Open Threads

David Brooks has passed on a bunch of nonsense over the years, but he nails it today:

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

***

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

***

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Read the whole thing. Should the Republicans lose in a landslide next month, it really was their own doing.

Also, Larison.

Brooks Nails ItPost + Comments (54)

Michael Scherer at Swampland notes something we talked about during liveblogging:

Neither candidate has the courage to speak straight with the American people about our nation’s fiscal problems. Asked about the financial crisis, McCain talked about energy independence, hitting the same talking points he used in July. Obama talked about the need to give tax cuts to the middle class, and expand spending programs, a proposal he put forward last year. Both men have proposed policies that will lead to an increase in the deficit, according to independent analysts, even without a dramatic economic downturn, which looks increasingly inevitable. Neither man has shown any clear intention to tell Americans to face head on the hard economic times that await us. This is politics. The candidates are playing it safe, not telling voters anything they don’t want to hear. They choose to demagogue Wall Street instead. Let’s just pray that after the election, the winner drops this politicking and becomes the bold, honest leader both men claim to be. The nation will need it.

I used fewer words:

9:13 pm- They are both full of shit. This economy is in a deepening recession, and the economy is going to get much worse.

Among the number of things that really concerns me is that there still has not been an honest appraisal of how bad things are right now, even when both candidates were given a chance to talk about sacrifice last night. There are, I think, some very tough times ahead. We don’t just have a crisis in confidence right now, we have a deep structural problems and a mountain of debt and an aging population that has been promised a great deal of entitlement money and I just don’t see any end in sight. Things are really a mess.

On top of all that, Matt Yglesias has a good post up about how right now, spending cuts on the federal level may be the worst thing possible. While there is no doubt that Obama is the superior candidate of the two, this lack of openness about how bad things really are is depressing. I understand it, as no one can run on a platform of “You all are going to have to do with less,” but that is the reality, in my estimation.

An Interesting ObservationPost + Comments (65)