From The Baltimore Sun
By Garrison Keillor

I was messing around in Tulsa, Okla., last week and got talking with a big burly man with a McCain-Palin pin on his blue blazer who told me he was descended from yellow-dog Democrats who thought the sun rose and set over FDR and Republicans were people who wore spats and top hats and sailed off Newport. So I told him that my Republican ancestors believed that only lazy people were unemployed in the ’30s. He said, “So each of us is heading back to where the other one is coming from.” He found that rather amusing. I said, “If that’s so, I hope you’re ready to be good and poor and endure some hard Minnesota winters.”

“Poor, yes. Good, I’m not so sure about. Winter, no. No way.”

He’s proud of Tulsa, which survived the exodus of Big Oil and got into telecommunications and aeronautics, proud of its Art Deco buildings from the ’20s, its art museums and ballet. “Outsiders hear Tulsa and they think Dust Bowl and Oral Roberts,” he says, “but that’s not who we are. This town is all about change.”

I did not bother to tell him that change is exactly what the country is bursting to achieve in less than a week. Of course he knows all about it. Oklahoma seems safely red, but these days who knows? Sen. Barack Obama looks more and more steadfast as the moment nears. The country longs for a president who can talk and think at the same time. We’ve been locked up with the Current Occupant for way too long, and the thought of replacing him with the Angry Old Man of the Desert and Whoopee the Ice Queen is miserable in the extreme.

Most of my Republican friends are people who are not ashamed of having worked hard and done well in school, and their party’s frantic appeal to anti-intellectualism is nothing they care to sign up for. Time to nip that sucker in the bud. The party needs to reform itself around some coherent philosophy of governance and vision of the future, and for that, it must take a trip to the wilderness. They are quietly supporting the skinny guy this time around. They might tell a pollster otherwise, but that’s what they will do.

Read more New Era