Rush is seriously missing the point on this one...
As he does on so many things.

Just finished listening to the call from 33-yr-old Jared here in Spokane. Jared was voicing a fairly common idea: Since the R side won't give us any substantial candidates, he's voting for Obama because Obama is inspirational.

First, Rush and most of the punditry are still not getting the basic problem.

Americans have become so totally cynical, so totally fed up with the bizarre corruption, wild incompetence and shameless disloyalty of the Federal level, that a revolution is brewing.

"Futility is the nemesis of democracy" like it says up there.

FDR faced a similar situation in 1932. Hoover had done such an abysmal job of handling the Depression, had spent so much time claiming the economy was still strong (though at least he didn't use the word Robust!) that the people had lost faith in the entire system. Father Coughlin was gathering voters for outright Fascism, and various Communist candidates were gaining strength.

Roosevelt's substantial solutions were no better than Hoover's at first ... in fact FDR simply implemented Hoover's ideas. But he was able to avoid revolution from either side because he gave the people something to hang onto. After that, he had more freedom to experiment with unconventional solutions.

It's a plain fact that most people need to trust their leaders in times of stress.

This isn't true for the Rush class, because (as Polistra has said many times) the Rush class doesn't even need a country. They have their private transportation systems, private armies, private economies. But for the rest of us, a major crisis will turn us into starving mobs ripe for revolution, unless we feel some degree of reassurance that the leaders are ... that the leaders are not mentally defective, to put it plainly.

I understand how the emphasis on ideology came to be supreme: in several recent elections we had no particular crisis, and in the last two elections we had candidates who could only be separated by (essentially false) advertising of ideology. Bush and Gore are both mentally defective rich white guys from Yale. Bush and Kerry are both mentally defective rich white guys from Yale. Bush, Gore, and Kerry believe most of the same things. In order to make those elections seem like contests, the parties had to create something to advertise.

This time is different. We have both foreign and domestic crises. We did have some potentially available candidates with both substance and inspiring leadership. Well, we had one. Dana Rohrabacher, the nearest thing to Churchill in our government. But he didn't run. Duncan Hunter had the substance but not the inspiration, and he dropped out. I've been supporting Huck because he has the inspiration if not the substance, but now that he's practically out, I just might go to Obama.

Yes, I understand what Jared is saying, and I'll bet many others do also.

Rush ended up with a stupid and contemptuous insult: Assuming Jared was a seminar caller, a plant, because nobody of that age could possibly have been conscious of Reagan in high school - especially in a liberal state like Washington. That's lame, Rush. Not just lame but ignorant. Washington is not the same kind of liberal as Massachusetts. Perot did very well here. Spokane is distinctly Republican; tradition holds sway here, and the public schools here are not badly infected by Communism.
  ¶ 9:48 AM