How to Think Like a Disaffected Republican

Last night, after the feast we prepared was devoured, after the second bottle of fabulous Sancerre was corked, my little dinner party started to talk politics.

We turned to the subject of the upcoming midterm elections. If we are lucky the Dems will take the House. If we are really lucky the Dems will take the Senate. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that we might take neither because of gerrymandering. In any case, my friend, Ricardo of Creative Destruction (though he rarely posts anymore) made the following analogy to help the rest of us understand why Republicans just might vote for Democrats.

Ricardo was pointing out how disaffected and darn right annoyed that many Republicans are getting with George Bush. I could buy that this was the case, but I, like so many others, never understood why Republicans with any brains voted for him the first place. Anyway, Ricardo was trying to explain this to us. First he clarified why many Republicans, even those far and away more intelligent that W voted for him: they were voting for the Party. Ok, fine. I get that, but still, I am hard pressed to imagine voting for a democratic candidate as awful as W.

Anyway, Ricardo said: "Look, imagine that we got the Democrats in power and the new President started demanding that the rest of us wear only Hemp clothing, drive alternative energy cars or use our bicycles, eat only an organic and vegetarian diet, shop only at co-ops, etc. . . This is how many, many Republicans feel about Bush."