The self-selection factors operating on this crowd are, of course, enormous. They’re all right-wingers, they can all afford to take off a week or two in November, and they’re all semi-rich. So you get a collection of wrinkly white folks who literally think the country is going to hell.
Hilarity ensues, right? Well, thanks to Joe, it does, because he’s polite, and they’re polite back. He doesn’t goad them, and he doesn’t go heavy on the racism, though it’s there, since, for the most part, these are people from White America, who have very limited social interactions with non-whites in their daily lives, down in the Caribbean, where everyone’s non-white and some of them don’t even speak English. Scary! This is what Obama wants America to be! O Lordy! Praise the Lord and pass the white bread please!
Reading this piece, one can wonder how the Democrats can ever lose another presidential election, and how, absent redistricting done with Democrats in charge, we can ever win the House of Representatives, because the people on this cruise more or less run things in a majority of House districts.* Despite Obama’s big win, and the Democratic Party’s big win in the Senate, the Party shows continued weakness at the state level. Part of this is kick-back against the public employees union, which I fear will continue to hurt the Democrats for some time to come. After all, no group votes Democratic more regularly than public employees, but the massive, if not crushing burden of publie employee retirement benefits is going to be continuing political embarrassment to Democrats for at least a decade, if not more.
*Putting all the Republicans in safe districts means that all the Democrats will be in safe districts as well, which gives Democratic representatives a perverse stake in continued minority status. What benefit a representative to win the House if in doing so he lose his own district?
