Jerry Falwell with a pretty face

I can't believe it. It's going to happen again. Four more years of a conservative White House. I'm already beginning to prepare emotionally for seeing mobs of conservatives on TV shrieking with unbelieving joy that they've won the Biggest Football Game in the World a third time in a row, and for seeing bloggers rub salt into the wounds of the loser lefties by posting pictures of crying babies. After '00 and '04, why should it come as a surprise?

By all means, give the people what they want. That's the nature of democracy. One takes the good with the bad. One just hopes that there are enough checks and balances left in the system to keep the people from genuinely hurting themselves with the choices they make.

It's surprising how close Obama and McCain are in the polls. One could have expected that Obama's rockstar status during the primaries would have given him a significant lead in the campaign. But there doesn't appear, yet, to be an unstoppable momentum building toward bringing Obama's freshness and intelligence to the White House. It may be just the way the media are presenting the two candidates and consciously trying to avoid the favoritism toward Obama they exhibited during the primaries. But one would expect that, by now, there would be a huge, youth-driven wave of enthusiasm for a changing of the guard in Washington, for the torch being passed to a new generation. But my perception isn't that the tide is flowing strongly in that direction.

I've just learned that a Clinton fundraiser, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, is now backing McCain instead of Obama. She says "I believe that Barack Obama, with MoveOn.org and Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, has taken the Democratic Party—and they will continue to—too far to the left. I'm not comfortable there."

Of course Ms. Rothschild isn't comfortable on the left. After building her multimillion-dollar telecommunications company, she married into the Rothschild banking family of England and her net worth is probably in the hundreds of millions. One wonders if she wandered into the Democratic party by mistake. She says she will step down from her position on the DNC Platform Committee (how did she get on the committee in the first place?) but will not be changing parties. We would, however, heartily encourage Ms. Rothschild to change parties. It's very simple: When one wants to make mountains of money, one doesn't become a Democrat. The philosophy and focus of the party are counter-productive to the amassing and retention of great wealth. One wonders if Ms. Rothschild actually infiltrated the upper echelons of the DNC in the same way that Mary McFate infiltrated numerous gun-control organizations as an NRA mole.

I've also recently learned that, while Mayor, Sarah Palin wanted a book written by a Baptist minister from the neighboring town of Palmer to be banned from the public library in Wasilla. The book is Pastor, I Am Gay by Howard Bess. Palin now denies trying to have the book banned, but Bess says "This is a small town, we all know each other. People in city government have confirmed to me what Sarah was trying to do." Bess, now a retired American Baptist minister, also says of Palin "She scares me. She's Jerry Falwell with a pretty face" and "At this point, people in this country don't grasp what this person is all about. The key to understanding Sarah Palin is understanding her radical theology."

When comparing the virtual landscapes created by the rhetoric of both parties, I wonder why there isn't a wholesale evacuation of the right because of its unrelenting drive toward tight moral control of the individual by the unelected government of business. Why isn't there a mass migration toward the healthy, digital landscape of the left? Why should the tide of this campaign be pulled in both directions with equal force? Because being controlled is comforting and feels safe? If only voters on the right could see their landscape with disinterested clarity. They would see everything in the landscape, including the pews and pulpits, covered with a thin, gummy film of petroleum.