Response

Taranto has a great comment in today's Best of the Web responding to the piece I commented on yesterday re: Democrats feeling like battered wives. The comment is from David Bricker, who says that he's a "psychologist who specializes in marital therapy". Since there isn't a link to it, I'm reposting here what Taranto has.

Gilles takes the position that the Democrats are looking a lot like a battered wife, and there is something to this. Some of the behaviors do overlap. But the logic breaks down immediately. Gilles sets it up so that the partner in this analogy is the Republicans, who defeated them. And she suggests that the 56 million Kerry voters form a kind of really big support group to get by. But where does this lead? And specifically what are they going to do about the next election? Is Gilles suggesting that they secede and only deal with good folks like themselves? Because if they come back to contest the next election, they are going back to the abusive spouse, something that no one in the domestic violence field is ever going to feel too good about.

A better analogy is that the partner is the country as a whole. The marital analogy is a good one if we see the Democrats as the rejected spouse and the U.S. as the rejecter. This makes much more sense. The insistence on recounts is like the husband who stalks his ex-wife, who doesn't understand what "no" means. The denial, the rationalizations, the vilification, the aimless depression are all typical of someone who's in the early stages of rejection and can't figure out what to do next. Likewise, Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton experimenting with finding religion look a lot like someone trying anything to get the partner back. "Maybe if I get a hairpiece, she'll come home."

Gilles also errs in assuming that since the Democrats are acting battered that someone must be battering them. It doesn't work that way. As the saying goes, "If you walk around with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Closer to home, if you walk around with control issues everyone looks like a bully.