Friday Morning, as a new day dawns. Okay, the hoopla is all over with, the speeches have been made, the balloons have fallen, the commentators in the skyboxes have gone home, and the campaign begins anew, energized on both sides of the cultural and political divide, which right now looks as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon, even if the dark sun of corporate power hangs ominously over the whole scene, casting shadows over both Parties. In the piece I wrote yesterday I mentioned that the Republicans acted like the Party out of power that needed to win the election to revive the country, which had been taken in the wrong direction by the other guys, when in fact the GOP has been in the White House 20 of the past 28 years, and had control of Congress too, since 1994, at least up until two years ago. Peter Baker picked up on the same theme today in an article in the New York Times called, “The Party in Power, Running as if It Weren’t.” The Incumbent Party is trying to steal the motif of CHANGE as if it is a flag they found first. Only change in this case is hooked with REFORM, which means they will “drain the swamp” of a corrupt Washington D.C. It was the Democrats who steered us wrong and the republicans are the Cavalry arriving on the scene to save the day—to rescue us from the knuckleheads across the aisle who are led by a naïve and inexperienced black man of no account but plenty of pretty words.
They are the Party with a lot of brass too. For example, on Wednesday night Mike Huckabee said the following, “Sarah Palin got more votes in her two runs for mayor than Joe Biden did in his bid for the presidency this year.” The crowd roared when they heard that. But when the facts are checked you get another story. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 election and 909 in 1999, in her re-election race, for a grand total of 1,525. Biden dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot. Huckeebe wasn’t interested in the facts; he just needed a hook to rouse the crowd and it worked. But millions of people won’t check those facts and will retain an image of Palin as a giant killer, bigger and more successful at vote getting then the senior senator from Delaware.
Huckabee only wanted to rile up the social conservatives who had hijacked the convention by Wednesday, which I wrote about and posted Thursday morning. The base, that is, the social conservatives in the Republican Party, are tolerating McCain and his strange ideas about working with the other side, only to get their hooks in the White House. Their real hero and Standard-bearer is Miss Wasilla, Sarah “The Terror” Palin, the Northern Wonder Woman, who was the real star of the Convention and the darling of the right wing. She was the talk of St.Paul, not John McCain. According to some papers this morning she had a bigger TV audience than Obama last Thursday, whose numbers keep dropping as time goes by. He started out with 42 million and he’s now down to 37 million. She had 38 million on Wednesday night. She’ll probably do better than McCain also. Palin seems to represent for the right a new twist on the neocon theology: Not only is she a well-spoken, confident female, but a new breed of social conservative/reformer as well, a flaming populist, which is a perfect mask for people who think they are better than the people they have to convince to vote against their best interest. . As Maureen Dowd put it, she is “maverick squared.”
Clearly, the Democrats plan to stick to the issues. The GOP has decided to run on personalities, not issues. Palin is a novelty act and a Hockey Mom; they figure that’s enough to win the hearts and minds of the working class, the discontent Hillary voters and the uneducated. She will personify the base while McCain will embody the HERO and honor, duty, service, patriotism, virtue, country first, on and on like that. Neither is a Rhodes scholar so it makes sense to emphasize their personalities, charm, character, and idealism. Will it be enough? I doubt it.
I look forward to seeing the debates.
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