Why McCain / Palin is OK with me

On Sep 6, 9:21*am, jeff miller wrote:
it is so odd that so many won't recognize the political duping going on....


... and another side of that:

The Resentment Strategy
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a
Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout
business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern
elites”?

Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it,
“marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived
temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between
his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that
Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently
“cosmopolitan”?

Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the
White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party
that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into
itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were
reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running
against the “Washington elite”?

Yes, they can.

On Tuesday, He Who Must Not Be Named — Mitt Romney mentioned him just
once, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin not at all — gave a video address
to the Republican National Convention. John McCain, promised President
Bush, would stand up to the “angry left.” That’s no doubt true. But
don’t be fooled either by Mr. McCain’s long-ago reputation as a
maverick or by Ms. Palin’s appealing persona: the Republican Party,
now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which
has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier
than its counterpart on the other side.

What’s the source of all that anger?

Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict:
fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and
evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the
convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is
based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the
perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that
Democrats look down their noses at regular people.

Thus Mr. Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough”
for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms. Palin asserted
that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any
evidence.

What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of
resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite
that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P.
is still the party of Nixon.

One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian
Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his
career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself
elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’
resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club.
There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s
attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of
impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality
that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated
his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the
“misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than
all the fancy-pants experts.

And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his
presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of
resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do
that.

Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an
upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic
year? The answer is a definite maybe.

By selecting Barack Obama as their nominee, the Democrats may have
given Republicans an opening: the very qualities that inspire many
fervent Obama supporters — the candidate’s high-flown eloquence, his
coolness factor — have also laid him open to a Nixonian backlash.
Unlike many observers, I wasn’t surprised at the effectiveness of the
McCain “celebrity” ad. It didn’t make much sense intellectually, but
it skillfully exploited the resentment some voters feel toward Mr.
Obama’s star quality.

That said, the experience of the years since 2000 — the memory of what
happened to working Americans when faux-populist Republicans
controlled the government — is still fairly fresh in voters’ minds.
Furthermore, while Democrats’ supposed contempt for ordinary people is
mainly a figment of Republican imagination, the G.O.P. really is the
Gramm Old Party — it really does believe that the economy is just
fine, and the fact that most Americans disagree just shows that we’re
a nation of whiners.

But the Democrats can’t afford to be complacent. Resentment, no matter
how contrived, is a powerful force, and it’s one that Republicans are
very, very good at exploiting.