There's a great line in the 2000 film The Company Man, a wonderful satire about the Cuban Missile Crisis that roundly gets overlooked.  Two of the characters are at their country club and one of them says to the other, "1959 was the last good year for White Men."  The line is an allusion to the setbacks that have allegedly fallen white men in the wake of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements.  Looking at the current crop of republican presidential candidates I can not help but get the feeling that they believe that 2004 was somehow the last great year for white men. 

With the Democrats not only touting a serious woman candidate but also highly regarded black and Latino candidates as well, they seem almost nostalgic for the 2004 campaign between white men Bush and Kerry.  They'd likely agree that there was a certain civility to how Bush found countless ways to frazzle Kerry.  Bush, the former cheerleader born to wealthy parents in New England positioned himself as the butch alternative to the allegedly effete water-skiing Vietmam veteran. As Kerry kept on rambling about Tora  Bora, Bush kept on blinking his eyes, shrugging his shoulders as if to say, "dude, what the hell are you talking about?" 

Unless John Edwards comes back and makes a surprising rally, 2008 it will be hard for the 2008 republican candidates to campaing with the same free-wheeling air epitomized by great campaigners such as Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Jr.  They'll have to be careful in how they engage in their frat boy joshing of the democratic candidate less they get raked over the coals for calling Obama articulate, or Hillary mommy after she delivers one of her stern indictments. 

One need only look at the bizarre campaign being run by Mitt Romney who's turning his back on every progressive piece of leglislation he endorsed as Massachusetts governor in an attempt to seek a conservative vote whose cache has been severely diminished by Bush and his regime.  Bush, Cheney and Rove deftly playbed the James Dobson's and Ralph Reed's of this world, turning them into the Republican versions of Jesse Jackson.  Cheat on your wife, go speak to Dobson.  The conservative right's access to power under Bush has been greatly reduced as his presidentcy wore on.  Karl Rove set in place a more centrist model of macabre compassionate conservativism that in the post Bush era would not need to rely as heavily on evangelical conservatives as Bush did---and while Romney and his fellow candidates have not fully let them back in, they are actively trying to rewind the clock back to 2004.  While the democrats talk about healthcare, education and civil liberties, republicans spend their time debating waterboarding and gun laws,  Romney playing the court jester bends over backwards to say how quickly he'd overturn Roe v Wade. 

 At the outset of this campaign the republicans seemed intent on moving away and beyond the politics of the Bush/Cheney/Rove.  It is now becoming more and more apparent that instead of moving forward they are moving backward.  Instead of imagining life after Bush, but life before Bush (Hillary Clinton is doing a similar thing with a twist on the democrats side).  They are moving back to a place in time when white men roamed freely courting access to the white house, and invoked memories of a bygone year with little regard for the fact that for many Americans memories of those years were rather traumatic, and not so bygone.