GOP Campaigns Against Democrats as Fringe Party

The Los Angeles Times reports that the message from this week's GOP convention is that the Republicans plan a culture-war campaign that will paint the Democrats as a fringe party:

Speaker after speaker at this week's Republican National Convention defended small towns from the perceived slights of urban elites. They talked of working people, and ridiculed those with the time to become "community organizers." They railed against the media, Hollywood and the Washington cocktail circuit.

Cultural affinities, which President Bush played on heavily to paint 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry as elite and out of touch, are now central to the campaign strategy of GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

The Arizona senator appeared to float above the culture wars Thursday night in a nomination acceptance speech that criticized "partisan rancor" and promoted his history of working with Democrats. And he is an unlikely standard-bearer for the forces of family values, given his admissions over the years of his failures as a husband, or for the advocates of small-town living, with his millionaire wife and multiple homes.

But this week's events demonstrated that McCain's campaign has settled on its final-stretch strategy to defeat Barack Obama: portraying Republicans as in sync with mainstream America and Democrats as the cultural fringe.

The strategy is inherently appealing, but not without big risks, according William Schneider. He argues that big issues face the electorate this year, and if policy concerns dominate voter decision-making in the end, the GOP's in trouble. Conversely, if personalities and values dominate, McCain will likely win.

I'd add, to the contrary, that given how overdetermined a Democratic victory in November has looked all year, McCain's taking a path of victory to the White House - that is, culture, patriotism, and values can beat the party of recycled beatniks, community organizers, and the netroots fringe.

Indeed, the selection of Sarah Palin may be better than even McCain and his advisors imagined. The left has gone absolutely ballistic in trying to smear her, literally from day one, when Daily Kos launched the baby cover-up allegations. Since then Democratic partisans have been working non-stop digging dirt to bury the GOP.

Apparently, the "community organizer" meme in particular has struck a nerve. Byron York argues that Palin's take down of Obama's Chicago organizing experience means that the Democratic nominee will now exclusively refer to Palin by her appropriate title as the Governor of Alaska, rather than a "small town mayor." The experience meme has cut so deep that Ezra Klein is arguing that "community organizer" is the new "uppity" (and before that "audacious" was the new "presumptuous," and presumptuous was the new uppity, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum).

So we see once again, a cutting takedown of Obama's woefully lacking experience is turned around as a racial slur. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan and his minions are picking apart every possible nook and cranny of the Palin family life for salacious tidbits of scandal-fodder. For example, Track Palin? He's no patriot:

Meanwhile, even Howard Kurtz isn’t above mentioning reports that Governor Palin’s eldest son Track enlisted in the military not out of patriotism, but as a means of avoiding prison time that resulted from an arrest for vandalism and possession and possible distribution of cocaine.

Notice how TRex offers no links to said reports of Track Palin's (non-existent) arrest for "vandalism" and "possible" distribution of cocaine (and Kurtz mentions no such thing).

These are the desperate lengths to which the left will go to in smearing the GOP.

Barack Obama's an inherently weak candidate. He won the Democratic nomination not because he ran a superior campaign or because he had a better message, but because primary and caucus rules favored him.

Democrats and the hard-left partisans know this explicitly or implicitly, and they're doing every thing they can to attack, disrupt, smear, and slur the Republicans - using any all all methods, no matter how devious or underhanded.

No worries, though. This is a culture war between a lofty, softy Chicago orator and his faux-Scranton, Beltway-insder running mate, and two redoubtable Western-states warriors, with Sarah Palin packing a lot of heat.