanquished by the forces of evil.  Now that McCain has (contrary to his true nature, of course, but one must do what one must do, tsk-tsk) adopted it, the callow, untested, unsophisticated, naïve teenager called Barack Obama cannot possibly stand up against this Perfect Plan for Inevitable and Invariable Victory.   (Unless, of course, he immediately adopts the means and methods of his enemies, and not a moment to lose.  It's his only hope of salvaging something from this debacle.)

Whatever. 

We cannnot control the MSM.  It's late summer and late summer is Stupid Season for journalists in any year, much less an election year.  If they can't portray the election as close, there's nothing to do except write stories about attractive young white women in peril from sharks.  And, besides, they love Rove and believe he is well-nigh omnipotent.  He beat them and abused them for years and that makes them love him. 

We cannot control the campaigns.  Either of them.  They will do as they will do regardless of how hard we rant against the perfidy of McCain or how much frantic, panic-tinged expert advice we give to Obama in blog comments.  He is unlikely to to do what we want him to, even if we threaten to withhold our contributions.  Especially if we threaten to withhold our contributions—say what you will about him, Obama has shown repeatedly in this campaign that he will be owned by his potential or actual donors.

What we can control is ourselves. 

I submit to you that one of the primary goals of the Republican Atwater-Rove Sewage Release is to sew fear and panic among the Democratic candidate's base.  Do you think it's a coincidence that fear is the central unifying feature of the Rove-Atwater playbook?  Those who say that the purpose of that plan is make our candidate the issue miss the point.  They aren't attacking the candidate, they are attacking us.  With all the malign calculation of a psychologically abusive spouse or parent, the Republican Atwater-Rove game plan is a directed in no small part at undermining our own self-confidence, our belief in our candidate, our belief in our party's worthiness to govern and its ability to win.  It is directed at the undecideds and at firing up their own base, but a critical feature of the Atwater-Rove gameplan is a psy-ops campaign directed at undermining our will to win.  They know that if they can crack our own belief in ourselves and our candidates, there is no way in hell we can get those we deem “low information voters” to believe in them as well.  

And we make it so easy for them.  Democrats are the worst, the absolute worst, about believing every momentary transient news event three months out from the election is the decisive moment of the campaign even though most of us struggle to remember what happened three months previously.  We obsess over every blip in the topline poll numbers, ignore the ones with good news and obsess over ever little variance within the margin of error.  And then, in the midst of our fluster, we don't drill down into the crosstabs and indeed, believe a poll without crosstabs is inherently more reliable than one that does because it has less data to confuse the clarity of our conviction of impending doom.  We are convinced that Republican TV commercials have secret subliminal mind-control instructions in them that the weak-minded fools who don't hang out on political blogs all day are powerless to resist, while our commercials are useless wastes of money. 

We are, in short, slaves to our fear and that fear—not any ads by McCain or further asshattery from the asshats at ABC News—is the only thing that can lose this one for us.  Fear is contagious.  It saps our will, suppresses our turnout and, most corrosively of all, creates the perception among the MSM and the GDI's that we lack confidence in our candidates and our party's fitness to govern.

If we act like people who, in their heart of hearts, believe we're losers, we will lose.  This is not because of any mystical juju drivel, but because we are social animals and our emotions are contagious.  To those on our side, fear turns into futility and dejection.  To those who are undecided, it reeks of defeat.  And, of course, to our enemies, it smells like sweet, sweet victory.

I am personally convinced that this was what was truly decisive in 2004.  Not the Swift-liars or the purple heart band-aids, not Kerry running out of money before the convention, not Teresa and not John Edwards' failure to be as good an attack dog as the veep candidate is supposed to be.  It was us.  We let Rove get into our heads and the critical five percent who held the keys to the White House in that election smelled the fear on us and ran from it as fast as they could. 

Well the good news is that abusers can't get into your heads if you don't let them.  In a far darker hour than any we face today, or, God willing, ever will face, a great Democrat told us how to deal with that fear:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Read the whole thing, and recall that this is what being a Democrat used to mean and it is what it must mean again because, if the hour is not as dark as it was in 1933, the stakes are stratospherically high.  We still have two wars going, no insurance, an economy in freefall, and, oh yeah, a looming environmental catastrophe that stands a fair chance of turning our children's world into a place that looks a lot like “Soylent Green.”  Preventing that means we have to stop being so afraid of losing that we can't bear to take any risks.  Stop, to coin a phrase, spinning off into “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

This means having the courage to have a little faith in the voters, both the ones who handed the Republicans a defeat in 2006 that the MSM pooh-poohed right up to the end, and the new ones who are out there now, flying under the radar of the polls “likely voter” models.  And it also means having a little faith that our candidate and his team may actually know what the hell they're doing.  That just maybe they're playing a deeper and longer game directed toward winning the actual election, rather than just “winning the week” on the banal MSM scorecard.  That faith, too, would not be blind.  Notwithstanding the hysteria about how much worse and more damaging the new, improved McCain attacks are, the fact is that the sophomoric College Republican twittery we've seen so far has been some weak shit compared to the much better conceived and executed attacks Hillary's people ran.  Indeed, so far, I haven't seen anything from McCain's frat boys that Hillary didn't try first and do better.  And yet, despite that, and the added bonus of being smarter, better prepared, and a lot better looking than McCain, it didn't work.   

But if you're having trouble mustering up that faith, whether because of your deeply held conviction that Hillary would be doing much better now, or just because Obama's not doing what you think he should, another great, albeit fictional, Democrat has some more advice for you:

"Act as if ye have faith and faith shall be given to you. Put it another way, fake it till you make it."

We're going to have some rocky days, and some bad weeks.  Some days, the horse is going to throw us and we're just going to want to lay there and bleed.  That's how it works.  No one said it was going to be easy.  Only a fool believed McCain would continue to fumble-fart around forever like he did back in those halcyon bygone days of the green screens and the scary fake smiles and only a bigger fool would believe the MSM was going to let Obama just run away with it.  We're going to have to suck it up, make with the stiff upper lips and stomp Gachnar the Fear Demon's tiny eight inch tall ass. 

And, just this once, you don't have listen to Giles; go ahead and mock the little fear demon before you step on him.  It's not tacky when he's a Republican.