This is perhaps the worst crop of presidential candidates in my lifetime. I can scarcely bring myself to watch the news of the campaign, so dismaying are the prospects. Hillary Clinton, as I have said, is, in my view, a mendacious pseudo-socialist in pursuit of nothing but her own power. Barack Obama has now exposed himself as a fairly typical Chicago-style political operator who can no longer conceal his elitist disdain for the average American. And John McCain, for whom I suppose I will vote, wears his conservative principles like a threadbare toga. Surely the American political process and the reporting of it have not sunk so low and become so shallow and tendentious that this is the best that we can do?
As Hillary lies and panders her way through the process and Obama stumbles and explains his, I cannot help but wonder what has become of the Democratic Party, to which I adhered for thirty years and which, about ten years ago, I was forced to abandon. The refuge of scoundrels, unrepentant Sixties socialists, defeatists, elitists, apologists, victims, hypocrites and self-righteous irreligious snobs, the party has, it seems to me, become the captive slave of every smug and accusatory self-interest group in American society. I cannot stand the hubris, the self-satisfied elitism, the bloody-minded narrow secularism, the half-enlightened sense of entitlement, the pettiness, the me-first-and-to-hell-with-the-future narcissism, the sheer, boring, enervating attitude that liberals are superior beings who have the right to dictate to others how best to live their lives, and to use the power of the federal government to impose their views on everyone but themselves.
These anti-values are embodied and embraced by Clinton and Obama, who cannot forbear expressing them even when it is manifestly in their own self-interest to refrain from doing so. I am sorry, but I cannot help but feel that they despise us and believe deep in their souls (the existence of which they probably deny) that we cannot live without them, cannot make our own decisions, cannot find our own way through the world, and ought not to be trusted with doing so. And my gravamen with John McCain consists in this: That he lacks the principles or insight or courage to say out loud that this is who the Democrats have become, and to condemn with all his heart and soul what it is that they stand for.
