I was traversing the CEO President thread and came across a pretty good follow-up article by the Decembrist. What really caught my eye, though, was the opening paragraph:
One of the small downsides of writing a blog is that you can never claim to have had an idea before someone else. If you had the idea, you should have written it -- what excuse is there? An editor sat on it? What editor? Trying to find more evidence to prove the thesis? It's a blog -- Who needs evidence?To which I can only say, "Amen Brother! I feel your pain."
I have a folder full of "notes to myself" on subjects I thought would make for good posts, and several of them concern ideas I came up with independently and which later started flying around the blogosphere and/or the popular press. For example, I've been telling friends and family for at least a couple of months now that Bush, having lost the popular vote and won the electoral college in 2000, was in a position where he might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college in 2004 because of his enormous popularity in the Red states but insufficient support in swing states. Of course, I can't exactly get my sister to come and back me up on this assertion, this being an anonymous blog and all.
Another idea which I had --- literally my second or third essay after getting this blog --- was to delineate the common elements of the (seemingly dissimilar) Carter and Bush presidencies. It's sat unfinished for a couple months, and now the "Bush is like Carter" meme has started to make the rounds. You can see examples here, here, and here. Most of these comparisons are in the context of Bush's recent poll numbers, but the article in The Washington Monthly tries to take the analogy a bit further by saying Bush and Carter are both from the South, both very religious, etc. It's a tough sell, because it's hard to imagine two people less alike than GWB and Jimmy Carter. (Can you, in your wildest dreams, imagine Bush ten years from now building homes for the poor?)
So the lesson is, if you have an idea, and you think it's good, get it out there. I'm still going to finish my Bush/Carter comparison and will try to have it up by the weekend. And I can think of one way in which Bush and Carter are very much alike, so much that they would become the only answers to a trivia queestion. Can you think of it? I'll give the answer shortly.
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