In response to Matt’s comments on the last post-

I think you’re actually talking about two different things here, and how Republicans have managed to get people to think of them in a particular light.

I am talking about two different things, but my point is that the it’s okay, daddy’s here tack comes automatically to Republicans. It’s not exactly an angle, so much as it’s something granted simply by virtue of the (R) next to their name. The automatic response is for any Republican to be accepted as better on things we want daddy to do- like keep the bad men away and give us our allowance. Those are specific to the executive office, and it’s why Republicans win as Presidents, especially in the post-60’s culture. I think that the position changes a lot when it comes to legislature, which is why, of the forty years since Nixon first came into power, we’ve only seen Republicans run that show for twelve of ‘em. We’ve had twenty-eight years of Republican Presidents and twenty-eight years of Democratic Congresspeople. That’s not a coincidence. The way the parties have been branded since the civil rights era is directly responsible for that.

Furthermore, you really only see deviations on these trends when either party has been in its prescribed role for long enough to prove the inherent fallacy in that thinking- when a Democratic Congress proves itself to be utterly useless, as with the pre-’94 Dems, or when a Republican administration fails to balance the checkbook and act as the head of the family, so to speak, as with Nixon and George HW Bush (incidentally, did you know that you can rearrange the letters of his full name to spell huge berserk rebel warthog?). And even in those instances, it only lasts long enough for the brands to reset themselves.

Considered in this light, it does bode well for Obama, because the confidence in a Republican President to do those things is low, and McCain himself fails to inspire that feeling. He’s not Ronald Reagan promising morning in america, or even George W Bush talking about compassionate conservatism as a way of making people feel like they’re going to get the best parts of Clinton without the messy blowjobs. He’s a career Senator who lacks the public persona to ever step above that station, and that’s why his only hope of winning this election is to run as anybody but obama. But I remember the anybody but bush movement in ‘04, and I know what happens when you don’t give people someone to vote for. At this point, if you think of the Republican Party as a football team, and you’re more concerned with the uniform than the players, you have to start thinking that their real powerhouse candidate might have been Giuliani all along, who exudes authoritarian step-dad out of every greasy pore. Instead they’re stuck with a low-level hack who’s smear campaign is as likely to drive the 2-3% he shaves off of Obama’s figures to Bob Barr and Ralph Nader as himself. We’ll see how that works out, but I’m willing to entertain bets.