I love Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville.”  Not for the tune though that’s fine, it’s always been about the lyrics for me.  I enjoy hearing the evolution of the singer’s viewpoint, the self examination, the final conclusion.  Reading Republican commenators these days is like listening to the “Margaritaville” applied to real life.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that the Republican brand is in trouble.  Senator Obama leads handily in the polls with the word landslide being bandied about.  Democrats will certainly add to their margin in the House and Republicans would be estatic to keep Senate losses down to five.  Crowds and political ads are both getting ugly as every move the RNC and Senator McCain tries backfires.

The NY Times did an article over the weekend discussing the challenges the GOP faces in the comming weeks and how they got to this point.  The quotes were interesting.  Former Republican Senator John Danforth was quoted saying

“This is a year where everything that could go in Obama’s favor is going in Obama’s favor,” he said. “Everything that could go against McCain is against him. It’s absolutely the worst kind of perfect storm.”

You see, “it’s nobody’s fault.”

Other commentators have not been as generous.  They point to huge gambles McCain, the most egregious being selecting a little known governor who is in the middle of an ethics investigation as his running mate.  She invigorates the base, but as Governor Palin whips up crowds, moderates are turning away and Obama’s numbers have been swelling.  In other words, “it could be his fault.”

But staunch conservative David Brooks was very direct in his analysis over the weekend, and he’s not blaming 2008, but the entire philosophy of the GOP.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

As a former Republican who left the party in disgust some years ago, this sounds about right to me.  I was tired of branding experts as “elitist” when they don’t agree with you.  I don’t like the idea that thinking an idea through is not as good as shooting from the hip.  I can’t tolerate the mindless focus on non-issues like gay marriage when the country has real problems.  I hate that racial animosity towards minorities is considered a political tool to bring in votes.

I keep hearing the song and picture Republicans singing:

Yes and some people claim that theres a woman to blame
And I know its my own damn fault