Will the New GOP Be More Demonized Than the Old GOP

I was commenting how nice it was over at a politcal board I frequent how nice it was that Senator McCain took some time with Gov Palin's Daughter and her Fiance when he arrived. I am sure it has been difficult.

A liberal poster said "Palins pretty trashy too. What a disgrace and base defiler of the faith. Shes a terrible person."

Now I have seen cooments like this a million times.

As a former Huckabee supporters I saw this all the time too. It was not Huckabee programs and views that sometimes irked people it was the shock that all these other people from Dogpatch getting involved. For a lot of us those barbs were really felt.

Ross Douthat has written a new book that has gotten some play called THE GRAND NEW PARTY

Today he commented
Grand New Party, Sarah Palin and the Culture War
03 Sep 2008 01:08 pm
One of the most common readings of Grand New Party, from liberals and conservatives alike, was that Reihan and I were proposing that the Republican Party tack toward the center, becoming more moderate on economic issues in order to appeal the American middle, rather than to the conservative base. Sometimes I agreed with this reading of our proposals: Certainly, the book breaks with conservative orthodoxy on a variety of fronts, and draws on some of the smarter work being done on the center-left in some of the policy ideas it advances.

But I also shared the take of a highly intelligent friend, who read the book in galleys and remarked to me over lunch one day that if our ideas were ever operationalized - if the GOP became, more explicitly than it already is, the party of working-class America, and wove a pro-family thread through its economic as well as its cultural agenda - nobody in the media would end up calling the result "moderate" or "centrist." The chattering classes are already inclined to treat the Republican Party as a gathering of gun-toting yahoos with too many damn kids; if the GOP made its working-class populism more explicit, adding economic as well as socio-cultural elements, and found standard-bearers who embody the background and aspirations of the Sam's Club demographic more completely than a son of privilege like George W. Bush, the results would lend themselves to even greater hysteria, condescension and demonization than the Republican Party's current incarnation. I think the coverage of Sarah Palin to date - by colleagues I used to respect and publications I normally admire - at least partially vindicates this theory about the reception that would greet the kind of GOP I'd like to see. Which is a sobering thought, to say the least.

I must say after seeing a year of this and the more Sams Club Republican face of the party coming to the forefront I agree.