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A number of factors have converged to make this election season something "special":
1. We have a unique candidate. Barack Obama is highly intelligent, thoughtful and composed. So were Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. But, Obama is also that rarest of creatures, a political leader who inspires people, lifts them up and is as much a movement leader as a presidential candidate. We haven't had anyone like him since RFK was killed. I genuinely liked and fully supported Duke, Gore and Kerry, but I wouldn't have walked two miles through the snow to vote for them. I would for Obama. Obama successfully speaks to the broadest audience of any Democrat I've seen since RFK in 1968. Furthermore, between His Chimperial Highness' incompetence and Obama's forward looking message of hope, the 'pukes have lost an entire generation. If O is a successful two-term president, they will lose another generation.
2. Because of his unique gifts, Obama is able to inspire his supporters to passion, rather than mere support. Evidence of this is most convincingly provided by the unassailable fact that the man can literally snap his fingers and make tens of millions of dollars fall from the sky. As Eleanor Clift observed in Newsweek, Obama's fund-raising success is the American people screaming "ENOUGH!!"
3. The Pukes were so arrogant and fascistic in the last eight years that they have much to hide. There are a dozen cemeteries worth of skeletons out there that would, if exposed even in significant part, sink the party for at least thirty years as anything other than a regional force in the Stupid Belt (which is not a specific geographical area). The 'pukes are terrified of the notion of a President Obama for that reason.
4. Our standard bearer is literally an African-American. The full-mooner, foaming at the mouth fundy Repuke base is deeply and irredeemably racist. Given the sorry state of race relations in this nation, white trash's only claim to being better than brown people of all kinds is their whiteness. With a black man (especially such an intelligent and educated black man) in the White House, white trash, racists, Freepers and the rest of the intelligence underclass (as opposed to the economic underclass) will have to confront the cold, iron-hard reality of their own situation. Their cognitive dissonance will be taken off their psyches like bark off a tree and it is going to be incredibly painful. They do not want, and possibly cannot stand, to face their real selves. That is a burning, core fear of this portion of the electorate.
The educated economic/political elites that identify as Repug couldn't give a hamster turd whether a candidate is blue, purple, black or Vulcan. To them, vulgar racism is declasse. That is why the conservative "intelligentsia" is throwing McCain under the train. Whether they admit it to themselves or not, the Powells, Brookses, Wills, Buckleys, et al., have finally gotten an uncensored look at the underbelly of hatred, paranoia and sociopathy in their party's base and they have been scared to death by seeing it up close. Palin did us a favor in that respect.
Palin let the kooks out of the attic, they are now in the middle of the living room shrieking their kookery at the top of their lungs in the middle of the dinner party, and they are firmly in control of the Repig party. This has spooked the establishment conservatives big time. Which is why the Reagan coalition is already in its coffin, just waiting for burial. No common interests unite these people.
5. The Repigs are completely out of ideas. They are as bankrupt as we were at the end of the 1970s. Which is why this will be a transformative election. The majority of the populace has come to what I refer to as the "Popeye point"; They've had all they can stands, and they can't stands no more. This is a "throw the bums out" election. And the party that brought us to this crisis point is the Republican party. The recriminations, bloodletting and fratricidal warfare on the right for the next 2-10 years should be most entertaining to watch. Unlike Democrats, they are unable to sit down, talk it through and try to figure out what will work.
No Repig president will be elected again until they find their Bill Clinton - nominally of the party, but other-side lite. But the fissures between the neocons, theocons and economic royalists are now far too large to paper over. They barely managed to steal/win elections with that coalition. They stand no chance splintered. The Republican Party of Reagan is as dead as Dillinger. They will be in the wilderness for quite a while. Whatever Republicanism may reconstitute itself as, the party we have known for the last thirty years is gone.
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