There's only one reason I continue to brave Washington's dreary formal press dinners, which are so calcified they're a bad cross between a zombie movie and those little Mexican Day of the Dead sculptures.

The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic. In 2000 and 2004, GOP gunslingers played into the Western myth and mined images of manliness, feminising Al Gore as a Beta Tree-Hugger, John Kerry as a Waffling War Wimp With a Hectoring Wife and John Edwards as his true bride, the Breck Girl.