How the hell is this so close?

This editorial from Newsday captures my sentiments exactly: how the hell, with an incoherent bumbler like Bush in the White House, with a shambles of a war with endless and gorwing evidence of abysmally bad planning, the first record of job loss in seventy years, a massive and growing deficit, increasing poverty, decreasing wages, more people losing their health care, and on and on - why is there even a chance in HELL that he could get re-elected? And it really comes down to the fact that the Republicans have done a massively effective bit of voodoo on the middle American mind. I was listening to a woman explain why she was voting for Bush yesterday and she said it was because she didn't like the way Democrats spent her money. I had to explain to her that contrary to her ideas, government has grown under Bush more rapidly than under any president since Johnson, and that Bush had turned what had been a sizeable budget surplus into a series of deficits that keeps breaking its own record year after year. But would she believe me? Not when Fox had told her differently... It's like some weird brainwashing - no, not like, it IS some massively strange brainwashing. And standing on the outside of it, I'm sorry, but has sanity actually become a partisan issue?