I agree with Clark Stooksbury that Bush has been a disastrous president, and I expect McCain will be a disastrous president as well.  I did not vote for Bush, and I will not vote for McCain.  But I can’t shed any tears for the Democrats.

The reason Democrats keep losing presidential contests, and may even manage to lose this one, is because they keep nominating unelectable candidates.  If John Kerry had won the Catholic vote in Ohio in 2004, he would have won the electoral vote (despite losing the popular vote) and he would now be president.  Speaking as an Ohio Catholic, I have some idea why he lost that vote.  John Kerry lost that vote because he is a pro-abortion zealot, and he likely became a pro-abortion zealot because he knew the national Democratic party would only nominate pro-abortion zealots.  Catholics used to be a major part of the New Deal coalition, but the Democratic party now insists on making faithful Catholics compromise their faith each time they vote for a Democratic presidential candidate. 

Nor do I shed any tears for Obama.

In fact, anger is the appropriate response to Obama’s  comments, which were as purely Marxist as any I’ve ever heard from an American presidential candidate.  What Obama was saying, in essence, was that small town America was suffering from “false consciousness,” and the only reason such folks embrace religion, or hunting, or are concerned about trade or immigration, is because those people are too benighted to embrace Obamaism instead.  His attempt to clarify his remarks was just as bad, and retained the point that it was only “cynicism” bred of “bitterness” that has prevented small town America from agreeing with Obama that Big Government can solve all its problems.

Take a minute, too, to ponder Obama’s own cynicism.  He campaigned here in Ohio against NAFTA, at the same time one of his advisers was assuring the Canadians that Obama’s protectionist rhetoric was not to be taken seriously.  And now, he goes to San Francisco and denounces “anti-trade sentiment.”

I’ll admit, too, to a personal stake in this.  Lots of Clevelanders have roots in small-town Pennsylvania, including both of my wife’s parents, regular churchgoers married in a small Pennsylvania Catholic church in the late ’50s, whose wedding reception at the town’s fire hall featured venison provided courtesy of the guns of my late mother-in-law’s brothers.  If Obama is to be believed, the only reason my in-laws went to Mass every Sunday, or my wife’s uncles liked guns, was because they were “bitter” over the economy and took false refuge in such things.  If Obama is stupid enough to believe that, he is just another in a long line of unelectable Democratic nominees.