Some Early Demographic Thoughts

I get that its pretty passe to link to the New York Times, and I am going to do it anyway, particularly because I think the stable of columnists there represents an excellent cross section of styles and outlooks at the moment, probably better than at any time in the past 20 years. This morning Frank Rich nails the "Real America" argument used by the best surrogate the McCain campaign could locate in our nation of 300 million, that would be Gov. Palin. She gave a speech in North Carolina in which she said she was "happy to be in the Real America." And then that county voted by 18 points for Obama.

Oops. For this reason and many others I love having Gov. Palin on the scene as she and those who are part of the just-eviscerated conservative movement of the last 30 years are our ticket to a permanent Democratic majority.

Growing up and through most of the 90s I thought the Democrats had a common sense problem, in that many of the party's positions took longer than 30 seconds to explain and would not fit on a bumper sticker, so therefore any platitudes the conservatives could invent, like for instance "no nation has ever taxed its way to prosperity" which is one of my favorite pieces of conservative nonsense that I will hopefully treat at length at some other point, would strike the working middle class voters they needed to peel off from the Democrats, as common sense.

Its tough to sell progress in 30-second segments. We Democrats are, as is so often the case (see the Clinton impeachment debacle) the beneficiaries of wonderful political enemies.

Palin took the conservative common sense playbook and stretched it till it popped. This anti-intellectual thing (and there is much, much more to say about it) is the central argument of American conservatism right now, and we just watched it fizzle like a warm Diet Dr. Pepper. Part of the reason is that we are in tough times, out of which we will need smart, careful leadership to remain the strongest nation on the planet. And part of it is we just had eight years of from-the-hip governance that resulted in some jaw-droppingly bad strategery.

So, this is a moment. As Rich notes, the GOP lost every growing demographic in the country, AND lost white men by a bigger percentage than anytime since LBJ.

How to make it stick?