Enter Reagan
His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings--it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street ... at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial.
In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem."
The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems.
The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.
The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President.
Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households.
Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America--an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted--but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1840388,00.html
