Matt’s right-—this article by Frank Rich that uses “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” as a reference point is a sobering reminder to those of us who were born after the 60s that the majority of Americans actually lived through those tumultuous times, which goes a long way to explain McCain’s baffling showing in the polls. Because for all that McCain is supposedly so far behind, really this should be a blowout. The Republicans have done pretty much everything they can to turn the public against them. They suck away your tax dollars on a pet project war that turned into a clusterfuck, exactly as was predicted it would. They’ve ushered in an economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression. The one thing people elected them to do in 2004, and trusted them to do—-shut down Islamic terrorism—-they not only didn’t do, but in fact they actively made the threat worse. By all accounts, they shouldn’t even have a party anymore, they’ve fucked it up so badly.
But Republicans hang in by re-fighting the 60s. (And early 70s.) Which is rich, because as Dubya showed us, they’d really prefer to rebuild the 30s so they can do it “right” this time by turning most of the nation into a permanent underclass. The Holy Grail of Republicanism is taking away programs that FDR founded, especially Social Security. Re-fighting the 60s is a poor substitute for going straight to the source of liberalism in their eyes. But most people living don’t remember the 30s, and even if they do, they take that past as unchangeable history, so Republicans are stuck re-fighting the 60s. In the final days of the campaign season, the entire strategy of the Republican party campaigning can be summed up as, “Stoke fears that a certain class of people has been nurturing for 40 years.” Elizabeth Dole busts out anxieties that have been alive since Time magazine put “Is God Dead?” on their cover in 1966. The Norm Coleman campaign in Minnesota is mainly alive because they’ve been blanketing the airwaves with ads that suggest that Al Franken perhaps is a little soft on the issue of keeping women chained to the stove and pregnant. And the McCain campaign’s argument has been reduced to, “Can you really believe we’re going to elect a black President? Did I mention that he’s BLACK?!”