Notice what is missing from that, conservatives? Attacks on John McCain. For 30 minutes, Barack Obama talked about what he thinks are the problems currently facing the country, about what he thinks he can do to help fix them, how you can help him, and why it is important to elect him. He did not spend his time telling you why you should not vote for McCain, he spent his time telling why you should vote for him. You may not agree with his ideas, but you can not argue he has them and is presenting them to the country in a clear and nonthreatening manner.
Now, for a moment, consider what the Republican 30 minute infomercial would look like this year- if I had to guess, it would be ten minutes about McCain as a POW, ten minutes of McCain saying he isn’t Bush, and then ten minutes of bullshit smears about Ayers, Khalidi, socialism, celebrity, and maybe out of sheer nostalgia, Rick Davis could go before the cameras and pull a tire gauge out of his ass.
He also makes a good point of comparing the McCain campaign now to the Kerry campaign of yesteryear in that their only message is that they're not the other guy. Ultimately, though, the current state of the GOP is due mostly to the cancer of protracted bitterness and victimization. At its height, conservatives listened to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who tried to summon an optimism and vision about the future (we all know what came of the latter's promises, though). This has been an exception, however: most conservatives, of which John McCain is the most recent and his predecessor Barry Goldwater was another, tend to see gloom instead of hope, and ever since Nixon the Republican Party has been built upon a foundation of class- and race-based resentment. One of the things that always gets me is how much the conservative base sees themselves as victims--of political correctness, of affirmative action, etc. Everything is the liberals' fault, and if something goes wrong--if someone loses their job--it's due to liberalism in some form. I remember a few years back, a propos, when Tom DeLay got harangued at a fundraiser for excessive spending and blamed it on congressional Democrats. The haranguer asked DeLay how big a Republican majority he'd need to curb wasteful spending. At this point, DeLay basically broke down and admitted the point--this was around 2005 or 2006, when the Senate was 55-45 GOP and the Republicans had a 30 seat advantage in the House. And the party out of power, the party that the Bush administration famously steamrolled on nearly every policy initiative until 2006 was still to blame for Republican failures.
When you see things through this lens, things make more sense. The Republican Party has made a cottage industry out of capturing free-floating anger and telling people why they're angry. Out of work? Illegal immigration. We'll stop that (but not really). Times are tight? Welfare. We'll stop that (but not really). Mugged on the street? Crime. Liberals. We'll stop that (not really, but we'll take credit for it when it happens under the other party). It makes sense to me that the Republican Party has devolved into little more than anger and bitterness at abstract and vaguely defined cultural targets because that's all they had to begin with. And I've counseled the GOP to try to overcome said bitterness, but I'm beginning to see that that is the only thing that binds their coalition together. So I don't anticipate it happening just yet.
