If you live outside Red America, it's easy to forget just how different a place it is from the rest of the country. I just went to the Web site for Mitch McConnell's 2014 Senate reelection campaign, teammitch.com, and this was the first thing I saw:
Remember, that's not the title screen of a gun rights subsection. That's the title screen of the entire campaign site. That's the first thing Mitch wants you to see when you show up.
And literally every page on the site has this as a header:
Would any Democratic pol put gun control on every page of a campaign site? Would Democratic voters respond to that? I'll tell you this: we'll never beat the NRA until our side is as primed to respond on this issue as the other side is.
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Meanwhile, I see from the site that McConnell has released a new Web ad. It's not subtle:
I love the way he starts out with class warfare, as if the GOP is the great defender of ordinary folks -- see, at approximately 0:20, the shot of fancy silverware in front of a placecard that reads "The President," followed by a "WALL STREET" street sign -- then (at around 0:38), he begins denouncing Obamacare, as if that's another way the elites get eliter at ordinary people's expense. (Of course, if you imbibe right-wing propaganda every day, that actually seems sensible.)
Then, at the end, we get this (taken from McConnell's CPAC speech in March):
Society may change, demographics may shift, but the principles that make us a free and prosperous society never do, and conservatives -- we own these principles. We own them.That's the right-wing message, just as it's been since at least 1968: Conservatives own Americanism. Only conservatives can be loyal to America.
I've had it. Let 'em secede. Or let us secede. I no longer believe we can continue to live together in the same country.
