I'd like to take a longer view of recent history. The last time the US had a really healthy economy was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, and all of Washington probably knew that his policy-wonk wife deserved a major share of the credit. The GOP, which has always positioned itself as the party of business and economic wisdom, were afraid that America would realize that the Dems could manage the economy well. In desperation, they broke the old boy's code and (unsuccessfully) impeached Bill Clinton over the sort of extramarital affairs that most of them had had as well. Even after being acquitted, Bill Clinton left office boasting a three year budget surplus and the highest approval rating since WW II.
After Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush narrowly got into office only because the Supreme Court blocked the recount of Florida's "hanging chad" ballots. Dubya was a disaster, and only got re-elected (by the narrowest margin ever) because of attacks on John Kerry like the bogus "Swift Boat" smear, and Kerry's position on gay rights, for which the country was not yet ready.
All this time, the GOP's conspiracy-theory surrogates kept up a low-level campaign to denigrate the Clintons. The "body count", unfounded rumors about the Clinton's sex life and their daughter's "true" parentage, and so on. The internet is full of this crap.
Now comes a biggie: The GOP deliberately threw the 2008 election. They knew that after Dubya, they had no chance of winning, so they ran a ticket of the two biggest pains in the party's butt: John McCain, whose integrity often took him away from the party line, and Sarah Palin, whose wacky "Caribou Barbie" persona created a surge in the careers of female comics. But the key part of their plan was to encourage the candidacy of a junior Senator, an African-American with a foreign sounding name: Barack Hussein Obama. Their objective was to keep Hillary out of the White House, and to arouse the anger of racists and anti-Islamists against the Democratic party. They expected him to be a one-term President, and tried to ensure it by blocking all of his initiatives in Congress.
They were hoping to ride the backlash into the White House. To their amazement, Obama got re-elected, defeating the charisma-free Mitt Romney. Now, after four more years of Obama's gains in the face of their obstruction, they have doubled down on their hate machine by nominating a paranoid narcissist with a messiah complex, slinging every bit of conspiracy-theory mud they can find, and mobilizing a subculture of xenophobic bullies. It's a sign of their desperation that they are running someone with no political experience. They are slighting their traditional religious conservative base by running a multi-divorced, confessed adulterer and gambling tycoon. They have abandoned their once-firm fiscal conservatism in favor of a tax-dodging bankruptcy king who stiffs his subcontractors.
This election is the last gasp of a mortally wounded elephant. I used to support the Republican party, generally, back when their platform was fiscal responsibility in limited government. They lost me when the militant religious right drove their agenda. Now that they're so far out of sync with mainstream America, they're going to lose it all.
