"Racial and lifestyle minorities provide the electoral ballast for the [Democratic] party, true. But outside of those categories, the Democrats are the part of America's creme de la creme--not just the 'cultural elite,' as Dan Quayle put it, but the elite, period."
This makes it sound as though the Republicans are the party of nobody -- or maybe the party of the middle-class whites. Whereas it would of course be much truer to call the Republican Party the party of the elite.
If by "electoral ballast," he means the majority of the DP's support, that couldn't be true. "Lifestyle minority" is apparently a euphemism for homosexuals, and "racial minorities" a euphemism for "blacks" (yes, there are other skin-color minorities, but the DP hardly has a lock on them). But how could the party elect anyone if most of its voters were homosexuals and blacks?
Also, he seems to me to strike out in trying to explain that Dean might beat Bush because he has such a large advertising budget. And Bush is sitting on peanuts? He will be able to drown any DP candidate in money next year.
He is of course correct that any Democrat who is a "social liberal" has no hope in the South -- and I would add, in much of the Midwest and most of the West until you get past Las Vegas. But his blaming Lieberman's poor position on his being trashed by blacks for "reasons" which "can only be guessed" is a clear charge that the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP are anti-Semitic. An intelligent and interesting conservative Caldwell may be, but he seems to be just as sneaky about smearing his political adversaries as the rest of the Weekly Standard crowd.
This whole piece reads to me like another attempt to lower expectations for Bush, which there will be more and more of in the coming months. His supporters are deathly afraid that he looks like an electoral steamroller who is all set to flatten any Democrat, which (at this point, anyway) is exactly what he is.
All that said, I think he is probably right at the end of his piece -- this election will be a very bitter one: "Democrats are prepared to fight this election as if they were struggling to overthrow a tyrant." Throw in the "gay marriage" (read: homophobia) issue, which might well overshadow the war issue by this time next year, and there will probably be a lot of animosity rampaging around the country.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. - Frank Zappa