I haven't read any posts here or come across anything in the media that suggests anybody thinks that Kerry, if elected, is going to do things like "bring the working class and poor universal health care, a clean environment, human and civil rights" and so forth.

I suppose there may be some of Bush's crowd saying that he's a leftie and all that, and Bush came out in one of those debates with some crap about him being on the left - but obviously enough anyone who thinks that is true would indeed by "seriously deluded".

As I understand it, as a spectator (and being a spectator has its points when trying to make sense of what is going on in a roughhouse), the reasons "progressives" give for seeing a Kerry victory as desirable are that this would make for a much better environment for building a movement to achieve those kind of things; whereas a Bush victory would make it far harder to build such a movement, as well as entailing enormous additional costs for poor Americans, and risks for everybody.