I grew up in central New Jersey. Mercer County isn’t horse-farm country exactly, but you don’t have to go far to get there. You can drive north up Rte. 206 an hour or so and be right in the heart of Christie Todd Whitman’s turf. Or you can drive east on Rte. 33 toward the Shore and really get a taste for the high-life. There really are people who play polo in their spare time. They’re called Republicans. They’re totally isolated from what ordinary people call ‘hardship,’ and they pretty nearly resemble the assholes at Caddyshack’s Bushwood Country Club. They don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Glenn Beck, and they have almost exactly nothing in common with Tom DeLay. For the most part, the money these people have was earned by a father or grandfather or great-grandfather, but they do alright letting the magic of compound interest keep them in luxury. Most of them mean no harm.
To answer Josh Marshall’s question, yeah, a lot of these people probably have absorbed some pretty socially conservative views by osmosis. That happens when you attend the Republican National Convention as a delegate and everyone you meet is a redneck. But most of them are too concerned about getting grass-stains to mix with the Hoi Polloi that make up the Republican Party’s base. If their child developed a taste for NASCAR they’d send him to a psychiatrist faster than a Southern Baptist would his gay son.
The more sophisticated of these people…the ones that actually are still conducting international business transactions…got worried enough about our deteriorating status in the world that they actually voted for Obama-Biden over the erratic and bizarre campaign of McCain-Palin. They may not want to pay taxes, but they’re not giving up their European vacations, and they hear from their European clients.
The Republican Party doesn’t seem to want anything to do with these country club Republicans. And I’ll admit that they’re not an attractive lot, and never were. But these elites ran the opposition to the New Deal and Great Society a far sight better than the teabaggers. Don’t you think?