Please Don't Throw Me in That Briar Patch

Pat Buchanan has a lovely little column on a conservative site, Human Events. In it, he not only exhorts the GOP to attack Sotomayor as a racist, but also claims that the key to GOP victory is further shoring up their portion of the white vote. Example:

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.

And:

Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.

These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.

And McCain might be president.

So, yeah, this is repugnant stuff. But, it's also delightfully wrong-headed. For one, Buchanan assumes that all white people are as narrow-minded as he is. Second, the kind of people who are charged up about this stuff make up a shrinking portion of our overall population. If anything, the GOP needs to moderate itself or it risks becoming a powerless fringe group.

Ultimately, I think the crazy right will find themselves marginalized. Moderate Republicans will realize that they need to cast the wingnuts out of the party and our whole political spectrum will correct its course. I can dream, right?

Morning Roundup--Part One

Yes, the tracking polls are tightening up. No, there's really nothing to worry about. The state polls are still heavily in Barack's corner. From you-know-who.

Still concerned about the Bradley effect? What the polls say about race. From Sunday's NYT.

Very cool article about Biden, who we haven't heard enough from lately.