The anger in Middle America today looks much like what erupted in the NAFTA debate of 1993 and the amnesty debate of 2007.
The difference: Republican leaders stood with Washington then, for NAFTA and amnesty. This time, the party leaders are with the people, and should do the people's will.
Seven months into the Age of Obama, the GOP has been given an opportunity to regain the allegiance of the voters John McCain lost with his embrace of NAFTA and amnesty, and his dash to Washington to convince Republicans to give Hank Paulson $700 billion to bail out Wall Street.
For these protesters are not so much being drawn to the GOP as being driven to it. The manic assaults by Democrats and liberal commentators and columnists on the protesters as "un-American," "birthers," "racists," "mobs" and "evil-mongers" has enraged and united them and cost Obama much of his support in Middle America
Does the left not realize that, while four in five Republicans say the protesters are behaving appropriately, 64 percent of moderates and 40 percent of Democrats agree with those Republicans?
We are also learning that Republicans have not been hurt by their opposition to the stimulus bill or cap-and-trade. The country has come to agree with the GOP.
Nor was the party hurt when, by four to one, its senators voted against Ms. Affirmative Action, Sonia Sotomayor. Nor was it hurt by standing with Sgt. Crowley when Obama rushed to denounce the Cambridge cop for acting "stupidly" in arresting the Harvard professor who got in his face. Obama's support among Africans-Americans remains solid. His support among the white working and middle class is sinking.
Increasingly, Obama is being perceived as a man of the left and Republicans as the bulwark against a lurch to the left. Democrats may denounce Republicans as the Party of "No" -- but the nation seems to be saying "Yes" to the Party of "No."
In his new memoir, "Encounters," conservative scholar Dr. Paul Gottfried writes of a 1993 gathering, hosted by this writer, where libertarian legend Murray Rothbard, columnist Sam Francis and that founding father of postwar conservatism, Dr. Russell Kirk, went at it over the role of the populist right in the conservative movement.
Though they vehemently disagreed, each man represented an essential element of a center-right coalition. As for the protesters, surely Thomas Jefferson was more right than Harry Reid, when he wrote to James Madison, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."