The SS McCain-Palin hit an iceberg weeks ago, but nobody told the skipper and his first mate.However, the crew is much more attuned to the workings of the vessel, and they're all jumping in the lifeboats while John McCain is still needlessly at the helm.
Some big-time staunch Republicans have abandoned ship and announced their reasons. More often than not, they give Sarah Palin's choice for VP as a critical reason. However, I suspect that they simply know it's a lost cause supporting the throw-back war horse, and they don't want to get sucked down with the ship when it finally sinks on election night. In what may be a huge tidal wave of Democratic support.
Chris Buckley and Colin Powell rattled the GOP establishment last week by publicly aligning with Barack Obama. Additional high profile Republicans are quickly following. Former Bush Spokesman Scotty McClellan jumped ship this week. So did President of Harvard Law and former McCain adviser Charles Fried. Former Mass. Gov. William Weld said Obama represented a "once in a lifetime candidate". The list goes on and on, and gets longer every day.
To me, this indicates a major shift away from the conventional wisdom that the McCain-Obama race was close enough to still be uncertain, to a gradual acceptance by the GOP establishment that it's a lost cause and they're going to get shellacked this year.
Now, that doesn't mean we can all sit home and wait to watch the victory party on TV a week from Tuesday. We still have plenty of work to do. We have a lot of Democrats to help, including the 4th CD's own Jim Himes, who's in a tight race with Bush apologist Chris Shays. We have all our Assembly reps to work for, and lots of State Senators.
And we have to remind people to vote "NO" on Question 1, to defeat the expensive, unnecessary and potentially disastrous constitutional convention.
But still, I can't recall ever seeing such a large (and growing) crowd of conservative stalwarts abandoning their chosen candidate while the race approaches the final week to support a Democrat.
Sarah Palin must really suck!
Or more accurately, the GOP is a party is total disarray, and even longtime Republicans are paraphrasing Ronald Reagan when they say, "I didn't leave the Republican Party; the party left me."
4 comments:
Grandchildren of GOP icons too. Susan Eisenhower and CC Goldwater, both switched parties to support Obama.
oldswede
Yes, thanks.
At least it shows that not all Republicans are the "party line to the end" die-hards like Karl Rove. There ARE Republicans who really DO want what's best for the country, at the risk of being ostracized by the party stalwarts. It's encouraging, actually.
If they really thought that Obama was "what's best for the country" then they should have had the courage of their convictions and endorsed him months ago. To jump on the bandwagon in the final weeks of a campaign with Obama in the lead strikes me more as an opportunistic attempt to curry favor with the potential new administration. It also allows these individuals to distance themselves from any blame for a potential McCain loss.
Yeah Adam, there's definitely quite a bit of that going on here. Even Joe Lieberman is saying some less than awful things about Obama these days. It's embarrassing, really. It fairly reeks of opportunism and abandonment of their party.
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