Honey, I Lost My Job -- Now Bring Me My Bible, My Rifle and Get Them Mexicans Off the Porch!!

Jimmy Carter and brother Billy at the latter's gas station. Is such a photo op in Barack Obama's future?

". . .Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual."

Jimmy Carter, "Malaise Speech" 15 July 1979

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration."

Barack Obama in a speech at a fundraiser in San Francisco, 6 April 2008

God save the Republic from Democrats auditioning to serve as psychoanalyst-in-chief to the nation's body politic. To hear Democrats tell the tale it's all gloom, doom and various pathologies brought about now by a generation of alleged GOP economic neglect. As Carter's speech points out, Obama is but the latest Democrat to talk down to and insult people who might have religious faith, be concerned about Second Amendment rights or have reservations over the effects of illegal immigration on this country's society and economy. How else would one explain their seeming to cling to ideas that run counter to the party looking out for their best interests? Or as one other clueless liberal asked, What's The Matter With Kansas?

Carter found out the hard way in 1980 when Ronald Reagan cast aside the malaise and focused instead on the innate sense of American optimism and the sunny slopes of the Shining City Upon a Hill. Key to Reagan's winning his victory were those who came to be known as "Reagan" Democrats – working-class men and women who like Reagan lamented that they hadn't so much left their party as much as their party had left them. These Reagan Democrats, with the exception of Bill Clinton's plurality wins in '92 and '96, would cement GOP control of the White House for a generation.

Following John Kerry's loss in 2004, new DNC Chairman Howard Dean and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head Rahm Emanuel would focus on a "50 state strategy" that would no longer cede red-leaning states to the GOP and recruited candidates of more conservative mien which when combined with GOP scandals and the decline in President Bush's popularity resulted in Democrats reclaiming the House and Senate in 2006 and nowhere more evident than in my home state of Virginia where Jim Webb, a former Reagan Navy Secretary and decorated Vietnam War veteran, defeated GOP incumbent and presumed presidential candidate George Allen.

But this year's long and bitter drive to the left in gaining the Democratic presidential nomination is driving Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into the box from which the eventual nominee will find his or herself hard to climb out of to tack back to the center against a somewhat unorthodox GOP nominee in Sen. John McCain. They'll need those Reagan Democrats in November and Obama's comments before a crowd given to view religious faith, firearm ownership and concerns about illegal immigration as would a high-born English gentleman view one of Senator Webb's Scots-Irish forebears from southwest Virginia is not promising for their prospects if he is the nominee. Combine that with his long-standing personal association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and it's a GOP strategist's dream scenario.

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Doug Ross @ Journal

directorblue.blogspot.com

Sat Apr 12

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