This Picture Pretty Much Sums it Up

This picture is the perfect visual explanation as to why McCain is getting killed in the polls. Look familiar? Probably not. This is a picture of an ACORN political event in 2006. You know ACORN, they are that radical group of Communists who want to take over America by stealing elections and replacing the Statue of Liberty with a 500 foot tall fresco of Lenin. At least, this is the image of ACORN you may have been given after listening to the McCain campaign's stump speech and commercials over the last few weeks. There's just one problem, John McCain himself has ties to this radical group hell-bent on destroying America!

In other words, the reason McCain is losing badly, down 10 points in today's Gallup poll, is because McCain's campaign is run by morons who have decided that amidst the greatest financial challenge in the last 70 years, McCain's best hope of winning the election was to: (i) propose a half-trillion dollar mortgage buy-back program in addition to the $700 billion dollar program that Congress just passed, and (ii) run the most comically lame fear-mongering campaign in the last thirty years, attempting to connect Obama with 1960's ex-con hippies and so-called 'radical' political groups of today. Congratulations to McCain's handlers, they just managed to alienate both the intellectual wing of the conservative movement and the vast majority of independent voters, all in less than a week. Hence, -10 in today's Gallup.

The problem with all of this, obviously, is that when pictures of McCain himself attending ACORN events surface, it makes it just a tad more difficult to convince voters that ACORN is anything they should give a damn about. Similarly, when the Republican candidate proposes the Feds spend an additional half trillion dollars of taxpayer money in addition to the $700 billion just spent, you tend to lose a little street cred with the intellectual conservative movement.

My favorite columnist is conservative David Brooks. His latest article perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the Republican party, and precisely how they have managed to alienate people like me. Here are a few excerpts from the column, found here.

"Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away."