There are basically two kinds of Republicans these days: those who believe that, if John McCain loses, the entire right side of the country will rally around Sarah Palin as its new Reagan for 2012, and those who believe that, if John McCain loses, the right side of the country will explode along its tenuous fault lines, with the Paulites revolting against the Neocons, the libertarians declaring war on the so-cons, etc. I am decidedly a part of the latter group, and I see the words of conservative columnists like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley as evidence of that. Here’s more from Brooks’ most recent column:

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

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. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

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.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And here’s Chris Buckley, the late Bill Buckley’s son, endorsing — that’s right, endorsing — Obama for president:

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best.

…

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Conservative pundits are fond of saying that a McCain loss will be like 1976 all over again, and that 2012 will be 1980, with another Reagan riding in from the West to unite the Right and bring in the Center. But where is this Reagan? Brooks and Buckley both make clear that Sarah Palin is at least as unacceptable to them as John McCain, if not more so. Conservatives will be quick to point out that Palin Derangement Syndrome is confined to liberals and conservative eggheads, but Peggy Noonan showed us in 2005, when she bashed Bush as early as his second inauguration and was called a traitor for doing so, that sometimes the eggheads are right.

But this is less about Palin and more about the fact that conservatives don’t want to get along. They’re not looking for a leader who makes everybody happy because everyone on the Right is pissed off at everyone else on the Right. Opponents of our efforts in Iraq often said that the U.S. military presence was simply delaying the fact that the various factions wanted to get on with killing each other. I think the Bush presidency and the McCain campaign may now be delaying the fact that each of America’s conservative factions wants to get on with strangling one another. Like American liberals in the 1980s and British conservatives over the past decade, American conservatives will probably need a few years to fight it out so that the old, obsolete, clunky Republican Party that is about to head into the wilderness can make way for something that makes sense for the 21st Century.

From David Brooks’ most recent column:

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.

Or to put it another way, the GOP lost the broader middle class on economics by refusing to acknowledge and adapt to the realities of the modern economy, and it lost the broader middle class on culture by allowing a few zealots to use the party as a mechanism to try and prevent natural social change from occurring on the ground. And then partisans wonder why an economically clueless Republican Party that tries to police our sex lives is headed for the wilderness. November 4th will be a wake up call to Republicans everywhere who don’t want this country to become a one-party state.

It appears as if we have begun the 2012 GOP Presidential primary campaign and the long awaited Republican party civil war.

I will avoid playing the logomachist, specific to the editorials and blog posts written by Republicans and conservatives in recent days.  For the most part, the critiques of Governor Palin have been addressed by blogger Matthew E. Miller, but many of the editorials written on the state of the Republican party, its political wings, desire for change and road map to success have been misdiagnosed and contained inaccurate facts and subtle attacks on Governor Palin.

The Republican party is not divided by conservatives and moderates, or by secularists and evangelical Christians.  The GOP is divided by Tories and Reformers. This has always been the tradition, and the divisions will continue.  McCarthyism, the Whigs, protectionism, the abolition movement…….the two different factions have always expressed themselves in different models, usually by attaching themselves to the cultural and economic movements of the day.

Tories- Lead by the Bush family over the past 30 years, the Tories are from old money, many tracing their heritage back to the aristocracy of Great Britain.  Many fled to Nova Scotia after the revolution, but most remained to protect their wealth and political interests.  Usually from the urban and the northeastern United States, the Tories believe in tradition, and they are non ideological.  In recent decades, the Tories have been joined by the Dixeicrats, boss-hog type power brokers from the south, who are economic liberals, and partisan in nature.  They care about power, corruption and social status.

Reformers- Certainly the most complex faction of the GOP.  The reformers are ideological and cover most of the political spectrum, from libertarians, to moderates, to arch-conservatives, reformers believe in continuous change and have a deep distrust and distaste of the DC elite, our government, and most large organizations.  Reformers believe in different variations of federalism, but agree that the Legislative Branch should makes laws and the Executive branch should execute on them as instructed.  Reformers believe that most domestic policy/laws should be controlled by State government, not by the Judiciary.

Reformers are usually not life-long Republicans activists, traditionally from the west or mid-west, come from modest means, and are from exurbia, small towns and rural America.  Reformers have always suffered from inter-movement factionalism (usually over foreign policy, family values, and the specifics of the change they desire).  Reformers are in the minority of the GOP and only achieve victory when great change is desired in America (see Reagan and Gingrich).

Sarah Palin is a reformer, she is not a Tory.  No matter how much the media and bloggers attempt to belittle her accent, lack of wealth, or knowledge of DC, she is one of us, and we embrace her.  Tens of thousands of citizens in our great nation attend Palin events each week, send her donations and fight for her, because we understand Governor Palin’s values.  Sarah Palin has begun the modern Whig movement in America and the similarities are striking.  Just as the Whigs fought for domestic manufacturing, Palin fights for domestic energy development.  As the Whigs fought against the culture of corruption in DC, Palin fights to destroy the ‘old boys network’.

Do not mistaken yourself for a reformer because you read David Brooks, or admire David Cameron, they are not reformers.  Changing policy positions (for electability) is not changing a political party/system.  Reform is not about changing the GOP’s positions on abortion, gay marriage or the Iraq war, it is about how you view our federation, the Constitution, and who should hold the political power in America.

So be prepared my friends, you will have a choice to make next year.  Are you with the Bush family, John Boehner, Mitch Mcconnell, Haley Barbour, and Tom Delay, or are you with Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal?

If (I hope) Sarah Palin is the standard bearer of reform, then so be it. I am ready for war!  Let us get it on!

In just 30 days, the race for 2008 will be over, and win or lose, I think we can all agree that unless we want Democrats to hold 250 House seats and 58 Senate seats perpetually, it’s time to do some party building. My post-election work will largely involve recommendations on this very task, and I’ll finally be reading Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul and perhaps pick up a copy of Grand New Party. I don’t think either Sullivan, Douthat, or Frum, whose book I reviewed earlier this year, has all of the answers. But I also think that the best ideas of each, joined together, could provide a framework for a modern Republican Party, one that is a national party again, not limited to simply the Old Confederacy and the Plains States. In fact, I suspect that a viable future Republican Party will be urbane and culturally modern like Rudy Giuliani, will be pragmatic and focused on the broader middle class like Tim Pawlenty, will be serious about reorganizing and modernizing entitlements to achieve true fiscal sanity like Ross Perot, will focus on inventiveness and smart government like Newt Gingrich, and will embrace a more classically conservative foreign policy like Ron Paul. But there will be time to debate all of this of course. Marc Ambinder has his own ideas:

In Britain, the Tories have essentially reinvented themselves by secularizing and modernizing, and de-aging. The buzzwords now are youth, pragmatism, experimentation and efficiency. They’re moving out of rural areas and into big cities. They’re urban populists. What’s the big idea? Well, there isn’t one, really. They’ll discover one, eventually. Thatcher who? They’ve been aided by the intense dissatisfaction with the regime in power, something that American Republicans won’t be able to take advantage of until it arises.

So upon what foundations can Republicans being to rebuild? John McCain and Barack Obama will preside of an enormous expansion of government, of the reregulation of American economic life, of massive changes in our health care delivery system and epochal shifts in how we find, use and pay for energy. Americans paradoxically want regulation and ; they support an efficient, effective government, not a government whose reach extends into every area of their lives, as this government inevitably will. The counter-party to the dominant government paradigm might be an economic libertarian, or it might be something else entirely, a hybrid of economic conservatism and communitarianism, perhaps.

One thought I’ll throw up for debate: if American Republicans think they can emulate the Tories and rebuild the party without the full participation of social conservatives, they’re wrong.

Andrew Sullivan adds this:

The question is: what will social conservatism mean? Marriage equality is here to stay where it exists and has been banned almost everywhere else it can be. Abortion matters - but abortion reduction is obviously the next battle, and on that, many Democrats and Republicans can agree. The drug war? I’m not sure the next generation is going to keep pot illegal the way it is now. It’s insane. From then on, most of us agree: encouraging responsible use of freedom is not a partisan issue. Despair at modernity will not win majorities. And religious fundamentalism is as fickle a political force as it is dangerous.

Given the generational changes in social mores in this country regarding sexuality and other forms of personal behavior that largely involve consensual acts by adults, things like gay marriage won’t even be a particularly useful wedge issue in a few election cycles, let alone a fundamental piece of the new Republican foundation. And longtime readers know that I’m completely opposed to the cynical Republican strategy of transforming “social conservatism” into “let’s pretend we’re religious so that we can win more votes.” The whole strategy is insulting to the very religious people that are being targeted. Alternatively, a social conservatism based around the idea that the maintenance of freedom requires responsibility, not anarchy, and that actions have consequences is a necessary and important component of any conservatism.

Ultimately, though, I think that a future Republican majority will, like the modern Tories, be one that can win urban areas as well as rural areas, young people as well as older people, and one that doesn’t bump its head at around 300 electoral votes. Simply put, the entire American north and far west can’t be off-limits if Republicans are ever going to be a majority party again. And that requires modernizing on every set of issues, not just social, and addressing the middle class concerns of modern economic life, as well as existing in an increasingly multipolar world, with nations like China and India growing in prowess. But it also requires a different kind of Republican leadership. What we need in this country is our Cameron, our Sarkozy, our Fortuyn, conservative leaders who are intelligent, communicative, hip, urbane, and not at war with modernity.

Politico reports that the RNC raised a record $66 million in September.

Want to be even more depressed? Watch this in its entirety:

More here.

Conservative thinker and co-author of Grand New Party Ross Douthat has penned a thought-provoking piece on the direction of the McCain campaign and what it could mean for Republicans in just a few short weeks:

Writing in response to my suggestion that the McCain campaign has wanted for creativity, I think Rich Lowry makes a strong case that they’ve been quite tactically imaginative, and I agree with Rich that they wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for some brilliant improvisations. What I had in mind, though, was ideological creativity - the sort of creativity, for instance, that might have provided stronger talking points for your new-minted veep nominee to trot out when the subject turns to, say, the state of the economy. The McCain camp has found exactly one good domestic-policy talking point to call their own - namely, offshore drilling - and that one was more or less forced on them by rising gas prices and pressure from right-wing talk radio. They have a potentially decent health care plan that they don’t want to talk about because they don’t know how to sell it, and a grab-bag of tax proposals that they don’t want to talk about because there’s not much for the middle class and the numbers don’t add up … and then, of course, they have earmarks. (ZZZzzzzz …) Which is why they’re spending most of their time trying to tear down Barack Obama - because the case against the Democratic nominee is the best case they really have.

Obviously, I have my own set of prescriptions for the kind of ideological creativity McCain could have displayed. But my preferred avenue isn’t the only one he could have taken. He could have run as a Rockefeller Republican, version 2.0 - campaigning harder against his own base on issues like immigration reform or the environment, embracing the Wyden-Bennett health care plan to undercut Obama’s advantage on the issue, and generally casting himself as a “just to the right of center” candidate of national unity. Or he could have aped Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign, talking up entitlement reform and running as the candidate of real fiscal austerity (as opposed to the notional austerity of porkbusting), gambling that a difficult economic climate would produce middle-class support for belt-tightening, as it did ‘92. Or he could have combined elements of a Sam’s Club agenda, a Rockefeller agenda and a Perot agenda to create something potentially new and interesting (or, yes, potentially new and idiotic).

Instead, the McCain campaign decided that they didn’t want to take the kind of risks that real ideological experimentation would entail - that despite the difficulties, short and long-term, facing the GOP as a whole, there’s was too much potential downside in trying to imitate Bill Clinton in 1992 and George W. Bush in 2000 (both of whom ran genuinely creative campaigns at a time when their parties desperately needed them). I had hoped that the Sarah Palin pick was a sign that they were open to rolling the dice a bit more on policy; at the moment, though, it looks like Palin herself was the roll of the dice, and it’s just going to be down-and-dirty politics from here on out. There’s no question that anti-Obama hardball makes sense as a strategy given the limitations of McCain’s message; it’s just that a lot of those limitations are self-imposed.

While the notion of a Neo-Rockefeller Republican Perotista with Grand New Party sensibilities is political porn for junkies like Douthat and I, it is ultimately not the direction that McCain decided to take. Instead, McCain is basically running as the guy with the competence and experience to actually enact a traditional Republican platform, a platform far more humble than those proposed by folks like Douthat or Frum and one that seems to be (thankfully) free of the strange turns conservatism took during the Bush years. Will this strategy work?

Two months from now, McCain will either be a political genius or politically tone-deaf. He’ll either be the Teddy Roosevelt of 1904, a maverick Republican expanding the base of his establishment predecessor, or the Hubert Humphrey of 1968, an old war horse and the last of the old guard running to lead a coalition that no longer exists and whose economic and cultural ideas were about a decade past their freshness date.

Wow.

Somehow, some way, in the last 30 days, the GOP brand has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of Bush’s party. The Rehab Republicans are back, those right of center voters who cast ballots for Bush in 2004 but rebelled against the hectoring of Santorum, the ineptness of Rumsfeld, the sliminess of Foley, and the billions of dollars funding a thousand bridges to everywhere and nowhere in 2006. These Bush voters who crossed over and voted for Rendell, Casey, Strickland, and Webb last time around were once feared lost for a generation. But thanks to a series of fortunate events, including the presidential and vice presidential nomination of two individuals who have nothing in common with the current GOP establishment, the voters that the Republican Party did so much to chase away over the past few years are back in the fold.

Still, all of this seems hard to believe. John McCain has spent the last eight years as Bush’s foremost GOP adversary, sometimes attacking him from the right but usually from the left. Sarah Palin is to the right of GWB, and perhaps Rick Santorum, on most major issues. Yet when brought together, a chemical reaction seems to take place that results in the return of a myriad of disaffected Republicans to the party. But how does Sarah Palin’s nomination garner support from the very people that rejected Santorumite social policy? How does John McCain’s nomination bring back the folks who revolted over GWB’s immigration policies? Is Gary Matthew Miller correct in his assessment that McCain/Palin, at a gut level, represents a return to Western-style leave-me-alone Republicanism that is broadly acceptable to all factions of the party? Or is Matthew Miller closer to the truth in his theory that people are simply reacting to the sensibility that McCain and Palin understand and empathize with the problems of the everyman, probably because they are the everyman. Or is the truth somewhere in between?

Whatever the case, I don’t know who would have predicted a rehabilitated Republican brand less than 60 days before the election, but it certainly wasn’t me.

This is hands-down the most important piece written about the race today:

A potential shift in fortunes for the Republicans in Congress is seen in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with the Democrats now leading the Republicans by just 3 percentage points, 48% to 45%, in voters’ “generic ballot” preferences for Congress. This is down from consistent double-digit Democratic leads seen on this measure over the past year.

The new results come from a Sept. 5-7 survey conducted immediately after the Republican National Convention and mirror the resulting enhanced position of the Republican Party seen in several other indicators. These range from John McCain’s improved standing against Barack Obama in the presidential race to improved favorability ratings of the Republicans, to Republican gains in party identification. The sustainability of all of these findings is an open question that polling will answer over the next few weeks.

The positive impact of the GOP convention on polling indicators of Republican strength is further seen in the operation of Gallup’s “likely voter” model in this survey. Republicans, who are now much more enthused about the 2008 election than they were prior to the convention, show heightened interest in voting, and thus outscore Democrats in apparent likelihood to vote in November. As a result, Republican candidates now lead Democratic candidates among likely voters by 5 percentage points, 50% to 45%.

If these numbers are sustained through Election Day — a big if — Republicans could be expected to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.-(emphasis mine)

Image Source: Gallup

Looking over polling report, I see a lot of data that I have missed, which point to the continued rehabilitation of the Republican brand, as the party becomes John McCain’s party, rather than George Bush’s party. Consider:

NBC News: “Now I’m going to read you the names of several public figures and organizations, and I’d like you to rate your feelings toward each one as either very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative. If you don’t know the name, please just say so. The Republican Party.”

The Republican party is still a net-negative, which is bad. But it is the best showing in over two years of asking this question:

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As I’m sure many of you still remember freshly, former contributor Alex Knepper published a front-page smear of Sarah Palin on this site during the RNC. I repsonded by challenging our contributors and readers to defend Ms. Palin if they could.

Well, it appears that non-partisan FactCheck.org has confirmed what we suspected. Alex had been taken in by a pack of complete, utter lies. This should be an object lesson to everyone interested in politics: take a deep breath and do the research. Alex fell for this Democrat propoganda, and he lost all of his credibility - not to mention a friend or two on the way down. But, it remains true that Republicans often take the Party’s talking points as gospel without considering them critically. Doing so is just as terrible a mistake as Alex’s, as it presents a very real threat to our own credibility. I remain as convinced now as I was when I endorsed McCain before the primaries - we will win this election with John McCain as our candidate. But, like McCain, we are going to have to maintain our credibilty if we are going to advocate for a conservative agenda during the next four years.

UPDATE:

To our Commenters:

I hope that this post is not taken by our readers as a swipe at Alex. As I said in his defense in one of the linked posts in this piece: as a fellow libertarian, I am very sympathetic to Alex’s point of view. And I certainly have no personal problem with him. I’ve never met, or spoken with, Alex.

The purpose of this post was to get the FactCheck.org report out there so that our readership could combat the lies being spread about Governor Palin. But, without referencing Alex’s post, the FactCheck.org report may have had no context to many of our readers - particularly those who may have missed last week’s fracas.

In any event, this entire episode, and FactCheck’s exoneration of Gov. Palin seemed to be a good reminder to us all that we do not have license to propogate false, scurrilous, or unsubstantiated allegations, merely because we write on the Internet. At least, not if we want Race42008.com to continue to be the well-respected channel of Republican opinion that it has become under Kavon’s leadership.

I really, sincerely hope they end up doing this. It would be a masterstroke of genius politically speaking and would be amazing help for the soon-to-be-victims of the latest hurricane in the LA/MS region. From CNN:

A senior McCain source said Saturday that officials are considering turning the convention into a service event, a massive telethon to raise money for the Red Cross and other agencies to help with the hurricane.

“He wants to do something service-oriented if and when the storm hits and it’s as bad as its expected to be now,” the McCain source said.

They are also hoping to get McCain himself to a storm-affected area as soon as possible.

I’ve been on three short-term trips to Bay St. Louis, MS to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, so my heart goes out to the folks that are in the Gustav’s path now. A national fundraiser as a part of the RNC would provide a lift and encouragement to them - as well as a lift for how folks view the GOP in general.

Reposted from F3 with the author’s permission.

I came across an interesting article today posted on HuckPAC’s site. It addressed something that’s been bugging me for months. Early in the primary season, the Republican elite tried to derail the Huckabee campaign by labeling him a “populist”. Being a bear of more than a little brain, I had a fairly good idea of what that word meant. It’s roots are the same as the word “people”. Still, I decided I’d better do some research because it obviously couldn’t mean what I thought it did. It was spoken with such venom that it must have belonged in the ranks of those words my mother used to wash my mouth out for saying. Imagine my surprise when I found the definition to be pretty much what I thought it was. Here are a few:

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. A supporter of the rights and power of the people.

And from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1892, Amer.Eng., from L. populus “people.” Originally in reference to the Populist Party, organized Feb. 1892 to promote certain issues important to farmers and workers. The term outlasted the party, and by 1920s came to mean “representing the views of the masses” in a general way.

Yes, the word originated with the Populist Party, which, by the way, was formed to support the issues of the middle class and rural communities. Horrors! To think that people would actually expect to have their government interested in the needs of those that feed us and do our labor.

Being a good Political Science student, I decided that this wasn’t enough research. Obviously, I was still missing something. Certainly, there must be some connection with populism and some foul dark arts. As the primary rolled on, the word took on more and more negative connotation. I witnessed the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh spit the word out as if it were spoiled milk. So, I decided to call my favorite Poli Sci prof and pick his brains. I asked him what he could tell me about conservative populism. His response? He’d never really heard of it. Said it was a bit of an oxymoron. Seriously? You mean you weren’t aware of the fact that Ronald Reagan, the idol to which all good conservatives bow, was often referred to as a conservative populist? Nope. The only example he could come up with was the Puritans! I was amazed at how thoroughly the propaganda had done its job. Not even someone with a doctorate in Political Science could comprehend of a person being able to combine the values of conservatism with the compassion of populism. When did we conservatives get such a hard reputation? When did we decide that we must sacrifice caring for others to attain fiscal responsibility? And how, on earth, did they convince those of us that are Christians that this was ok? I said, as often as anyone would listen, during the campaign: When did we allow populism to become a dirty word? Isn’t the purpose of a representative government to protect the rights of the people? To “represent” us? Or is that just some of us?

It is becoming painfully apparent that those running the Republican Party aren’t interested in the “little people”. They are interested in those that can raise millions of dollars for them without breaking a sweat. And the DNC is anathema to our social values, and frankly, take the whole government helping the little guy way too far.

So where does that leave us? It looks like we’re the Cinderella of the party. Hopefully, our prince will come soon. Hopefully, he didn’t already come and we missed him.

-Victoria St Gelais

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.” 

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The New York Sun is reporting:

With social conservatives up in arms over the possibility that Senator McCain may tap a supporter of abortion rights, Senator Lieberman, as his running mate, one staunch McCain ally and abortion opponent says the Connecticut lawmaker is the perfect choice.

Rep. Peter King, a Long Island Republican, said social conservatives are making a mistake by opposing Mr. Lieberman, arguing that the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee could help deliver Mr. McCain the election in November. While ardent abortion foes have said the “pro-life” principle is too important to give up for the sake of political pragmatism, Mr. King turned the argument on its head, saying that electing an anti-abortion president in Mr. McCain outweighs the risk of a more conservative vice presidential pick that would ultimately lose to Senator Obama in November.

“They would be the ones morally responsible for electing a pro-choice president,” Mr. King said of Mr. Lieberman’s right-wing critics in an interview with The New York Sun yesterday.

Mr. McCain drew the ire of opponents of legalized abortion when he told the Weekly Standard last week that the support of abortion rights would not necessarily disqualify a former Pennsylvania governor, Tom Ridge, as a prospective running mate. And reports have spread this week that he also is considering Mr. Lieberman.

The news has led to angry warnings from social conservatives, and the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Mr. McCain would “destroy the Republican Party.”

“I understand the sincerity but I really believe it’s misguided, and I’m saying that as a person who has a 100% pro-life voting record,” Mr. King said.

CBS News is reporting:

Former New York City mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani will be the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday, September 1st. His Tuesday night address will follow primetime speeches from Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who are seen as two of the most likely candidates to become John McCain’s running mate, were not granted primetime speaking slots. Romney is currently slated to speak on Wednesday, Sept 3rd, while Pawlenty is scheduled to join Charlie Crist, Sam Brownback and Mel Martinez to address the convention on Thursday, Sept. 4th, before McCain’s convention-closing address. (The schedule could change.)

Whomever McCain selects as his running mate will give an address in primetime on Wednesday, along with Cindy McCain and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindel.

Former Democrat Joe Lieberman and Vice President Dick Cheney will speak on the convention’s first day. They will be followed in primetime by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.

Full convention schedule can be viewed below the jump…

(more…)

The New York Post is reporting:

Rudy Giuliani has landed a prime-time speaking gig at the Republican Party’s convention in St. Paul, Minn., The Post has learned.

Giuliani, the former presidential candidate and Big Apple mayor, is tentatively scheduled to address the GOP faithful on Tuesday, Sept. 2 - the second night of the convention, sources said.

Giuliani was a marquee speaker on the first day of the 2004 GOP convention in Madison Square Garden.

Giuliani has been a loyal supporter of presidential standard-bearer John McCain ever since his own campaign flamed out.

McCain, in a recent Post interview, said of Giuliani: “I’ve been with him a lot. I appreciate more than I could tell you his friendship and support. And that was steadfast throughout the primary.”

“He’s a great American. He united America. I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” McCain said, referring to Giuliani’s composure after 9/11.

I know that posting on such a boring topic as Veep Selections here at R’408 that I run the risk of being marginalized because no one wants to read or comment on these anymore, but I thought this one was well written.

Now I personally have stated that I am voting for McCain regardless of the VP, and whether he picks Huckabee, Romney, or the tooth fairy, it doesn’t matter to me. I am looking at 2008 and the potential damage that can be caused by such an un-vetted, inexperienced Marxist junior senator such as B. Hussein Obama. With that said, I thought this was a timely and somewhat well written argument for a Huckabee VP pick. I do not believe that Mike will be the VP pick, and I do not want to start the rantings and ravings of highly em-passioned supporters of either candidate. I rather want to get this word “out there” from an economist that I feel “Get’s it”.

Is Huckabee the economic wiz that will save the free-market capitalistic economy that we know and love? No. Is he the worst possible choice in this arena? I know some will say yes, but I disagree. It doesn’t matter how hard CfG or others attack Mike on economic issues, the fact remains that he is an economic Conservative. He governed conservatively in a highly democratic state. Dick Morris made some good arguments over here. And the source for the real cause for the Club for Growth attack can be found here.

Yesterday we heard about an independent Evangelical group in Michigan striving to be heard by the Republican Party, and then another group in Ohio had their voice marginalized, and I’m sure that there are others in the rest of the key swing states that want to be heard. These are voices that need to be listened to.

As for the original article, here are some excerpts:

McCain needs help if he is going to win. Huckabee is in many respects an ideal complement for the senator from Arizona - he is 52 to McCain’s 71; Huckabee, a Baptist minister, is solid with the evangelicals, who remain suspicious of McCain; Huckabee is a genial, folksy, guitar-playing personality who connects on the campaign trail, compared with McCain’s grating and inept performances (not to mention Romney’s power-point drone).

No I know some people LIVE for those PowerPoint’s - The cool fade effects, and the neat spinning transitions are pretty sweet, but they do not work for most of the non-white collar workers.

During his primary campaign, Huckabee was able to show the same sympathy for the plight of low-income workers as Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And Huckabee — who at one point interrupted his campaign to deliver a paid speech outside the country because he needs to earn a living — was much more convincing than the multi-multimillionaire Romney or the married-to-an-heiress McCain. His whimsical ad about preferring to vote for someone you can work alongside rather than the boss said it all.

I’m sure that Metro will point to this as the EXACT reason to not vote for Mike, and God love him, he is entitled to that opinion, the fact is, it resonated well with the electorate on both side of the aisle.

But free-market policies may not be what voters in a distressed economy want to hear. In an election when many low-income white voters may be reluctant to vote for an African American with no track record, Huckabee offers a lifeline of economic support with solid social conservative credentials. What should McCain choose: 40,000 Club of Growth members or 80 million-some evangelicals? Hmmm.

That pretty much says it all. I know that all 80MM Evangelicals will not vote for Mike solely because he is on the ticket, but I know that most of them would echo these sentiments:

“It’s important that people sing from their hearts and don’t merely lip-sync the lyrics to our songs,” he said. “I think it’s important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language.”

 Thanks for your time today, and if you do want to make a difference, and you want to get involved regardless of the VP pick, please join me over here at Stop Barack and get signed up for updates as we have work to do in the coming election to educate the voters just how bad Barack is and your help is needed.

h/t Debra Mantey

Last night in the Missouri Gubernatorial primary, the Republican candidates won 394,715 votes among them. 

The Democratic candidates won 357,564 between them.

Stayed tuned for media reports on how Republican turnout exceeded Democratic turnout, so that means Missouri has to be in the bag for the GOP in November. 

Of course they won’t.  And their rationale will be that it isn’t a fair comparison because the Democratic side wasn’t contested.  That didn’t stop them, of course, from making similar comparisons earlier this year.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Bridge To Nowhere) has been indicted. A lot.

In a way this is good news for Republicans, as he will likely have to set aside his re-election effort, if not outright resign. The question is, who replaces him? The filing deadline was June 2, 2008, and this guy is the current alternative.

UPDATE: Note that Stevens runs a PAC that has given to virtually all the vulnerable Senators up for re-election this cycle. What a headache.

Remember this next time someone comments on what a hopelessly partisan outfit DOJ has become under Bush.

UPDATE 2: Does it sound to you like this guy is resigning? Because it sure doesn’t to me.

In Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, conservative author David Frum begins with an interesting premise. According to Frum, George Bush both saved and destroyed the Republican Party. He saved it from electoral loss in 2000 by running as a new kind of Republican. He destroyed it by running as the wrong new kind of Republican. While Reagan Conservatism had expired by 1996, evidenced by Bob Dole’s nine-point loss after morphing into a Reaganite supply-sider and social conservative, Bush Conservatism was the wrong solution at the right time. Frum explores an intriguing alternate reality: what if Gore had been elected in 2000? This would almost certainly have saved the GOP from losing its reputation as the frugal party, the grown-up party, the competence party, and the foreign policy party, and would have propelled someone like Rudy Giuliani into office in 2004 to curb President Gore’s massive growth of government and tepid response to Islamism. But all of that is neither here nor there. What must be dealt with, and what Frum deals with, is the world that we are faced with now.

Frum explains the GOP’s dilemma by returning to an old line about conservatism’s decline being the result of its successes. Frum points out that conservatism initially arose to tackle the public problems of the 1960s and 1970s, which primarily concerned a lack of economic freedom in the Western world. But there are only so many marginal tax rates that can be reduced and only so many industries that can be deregulated and only so many Berlin Walls that can fall before the size of government is replaced by something else as the primary impediment to Americans’ livelihood. The lack of a real increase in the wages of the median American worker, combined with the rising cost of education and health care and housing, has shifted Americans to the left on many domestic issues. Polling shows that Americans now support Democratic policies on greater education spending and universal health care and don’t really care much about lowering income taxes. Upon digesting the whole of his book, though, the reader learns that Frum’s argument is not that the electorate has become a liberal electorate, but that Republicans have failed to present modern conservative alternatives to Democrats’ big-government policies (with the exception of the Bush attempt to out-liberal the Democrats) and have thus ceded the playing field to Democrats.

Frum has lots of potential solutions for the modernization of the Republican Party. While I don’t buy all of them, I do think that Frum has laid out a number of interesting alternatives to the three-headed hydra of today’s national politics: a 1970s Democratic Party, a 1980s Republican Party, and a big-government Bush-era Republican Party. Frum’s Republican Party is one that tries to apply conservatism to today’s world, with today’s economic concerns and today’s social mores.

On taxes, Frum points out that the domestic and defense demands on our government preclude any sort of broad Reaganesque tax cut in the near future. Indeed, the public at large intuits this, with deficit reduction now more popular than tax cuts. The reason is that Republicans’ traditional focus on the income tax at the national level is outdated given how little the average American now pays to the government via the income tax as opposed to all sorts of other taxes. Frum suggests that if any broad-based tax cut were to garner public support, it would have to be aimed at the payroll tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax, or an expansion of the child credit. Additionally, instead of talking about tax cuts, Republicans need to start talking about what to tax in order to minimize harm to the economy while raising the most revenue. Frum supports shifting taxes from income, savings, and investment to consumption, flirting with the idea of a VAT in lieu of income and capital gains taxes.

On offering a better deal to the middle class, Frum discusses the plight of the median American worker and his or her stagnant standard of living. He notes that two of the main burdens on the average American in today’s society — education and health care — are the product of a corrupted market thanks to massive government intervention over the past few decades. While government did much to create the problems in these areas of American life, Frum argues that pulling government out would both be politically unfeasible and would probably do more harm than good. In other words, government has done so much harm to education and health care in this country that it has to act creatively in order to set things right.

When it comes to education, market forces are the key. Choice and accountability are paramount, as is the need to ensure quality instruction for students. Education is going to matter more and more when it comes to America’s standard of living as we head into the future; it’s a global economy that we’re living in, and Americans are competing with folks in India and China for the high-paying, highly-skilled jobs of today and tomorrow. Americans have to close the performance gap with the other industrialized nations of the world when it comes to education.

On health care, Frum points out that rising health care costs are an especially guilty culprit of keeping Americans’ wages down. Employers are dedicating money that would otherwise end up in employees’ pockets to health insurance contributions. And workers are seeing more of their own post-tax dollars going towards health costs. Republicans should become the party of choice in health care and make it easier for individuals and families to buy their own health plan, helping to sever the link between employment and health insurance. Republicans should also allow individuals to shop for health plans across state lines. Frum suggests that something similar to the Romney plan in Massachusetts may be necessary to make sure everyone has access to basic health insurance. Ultimately, something has to be done, or Frum predicts that voters will embrace Democrats’ Canadian-style health plans.

Retirement security is another area that Frum touches on, arguing for the Clinton version of private accounts to be put into place. These accounts would supplement, not replace, the existing Social Security scheme and give individuals a better return on their investment than the current system by allowing them to invest additional funds in the private sector.

On social issues, Frum argues for a strong social issues plank to be part of the Republican platform. Frum points out though that the GOP is currently suffering on these issues because changing public values have put Republicans on the wrong side of many of their pet cultural issues. As Republicans found out in 2005-06, no amount of arguing or persuasion is going to change minds about stem cell research. Americans want stem cell research, and any party on the wrong side of that issue with regard to public opinion is going to have trouble winning elections. Gay marriage is another area where the public is about to turn against Republicans. Vast majorities of young people support gay marriage or something like it. Frum suggests that by 2012 or 2016, gay marriage opposition may be a net negative for Republicans. And while the Federal Marriage Amendment has to go, so does the Human Life Amendment. Voters will never support a “no abortions, no exceptions” policy. Public opinion has remained unchanged on abortion for about thirty years, with a South Dakota-style abortion ban being something that most voters do not support, even in a red state like, well, South Dakota. Republicans will lose if they run on these issues.

That does not mean that there aren’t social issues for Republicans to run on. Instead of running on gay marriage, Republicans can run simply on the issue of marriage. Republicans can point out that marriage is important as an institution, that it needs to be valued, and that marriages that end in divorce, when children are involved, contribute to all sorts of social ills. Additionally, instead of being for no-abortions-no-exceptions, how about being for federalism on abortion, and arguing aggressively for the overturn of Roe while pointing out equally vocally that every state will get to have its own abortion policy at that point, and that that will be fine.

Interestingly, this is where fiscal and social issues come together. Frum points out the dirty little secret that those at the top of the socio-economic ladder of our society should be social conservatives’ poster children, as they are have discovered that economic success is impossible without personal responsibility. As such, it is the educated and upscale who don’t get divorced, who don’t have abortions, largely because they utilize contraception and common sense to avoid pregnancy in the first place, and who don’t create broken homes which lead to broken children. Moreover, these folks didn’t need a government to step in and change their values in order to adopt these behaviors; instead, they adapted to the world around them and made smart decisions based on good, old-fashioned self-interest.

All in all, Frum’s conservatism could probably best be described as “Smart Conservatism.” It requires government to tax smarter, interact with the private sector in smarter ways, and to ask Americans to rise to the occasion and act smarter in their personal lives so the rest of us don’t suffer because of their poor decisions. The last conservatism that worked was a small-government conservatism. Frum seems to be proposing a smart-government conservatism.

Where I disagree with Frum: I felt there were a few times that Frum either didn’t show his work or simply jumped the shark. Frum seemed to understand that education is very, very important in the modern world, but really didn’t have any solutions beyond what you’d find in George Bush’s education proposals. Despite his insistence that Americans need to become as hyper-skilled as the Chinese, he didn’t touch on solutions to lowering the ridiculously inflated cost of higher education in this country. He at least gets partial credit I guess for recognizing that there’s a problem I suppose. Also, even though one of Frum’s major arguments is that the median American worker is getting a raw deal, he suggests increasing immigration levels of highly-skilled workers into the U.S., which would seemingly lower the wages of that same median American worker, if I’m remembering my basic economics right. Frum also calls for a green conservatism, which is fine, but one of his proposals — to raise the gas tax — is clearly a relic of pre-four-dollar-a-gallon gas prices. I much prefer drilling and nuclear power to attempting to use government to make Americans bike more often. Finally, Frum acknowledges that Iraq didn’t work out as planned but then goes on to call for continued democratization of the world by the United States. I’m not so sure I agree. It appears that we’re going to leave Iraq as a functioning, stable society that is an ally of the U.S. instead of its enemy. To me, that’s good enough. As for supporting democratization, that’s fine, as long as we don’t start invading other nations. Personally, I’d be happy focusing on destroying jihadists and preventing nuclear weapons from getting into the hands of our enemies. But that’s just me.

All in all, I found Frum’s book a worthwhile read and I hope that the coming generation of conservative leaders looks to his example of a conservatism that focuses on solving the problems of today, not of 1980 or 2004.

Evangelicals have been the most loyal GOP voters since Ronald Reagan brought them into the party in droves in 1980. They left their previous apathy or Democratic Party allegiance to vote for Republicans based on issues, not instructions from media appointed “leaders.”

Given that, I was quite amused at all the teeth gnashing by certain libertarian and/or secular leaning conservatives last winter when Dr. James Dobson and other prominent Evangelicals vocalized their opposition to pro-choice candidate Rudy Giuliani. I was even more amused at the wailing when Dobson announced he couldn’t vote for John McCain. My amusement was a mask for my contempt for people that have such a low opinion of Evangelicals (as well as Southerners and Christians in general) as to think that they follow pied-pipers rather than vote issues like the enlightened.

The wailing teeth-gnashers were convinced by “leader” statements and those ubiquitous between election polls that liberals put out to torture the political novices or those with memories that seem to wane every four years, that Evangelicals would abandon the party.

So, given that so many wrote off the Evangelical vote, and, hence, the election based on Dobson musings of “the moment”, I am expectantly waiting for the nervous nellies whose world is created anew each morning by the MSM and conservative chatterers, to make a U-turn and declare all is well after:

“I have considered the fact that elections always involve imperfect candidates … you always have to choose between two flawed individuals,” Dobson said on his national radio broadcast July 21. But Dobson also said there are several significant issues where he and McCain agree.

“As of this moment, I have to take into account that Sen. John McCain has voted pro-life consistently,” Dobson said. “… He says he favors marriage between a man and a woman. He opposes homosexual adoption. He favors smaller government and lower taxes and he seems to understand the Muslim threat, which matters a lot to me. Therefore, I have considered the fact that elections always involve imperfect candidates — there are no perfect human beings — and you always have to choose between two flawed individuals…. I never thought I would hear myself saying this, but it’s where I am: While I am not endorsing Sen. John McCain, the possibility is there that I might.”

McCain supports embryonic stem cell research and has opposed a federal marriage amendment; although he has have left wiggle room on both issues and implied or said he could change. But he has sought to reach out to pro-lifers during campaign speeches; during one recent stop in Missouri he told the crowd that they could count on his “active advocacy for the rights of the unborn.”

He also has stated his support for a proposed California marriage amendment, which Obama opposes. In February, Dobson said he was opposed to Republicans voting to make McCain their presidential nominee and said with McCain and Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) as the nominees, he would not cast a ballot in November. “There’s no doubt — at least no doubt in my mind — about whose policies will result in more babies being killed or will do the greatest damage to the institution of marriage and the family,” Dobson said. “I am convinced that Sen. McCain comes closer to what I believe.” Dobson said that Obama is an intelligent and charismatic candidate who, on the surface, is an attractive candidate.

But Obama’s beliefs on key issues, the two men said, should alarm conservative Christians. Dobson said he thinks Obama is “more liberal and more extreme than most Democrats in the Senate.” The “best example” of that, Dobson said, is the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which passed the Senate 98-0. Obama, then an Illinois state legislator, opposed a version of it on the state level. The bill would have given legal rights to babies who survive abortions. Obama “was chairman of the committee who dealt with” the bill and “spoke against the bill, arguing for the right to kill those babies,” Dobson said. Obama has a position that “even his liberal colleagues don’t represent. This man is really far, far left.” Dobson said the point of the program was “not to tell people how to vote” but instead “to ask people to think about the issues.”

So, who are the real mind-numbed robots, us Evangelicals, including the Cockstradamas among us that said last winter that Dobson would come around and that even if he didn’t, Evangelicals would come out in droves against an Obama or a Clinton, or too many of the conservative chattering class that follow the conventional wisdom story lines campaign season after campaign season, oblivious to the repeating pattern?

Evangelicals came into the GOP because Democrats’ economic policies were ruinous, they were weak on defense, and they favored judge made law that re-writes the Constitution, especially with respect to life and local control of public schools.

Guess what? They still care about those issues, and they still can spot a leftist a mile away or in Berlin. It was a bit harder in 1980 when one of their own sold them out, but it has gotten increasingly easier since, and the Obama is anathema with his 20-year pew-parked in a hate whitey America church.

Most Evangelicals are white and love America. hence the recent poll that only 31% of whites have a favorable view of Obama.

Dobson and friends wanted to make sure the GOP nominee was pro-life. They got their way. The way that got us Reagan and the Congress.

Evangelicals want America to reject liberals that attack the values they hold dear whether Dobson or anyone else lets his pride get in the way of the sanity they live by each day that sees all too clearly Ruth Bader Ginsburgs emanating from even moderate Democrats.

So, all you that wrote off the Evangelical vote based on an “at this moment” writ Dobson last winter, start churning out the crow eating essays and address them to Gamecock.

[Prepare for more as well, and all you that change positions each weak get not slack. Flip-floppers. smile...]

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Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

Legal Editor for The Minority and HinzSight Reports

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” - The Chief Justice

Race 4 2008

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have generated a lot of discussion with their latest book, Grand New Party. It calls for a Republican Party that embraces working class concerns and promotes policies to make it easier for family life. In order to do this they recount the failure of Republicans to address the economic situations facing the 67% of voters without a college degree.

The writers show that while these voters aren’t slipping into poverty, they have less chance to achieve the American dream than in past decades. The authors identify trends begun in the 1960’s and 1970’s that threaten the nature of America.

“Imagine higher taxes, vastly expanded public-sector employment, infantilized upper-middle-class men and women who live with their parents until their late thirties because their jobs don’t pay enough to buy a house of their own, illegitimacy rising towards 50 percent and a growing social services bureaucracy that steps in to pick up the slack, plunging birthrates as rearing children grows more expensive, and an ever-larger stream of immigrants being imported to fill the breach. For many of America’s elites, this scenario might not sound so uncongenial. But a victory of this vision of the American future would be a defeat for everything that has been distinctive about American life”

Douthat and Salam use copious polling, demographic and economic data to show why the Republican Party did not achieve a governing majority like the New Deal Democrats during 1932-1968. Republicans haven’t convincingly won over the working class whites who still make up ~50% of voters. Meanwhile our grip on the middle class (the 33% of voters with college degrees) has weakened. Increasingly college educated voters and working class voters live in different cities and different states. They share less in common now than at any time in American history.

Since the 1970’s the working class has been buffeted by family disintegration that leaves their children unlikely to succeed. They face a culture that glorifies no-consequences promiscuity and then face the dire consequences often without support. They’ve faced economic instability that decreases their own ability to get ahead. Since the end of the Cold War these voters have seen their income stay flat or slightly decline most years. Turning to social conserv