Circular Firing Squad Update #2

In the first place, we should address the fact that the GOP isn't running a campaign based in reality.

About 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, not small towns. A third of us are ethnic and racial minorities, but that's changing: Already,nearly 45% of children under 5 are minorities. Although 88%of us believe in God, 70% think that religions other than our own are equally valid routes to truth. And while 59% of us think that wearing an American flag pin is a decent way to show patriotism, even more of us (66%) think that protesting U.S. policies we oppose is a good way to show patriotism. These days, more than half of us say we prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Given this, why do McCain, Palin and their team keep pushing the message that the America where most of the electorate lives isn't "real"?

The GOP hasn't been the party of reality-based thinking for some time now. "When we act, we create our own reality," a "senior Bush advisor" (assumed to be Karl Rove) told journalist Ron Suskind in 2002, and this became the administration's version of a game plan. Thus Donald Rumsfeld's conviction -- shared by McCain -- that we would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq. For GOP leaders, the Iraq that erupted into a violent insurgency just wasn't the "real" Iraq.

We're now seeing the same pathology at work in the McCain-Palin campaign. McCain and Palin look at America and see what they wish was there, rather than what's actually there: an America in which they'll be greeted as liberators and rightful heirs to the mantle of leadership. America, after all, has been led by white Anglo-Saxons for the last two-plus centuries and, for the last 40 years, mostly by Republicans. For that to change is almost unthinkable. And so Team McCain just edits out the inconvenient America that doesn't seem likely to vote GOP. That America's not real. It just can't be.

Given that the campaign is aimed at an alternative electorate, not the one that exists in the United States, it should come as no surprise that they are failing spectacularly.

That they are failing spectacularly is obvious to them, too, for discontent seethes within the campaign. And Sarah Palin is angry at her "handlers".

And what could the upshot of this be?

Well, there's a lot of finger pointing going on inside the campaign:

Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

To "clarify":

"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.

There's a real stumper buried in this story, though:

She turned in an adequate performance at a debate against the Democratic Party's foremost debater.

"Adequate" here can only apply if one expects there to be no relationship between the words flowing out of the debater's mouth and the actual subject at hand, under discussion, or remotely relevant. At best, Palin "speechified", turning questions aside and repeating canned talking points. At best.

At any rate, to return to the subject at hand and under discussion, McCain aides aren't having it, insinuating that Palin appears to be totally out for herself at this point.

Palin's team appears to be denying the substance of these stories.

Jeesh, who can keep up?

But the reality is that the GOP is having a bit of a hard time lately, so much so that they are each other's throats. Remember: There are no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests. But I think they don't know that.

Despite all this intramural warfare, one thing is certainly true: the GOP's base is united against Obama.

I wonder, has the GOP's leadership made the country borderline ungovernable by making as many people as possible freak out over Obama being too different? I