We only lost by three and a half million!

-- Michael Moore

There we go again.

The word "we" has an ugly habit of sneaking its way into political discussions, with an almost hypnotic tendency to induce people of good will (or people who don't enjoy debating) to imagine themselves in the same ideological group as whoever is using the "we" to claim that those in agreement with them have a right to dominate the larger group. In Moore's case, he's talking about some 55 million people. But in this piece, he repeatedly uses the "we" word to refer to himself and "young people" as a sort of combined Michael Moore "slacker" phenomenon:

From the beginning, I believed that young adults and "slackers" would rise up in this election. As we began our slacker tour in Syracuse's football stadium on September 20, we could tell that this election would be like no other. It was no longer uncool to talk politics like it was five or ten years ago. Now, you were considered a loser if you didn't know what was going on in the world.

After speaking to the 10,000 gathered in Syracuse, we went on to hold rallies in 63 cities, mostly on campuses. Every night the events were packed, with anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people showing up. We registered thousands to vote and got tens of thousands more to sign up to volunteer with Move On, ACT, the College Dems and other groups like Vote Mob and the League of Pissed Off Voters. We reached perhaps a half-million people in person and millions more on local TV and radio in those 63 cities (all but three of them in swing states).

Let's see, the young people (the "slackers") were 17% of the total vote.

54% of 17% is just over 9%.

That's "we"?

What I'd like to know is how many of the 54% of the 17% are really Moore's slackers? Does he really speak for them? For the sake of argument, let's assume he speaks for a large number of them. Does this make Moore's "we" ones the "base" of the Democratic Party? Some would argue that it does.

But who benefits from having Michael Moore's "we" slackers as the base of the Democratic Party? The Democrats? Here's Mark Steyn:

The Michael Mooronification of the Democratic Party proved a fatal error. Moore is the chief promoter of what's now the received opinion of Bush among the condescending Left -- Chimpy Bushitler the World's Dumbest Fascist. There are some takers for this view, but not enough. By running a campaign fuelled by Moore's caricature of Bush, the Democrats were doomed to defeat.

Yet there's a serious problem with any static analysis.

Looking at Moore's voters as a bloc, one might be able to come up with a serious estimate of hard numbers (i.e. exactly how many voters did Michael Moore directly cause to go to the polls and vote?) But such a static analysis does NOT answer a more vexing question for the Democratic Party: exactly how many voters did Michael Moore directly cause to go to the polls and vote for the other side?

To answer that, you'd have to ask people who voted for Bush.

(I might start by asking the 46% of the young voters for Bush what they think.)

ADDITIONAL QUESTION: Is 54% to 46% a landslide?

I'm not sure what definition Moore is using, but this one seems reasonable to me:

landslide - an overwhelming victory in an election. Of recent U.S. presidential elections, those in 1980, 1984, and 1988 can be considered landslides, because the Democratic candidates carried only a few states in each case, and were thus "buried" under a landslide.

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, here's London's Daily Telegraph, with a different take than Moore:

....if John Kerry's strategists feel like slitting anyone's throat right now, it is Mr Moore's.

This was supposed to be the victory that the podgy sage of Flint, Michigan, delivered for the Democrats by winding up students into paroxysms of anti-Bush rage and propelling them into the polling booths. In the event, he achieved the first but not the second objective. The proportion of young voters did not increase on Tuesday. In the gleeful words of one anti-Moore website, "pot-smoking slackers are still pot-smoking slackers": they meant to vote Kerry but, like, couldn't get out of bed in time.

MORE: As I just said in a comment to this excellent post,

There must be a mathematical formula of diminishing returns in there somewhere. The more extreme the extremes, the more the extremes repel the non-extremes. They drive away more people than their numbers bring in. Thus, Michael Moore can draw a crowd -- and simultaneously drive twice as many voters into the opposite camp.