Long-time Democrat insider Susan Estrich wrote a piece for Rasmussen Reports on Wednesday called “The Generic Race” in which she argues that a generic ballot lead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, primarily because the number is volatile and because specific candidates, not generic ones, are on the ballot.

Estrich is living in a Democrat echo chamber, saying for example that Democrats have been hoping for Joe Miller to win in Alaska because they see him as more vulnerable to a Democrat challenger.  Perhaps that explains why political betting odds at Intrade.com (in a very thin market) have Miller at an 89% chance of winning.  (That’s the last trade as I write this, with the bid-ask being 81% - 90%.)

Also, while Estrich is, typically for a Democrat, troubled by the open faith-related aspects of the Beck/Palin rally – and while I have a certain related but less intense concern about getting too much religion involved in politics – she misses the point that most Americans probably find it quite refreshing to see that hundreds of thousands of people can rally in support of First Principles, rather than of a candidate or party.

Democrats have very few First Principles and those they do hold are antithetical to the philosophy of government and liberty embodied in the American Founding.  They are all about outcomes, not philosophical foundation.  Democrats will do and say anything to win, and can do so without really being hypocritcal because they generally don’t run on principle.  They run on redistributing wealth. Therefore, at any given time they can say a particular tactic furthers that aim.  The public is well and truly over it, having for the first time since FDR seen the faces of the haters of capitalism and recognized them for the destructive force they are.

Glenn Beck, even though I don’t love his recent laser-like focus on church, serves a few very useful functions.  In particular, he gets people thinking about the proper role of government, the proper place of a philosophy of governing within that government, and the fact that Democrats believe in little other than playing Robin Hood, buying peoples’ votes with their own money, not least by redistributing our money to thuggish union leadership who are sure to return the favor.

Estrich, like Pauline Kael, doesn’t understand the real America, rather remarkably for someone who has been involved in nuts-and-bolts politics for many years.  Obama and his advisors are no different, perhaps suffering an even more acute version of the same disease, which is why he comes across as so tone-deaf at almost every opportunity to speak to the American people.

I love to read well-placed Democrats arguing that things are, or at least might be, just fine for their party.  The more that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barack Obama believe they should just keep doing what they’re doing and saying what they’re saying, the more intense and long-lasting will be the voter reaction against them.