Peter St. Onge, associate editor of the Charlotte Observer's editorial page, wrote a must-read signed editorial in yesterday's paper. He points out what most of us have been saying for some time--if Romney loses on Tuesday, it will be because he and the Republican Party have kowtowed to the worst elements among them.
St. Onge was prompted to write this by an ugly scene last Saturday. At an early Halloween party in the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood near downtown Charlotte, the host had a scarecrow out front. Well, someone got the bright idea to replace the scarecrow's pumpkin head with one of the president. The Secret Service is investigating. And apparently there have been similar effigies in Indiana, California and Utah. To St. Onge's mind, it's a symptom of a much larger problem.
It’s proud ignorance and joyful ugliness, and all of it has been embraced and feared – but rarely criticized – by Republican leaders.
That’s infuriating to moderate conservatives who believe that legitimate criticisms of the president get diluted because they share the same house with the crazies and the uglies. How, some wonder, can voters choose a president who presides over a stagnant economy, an astounding debt, with no new ideas about how to change either? For some, it’s because the alternative means voting with the birthers and the racists. It means being on the same team as the debate crowd that booed a gay soldier, or the crowd that cheered the idea of letting a sick man with no health insurance die.
In St. Onge's eyes, the Republicans were blinded by the prospect of short-term success that they didn't realize it could really bite them--hard--in the long run.
There's definitely something to this. Case in point--two weeks ago I mentioned how Joel Gilbert is bombarding swing-state mailboxes with a scurrilous video claiming that Obama is the bastard son of Communist organizer Frank Marshall Davis. Well, there's at least one documented case that the video may be backfiring. A Republican couple in Stuart, Florida--on the Treasure Coast--watched it, and were so disgusted by it that they're definitely going to vote for Obama. Plus, a poll of Iowa earlier this year showed Obama leading among seniors there. You have to remember that while Iowa has gone Dem all but once since 1988, before then it went Dem a grand total of four times from 1860 to 1984--all of which were national Democratic landslides. Which means Obama is pulling in a bunch of older voters who have probably voted Republican for most of their lives.
To be fair, St. Onge isn't the first one to come to this conclusion. Back in August, John Judis of The New Republic wrote that while Romney is pursuing a strategy that may be enough to get him over the finish line now, but is pretty much asking for a Democratic landslide as early as 2014. And of course, as any student of politics knows, the Republicans' cliff-diving to the right on social issues means that they have virtually no infrastructure to speak of north of the Potomac and west of the Sierra Nevada. In fact, looking at the electoral map, the only reason they're even still in the game is because of Texas and maybe Georgia.
Still, St. Onge's piece is pretty telling. After all, it appeared in the largest newspaper in a state that will almost certainly be part of the battleground for years to come. And it's a newspaper in a metro area that is essentially a blue dot surrounded by a sea of red. Though apparently it must have hit a nerve somewhere--the comments section, which is usually so full of wingnuttery that you need brain bleach to read it, is completely blank as of now (9:35 am Eastern).