It's The Culture Wars, Stupid

by Steve Soto

I’m sure that Sarah Palin will do just fine in her big speech tonight; she’s been well-trained for stage work like this, and will do her best to convince all of us that she and John McCain represent real America more than Barack Obama and Joe Biden. That is, if real America to you is a twice-married former POW who ditched his sick wife for a beer heiress Sugar Momma, and a former beauty queen fundamentalist with no record of relevant experience to be a geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency with Osama Bin Laden still running loose thanks to the GOP.

McCain and his surrogates will continue to spin around the elephant in the room, that his choice was his and his alone after he stupidly narrowed the field down to two flawed people and still managed to pick the one he knew the least. Somehow, this will be spun by the fear and smear party as a responsible choice in perilous times, superior to the choice of two intellectually-superior opponents who have both demonstrated more connection with real America and infinitely better judgment than either of the people on the GOP ticket.

But if John McCain wants to convince us over the next 60 days that his judgment is not flawed and he selected the most qualified running mate the GOP had to offer, one who had to be confined to a hotel room these last several days to learn what McCain stands for, and one who loves the earmarks process and undermines the reformer image the GOP wants to portray, I’m willing to watch him try. He and his team are telling us that appealing to the Sam’s Club crowd and ditching the experience argument are more important than the issues, and they are eager to get around their atrocious record these last eight years through a replaying of the culture wars. Yet they seemingly admit that someone as lacking as Palin is what passes for new leadership of the GOP, someone who supposedly can appeal to working class families who knows nothing about economic issues or the world we live in.

Simply put, the GOP knows once again it cannot win this election on its record or the economy, nor can it demonstrate that McCain represents change when he has done everything possible to align himself with the Bush base to gain the nomination. Palin is simply the deal closer for the far right base of the party, who must be locked down into McCain’s base as called for in the Rove/Schmidt playbook before any attempt is made to venture towards independents. So to drive the sheeple from the pews to the polls once again, the GOP is re-running this decade’s culture wars and demonization of the media, while avoiding any engagement on real issues.

It will work with the Bush base, but it will be up to Obama and Biden to show voters how cynically the GOP plans to manipulate them once again to hold power.