VIA HillaryGreenMountain

The below is an actual post from a SoetorObama supporter and liberal Democrat on why SoetorObama is going to lose in November. It boils down to, in essence: because he’s John Kerry.

There’s a weird pattern at work here.

We Democrats claim to be “the party of the people” – hell, our name even *says* it – but when you get right down to it, we don’t seem to *respect* the people we claim to represent. We talk about healthcare. We talk about a living wage. We talk about jobs. But when it comes time to pick a candidate, what do we do? We set about insulting the very people whose interests we claim to represent. All you have to do is take a good look at the smear campaign against Palin to see how this happens. The mutual masturbation society that is PB 1.0 criticizes her because:

1) of her accent (now there’s a winner)
2) of her hunting (news flash – millions of rural and not-so-rural Americans subsistence hunt in the winter. People who think food is magically created by elves living under the counters at Whole Foods just don’t get that)
3) She can’t be a good mother and VP (congratulations on insulting every working mother in America – most of whom aren’t trying to ascend the career ladder, but are working in offices, supermarkets, and factories just trying to keep food on the table)
4) Her daughter’s pregnant (this one’s been done to death)!
5) She grew up in some small town in the middle of NOWHERE!
6) She went to some freaking COW COLLEGE in IDAHO!
7) She was a SPORTS REPORTER (Olbermann, anyone?)

etc, etc, etc, etc.

So, when men and women all over America (who don’t post to DU or KOS) look at Sarah Palin, what do they see?

They see *themselves*. They see a working mom, with a special-needs kid and a minor family crisis, who is still managing to keep it all together. They look at her husband and what do they see? Well, judging from the live blogging on The Confluence, about 52% of them see a “hunk”, but I personally lack the toolkit to appreciate that. Hunkiness aside, they see a hard-working blue-collar guy who loves his family and (gasp!) changes diapers. They see an Alaskan fisherman, and as anybody who has been watching the History Channel or Discovery Channel for the last few years knows, that’s one of the toughest, most dangerous jobs there is. They see an oil field worker (which is a pretty damned tough job, too, especially in Alaska) who gave up a good job when his wife went into state politics, lest *somebody* accuse her of a conflict of interest. They see a union member (remember them?). They see a father standing with his daughter in a difficult situation.

They see a working class family that’s about to send its oldest off to war, because that’s what working class families do in this country when there’s a war (whether they happen to agree with it or not).

They see one of their own.

And what do they see when they look at Obama? Contrary to what he claims, they don’t see someone with “a funny name” – too many of them have Slovak, Hungarian, Norwegian, Greek, or Italian names for that to matter much. Most of them don’t really care about his race ,either (they might have 30 years ago, but not any more). A few might, but they’re a very small percentage. *All* of them resent being told that that’s going to affect their vote. What they actually see is yet another Merlot-sipping, prep school grad who never worked a day in his life, who talks down to them, and who thinks he’s *entitled* to their vote because he went to Harvard. They see someone who equivocates and prevaricates. They wonder if he’ll do that when he has to make a tough call and their kids’ lives are on the line.

They see John Kerry.

When Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain” and “I’ll be with you ’til the last dog dies”, they believed him. They believed him because they heard that Arkansas twang and they saw how the New York Times made fun of it. They saw how Sally Quinn mocked him (just as she mocked Sarah Palin) and lamented that he wasn’t throwing good parties (as if the primary function of the POTUS was to provide free entertainment for Sally and her privileged BFFs). They saw that, underneath the Yale JD and the Rhodes scholarship, he was just a blue-collar kid from Hope, Arkansas who worked his ass off to get where he was. They saw he was one of them.

They saw Harry Truman.

That’s why we’re going to lose this time around. We’re running John Kerry instead of Harry Truman. And afterwards, we’ll sit around our little committee meetings, we’ll wring our hands, and we’ll ask why. And we’ll reread “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and we’ll decide it’s all *their* fault. “Those people” just don’t know what’s good for them.

UPDATE: Daily Kos has been running things like this too. Here’s one called “I Am Totally Discouraged“. These are things we need to send our friend Astrid on a regular basis, because she always says how “unstoppable” SoetorObama’s “youth army” is — and we repeatedly tell her it’s the same thing in 2008 that happend in 2004, 2000, and 1972. These men who rely on “youth armies” don’t win general elections – or, in Howard Dean’s case, even primaries.

UPDATE #2: Conventional Wisdom Is Shifting