A new day.

by Frederick

“Whoever must be a creator always annihilates” – Nietzsche

To a Florida dinner gathering, Obama has paved way for McCain presidency
By John Vinocur
Monday, May 5, 2008

NICEVILLE, Florida: If only 27 percent of America’s voters have positive opinions of the Republican Party, and the GOP is less trusted to fix the economy than the Democrats, how in hell is it going to elect a president in November?

Simple.

Down here, where George W. Bush got elected and re-elected with scores of 70 percent plus – and old colonels, the Christian right, and convinced conservatives live a kind of wary symbiosis – their combined wisdom says John McCain will beat Barack Obama because Obama has become unelectable.

“Thank God,” one of those retired colonels said last week at a pasta dinner with five Republican friends and a visitor. Amused to think of themselves being portrayed as part of the American right wing’s collective belly of the beast, they accepted a trade of anonymity for frankness.

Synopsis: Tuesday night’s Democratic primary results would make no difference in the outcome. Obama would be the Democratic nominee. McCain would beat him in turn. The miserable economy, the war in Iraq, Bush’s unpopularity? Sure, but:

For these conservatives, white and middle-aged, Obama has transmogrified before their eyes from a remarkable prestidigitator into a divine target.

For the Red Neck Riviera of Florida’s Panhandle (or the Emerald Coast in the more genteel vocabulary of the tourist brochures) Obama has become so totally exposed – as a leftist, an elitist out of touch with vast segments of the white majority, a dubious healer saddled with disreputable friendships and unknown debts and obligations – that the colonel could say “McCain is seven strokes ahead on the back nine,” and the presidency is in Republican reach.

Let Hillary Clinton keep softening Obama up. No worries there about an eventual contender. “She’s got more negatives than Bush himself,” exclaimed a woman in the group.

I have consigned my self to the fact that John McCain will be our next President. He will most likely be a one term President–if his health holds–but none the less, a one term President. The only thing I’d argue with here is that Obama himself didn’t pave the way, Hillary Clinton did. Her transmogrification into a rabid Rightwinger before our very eyes is (albeit predictable) one of the most astounding acts in modern politics.