Yesterday morning I was at the local diner grabbing a bite to eat and reading my copy of the Winston-Salem Journal.  Normally I can tune out the folks around me, but this morning the following sentence snuck through my defenses:

"Well, you’d never know it from our local liberal media but Bush has actually done a damn good job, especially with the war."

This caught my attention because I was sitting there holding my own copy of the local liberal media not three feet from the old guy who said it.  I was wondering what he’d say if I let fly with what I thought about Bush when he went on to say (I’m paraphrasing here), "Hell, some of the most effective presidents we’ve had were considered failures at the time.  Look at Abraham Lincoln…" And then one of his buddies, trying to yank his chain said, "and Herbert Hoover!"

From there they started grumbling about how bad things were gonna get if we elect another Democrat, "It’ll be just like the late 70s when we had Carter," and that transitioned into reminiscences about the Iran hostages being freed when Reagan was inaugurated, "He scared Khomeini to death because he knew Reagan would pull the trigger if he had to."  I wanted to do a little chain yanking myself by asking if they believed the October Surprise theory that held that Reagan’s people negotiated with the Iranians to delay the release to make sure that Reagan won the election over Carter.  That would have been fun, but I decided not to because I was always taught that eavesdropping is rude.

Quick aside for an Andy Rooney moment: You ever notice that eavesdropping is only rude when someone else is doing it?

Anyway, the old guys finished up what they were doing and got up to leave.  Any notion I had that maybe some of this was directed at me because they felt I was some sort of commie, I was reading the Journal after all, was quickly forgotten because I don’t think they could see 12 inches much less the 3 feet it would have taken to see me.

So I just thought "To each his own" and would have forgotten it totally if not for a call I had with my Dad this morning.  In the course of our conversation he pretty much blamed Bush and his cohorts for ruining the Republican party and then said he’s thinking about voting for Obama AND he’s already voted for a Democrat for Congress in 06.  This is a man who’s a life-long dyed-in-the-wool traditional conservative, the kind of Republican who looks for fiscal responsibility and reasonable governance of free markets out of his leaders.  In other words he’s representative of the vast majority of Republicans I’ve known all my life and who seem to be fleeing the party in droves. 

I can’t tell you how many of my friends and acquaintances who have voted Republican all their lives are now looking elsewhere, and I’m not talking about those yokels who are throwing "suicide" votes in the hopes that Obama or Clinton will screw up so bad that Republicans can take over again in ’12.  How stupid is that?  These are people who believe in smaller and more efficient government, lower taxes and law and order.  They believe in balanced budgets and effective services, but less "nanny-state" programs.  They believe in free markets, but not that doing business should be free.  If the Democrats find a way to absorb these people and deliver at least a healthy percentage of what they’re looking for we could end up with a significant migration of centrist Republicans to the Donkey side.  The Republicans will be left with all the folks like those fellows at the diner, the hard right-wingers who never met a problem that couldn’t be solved by swinging the Republican hammer at it.

Since I’m even entertaining these thoughts I only have one thing left to say: hell hath frozen over.