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Far more Americans play poker and checkers than chess. Soccer has never caught on as a spectator sport with the American public despite over 30 years of promotion of the sport. Wanting quick victories or immediate pullouts is an old American characteristic. Had Eisenhower failed on D-Day and MacArthur's island hopping campaign in the South Pacific faltered, Thomas Dewey would have probably become President in November 1944, which was at the end of the third year of our World War II involvement. If Johnston had defeated Sherman at Atlanta, George McClellan would have likely defeated Lincoln in 1864, in the fourth year of the Civil War. The 2006 election was held in the fourth year of the Iraqi War.

The MSM is hostile to our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be sure, especially after the war dragged on. However, the media in FDR's day was far from universally pro-New Deal either. The Hearst, McCormick, and Scripps-Howard newspaper chains were strongly anti-Roosevelt, as were many independent publishers like the Chandlers in Los Angeles and the Pattersons in New York. A stagnant war, or worse, American setbacks in the South Pacific or North Africa and Italy in 1943 and 1944 would have brought out the long knives against Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust."

Furthermore, conservatives in our time have a stronger media than was the case in the recent past. The rise of talk radio, the Internet, and Fox News (though it is now drifting leftward) have ended the liberal lock on the mass media that had been in place between the 1960s and the 1990s. The sort of people who switched to the Democrats this election cycle in places like Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio are hardly latte-swilling metrosexuals or soccer mom ninnies who readily believe the "line" in the MSM.

The strategy for conducting this war must be reconsidered. Britain's success as a world power for centuries was largely due to that nation choosing to fight battles where they were strongest: on the high seas. Between the Hundred Years War and World War I, Britain did not generally make long term, large scale commitments of ground troops. After the mid-18th Century, the British Army used the peripheral nationalities, Scots and Irish, way out of the proportion of the population of the two Celtic nations to the overall population of the United Kingdom. American policymakers should study what the mother country did right if our nation is to have the staying power Britain had as a world power.

We have been drawn into a war where the terrorists have the home field advantage. Americans are historically good at projecting massive firepower quickly. We defeated the Japanese in the South Pacific largely due to that advantage. There was plenty of hand to hand combat, to be sure, but the enemy had been severely hurt by our air and sea superiority prior to the arrival of the Marines or the Army. Additionally, few if any of our soldiers were imprisoned for being rough on the enemy in World War II. That does not appear to be the case in Iraq, as Lieutenant Pantano and the Pendleton Eight would testify. Some would argue that our restraint is a compliment to our national character. However, the grunt in the field may worry that overly rough action may land him before a court martial. We also have not used our overwhelming firepower to level hostile towns like Fallujah. We did not worry about the cathedrals of Dresden or the temples of Tokyo, why should we protect the mosques of Baghdad?

Sticking to the present warfighting strategy will surely put a Democrat in the White House in 2009, and increase Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. We may wish for the American people to become chess players, rather than poker players, but it is not going to happen.