Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

This cycle would supplant a Republican period that saw Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan elected twice and George W. Bush, well, hanging on, albeit by the most dubious and highly questionable means.

The axiom many of us established was based on where the candidates stood at the advent of October, the critical final five weeks of the campaign.  In order for the McCain campaign to feel a measure of confidence and comfort it was essential to have certain states comfortably in tow, along with a few in the Midwest and western regions as well.

Certain mainstream analysts noted that last week the McCain campaign was taking out ads in Indiana.  This is a state that Bush won comfortably by better than 20 points in 2004.  National polling currently has this state, one that a Democrat won the last time with Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 landslide over Barry Goldwater, in the toss-up category.

As for the reliable south that Republicans never needed to bother defending, using that valuable advantage to concentrate on target states necessary for Democrats to stand a chance of winning, both North Carolina and Virginia are being vigorously contested by the Obama-Biden team and Republicans must necessarily generate careful focus there.

If the south is no longer in the category written off to Republicans and has two fiercely contested states being decided in 2008, the McCain team has seen a once sturdy and reliable western tide erupt.

California during Ronald Reagan's tenure extending to George Bush the Elder had gone Republican in each presidential election since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide.  

Since Bill Clinton's first triumph in 1992 the Republicans have lost each time, with Karl Rove being panned by political experts by being mouse-trapped by the Gore campaign into competing for a race decided by that time, which many believe may have ultimately cost Bush the Younger Michigan.

So Republicans reconciled themselves that, even if  California constituted a current problem and a thorny one since it is the nation's most populous state and hence the biggest prize in the electoral college pot, they were after all at the top of the hill in the region as a whole, save those "lefties" in Oregon and Washington, that the Limbaugh-O'Reilly crowd sought to depict as aberrations that had not seen the neocon light.  

Now along come Colorado and neighboring New Mexico, in addition to Nevada.  These states have seen significant population increases.  Those increases have been strategic, cutting in the Democrats' favor as educated high tech, Internet savvy voters who see intelligent application of government as a plus rather than the curse that neocons see it flexing increasing muscle.

The same phenomenon that has made western states that the Republicans once saw as reliable, or reasonably so, occurred in North Carolina and Virginia.  These changes have been particularly pronounced in Charlotte, North Carolina and in the suburbs of Northern Virginia adjacent to Washington, D.C.  

If you doubt the Northern Virginia phenomenon as a vote translation mechanism then talk to George Allen, who was on what he thought was a muscle flexing exercise against Jim Webb, only to realize that he was ultimately an ex-senator.

When the foregoing phenomena is examined the Sarah Palin choice can be concluded as one where the Rove neocon regulars hit the panic button and chose the familiar, going back to what worked in the past and, if present trend continues, will not work in the changing face of U.S. electoral politics.