This.

What I want is irrelevant. We're all going to be spending 4-8 years in the barrel. I've paid attention to what the Democrats in Congress have been saying about their priorities, and the whole thing reminds me of 1976-1980 all over again, except Jimmy Carter actually disagreed with his allies in Congress now and then. I don't see Obama doing that; he has always been a go-along, get-along member of the Daley machine, and has never crossed the aisle to go against his party.

The only people who are going to be largely unaffected by the policies of the Obama Administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress are the extremely rich (Buffett, Soros, et al) who can afford more lawyers and accountants than the rest of us, and the extremely poor, who are going to have a brief improvement in their standard of living before inflation claws back the value from their "tax cuts".

Short version: I've seen this before. It doesn't work. Welcome to the suck.

Edited at 2008-11-05 09:51 pm (UTC)

*shrug*
I'll give that clip a listen when I get home from work, but I really doubt it'll change my mind. Let's face it - Palin was pretty much the only reason a lot of conservatives got off the couch and pulled the lever for Crazy Uncle John, when you consider that he only got something like 35% of the primary vote. So, yeah - if she wants a shot at the top slot in 2008, she'll have a lot of folks lining up to help carry the spears.

Edited at 2008-11-06 02:53 pm (UTC)

Did you miss the post above this? Cheb and I went a few rounds regarding McCain's failure to mobilize the base, which is no surprise considering he spent the last eight years sticking his thumb in their eye at every opportunity. For every moderate/independent like you that McCain allegedly attracted (and judging from the polls, I don't think he even did that well) six or seven conservatives stayed home and didn't lift a finger for him.

This is part of the reason the dextrosphere is turning on pundits like Brooks, Noonan, Will, MacDonald, etc. with a vengeance - McCain was their candidate, and when the going got tough, they bailed.

I think there are other possibilities in 2008 - Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Pawlenty, maybe Rick Perry of Texas, but none of them have Palin's charisma.

After reading The Best and the Brightest and seeing other examples of "smarts" in high office, I'm not so impressed by what the media thinks is smart.

Nothing I have heard from Obama or the Congressional Democrats makes me think the next four years are going to be good for the economy.

Yup. Take a gander at the stock market: welcome to the suck.

Agreed that it's been headed into the crapper since the housing slump became the credit crunch, but usually there's a post-election boomlet. Today was unpleasantly unique, and I can't help thinking all the talk about expropriating peoples' 401k accounts for the benefit of Social Security didn't help.

Perfectly understandable.

This clip has kicked up quite a fuss in the GOP, and inspired a number of prominent bloggers in the dextrosphere to form a posse to hunt down the people responsible for this crap. Disloyalty like this ("It wasn't our fault we lost, it was that stupid Caribou Barbie!") deserves to be punished, and those people are never going to work for a successful GOP candidate again.

It's sheer opportunism. When it looked like McCain had a shot, they didn't say anything, but now that they're being accused -and rightly so!- for having run a crappy campaign, they're looking for a scapegoat. They're going to get burned for this, though, and they deserve it.