…Looks Like Me…

James Joyner says this morning:

Steve Bainbridge thinks we should take a break from good ol’ boys next November and elect a non-Southern president who’s knowledgeable about high culture, science fiction, football, and is otherwise very much like Steve Bainbridge.

I’m not fully sold on those criteria, however, which is not surprising considering that I’m a Southerner who doesn’t smoke cigars and, like Alan Jackson, prefers his sushi Southern fried.

Oh, of course it was offered in half jest, by Bainbridge as well as by Joyner. But…. things offered in jest often get one thinking….(sigh) OK, here goes….

I wonder if there isn’t something deeper to be said about this. The Democrats tapped into this one to a limited degree over the last few cycles, talking about a government that ‘looks like America’, usually reffering to inclusion of moniorities.

(Arguably, they included the minority to the exclusion of the majority which was the reason for ’00 and ’04, and I would argue their vision of what America looks like is the result of some hallucinogen or other, but all that’s perhaps beside the point for this outing.)

There is something in each of us that wants to see people in leadership positions that is not unlike we ourselves. We are comforted by the concept that their experiences and thereby their viewpoints, are not all that different from our own.

Based on this concept, I suggest two things:

1: That’s why the trend has been away from voting, the least number of cycles… people see nobody that fills that need, and thereby feel they have no real connection with those asking for votes.

2: By the same token, the popularity of a candidate is going to mesh almost exactly with how well said candidate looks to a particular group of voters, because of the need I spoke of. Which I take to be one reason Fred Thompson has been doing so well, without even saying he’s running. There’s a lot of identification with his style, and his way of looking at things… something that’s been transmitted to us loud and clear of late, inclduing during those Paul Harvey broadcasts of late.

There’s a lot to be said also, for the idea that the illness the Democrats created… Bush Derangement Syndrome… is alternatly serving them, and coming back to bite them. The left end of the party is looking for leaders who are taken with their illness. And the remainder of the party is just begining to understand that people with that illness are an unreasoning lot, and are likley to disconnect them from the middle-right, where most of the voters are. Thus, no more Clintonesque majority come ’08.

It’s going to be an interesting cycle.

?