Thomas Frank: The Audacity of Nope

It sounds very nice to say, as Barack Obama has done perhaps too much, that the upcoming election is about "hope" and "change." But those anodyne words conceal what I think is the public's true desire: Negation.

Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama's task is to help them heave it overboard.

It seems hard to believe after all the happy Republican talk a few years ago about a "permanent majority," but the public is now more unified in its antipathy toward the GOP than it has been in a long time -- maybe since Watergate, maybe since the Hoover administration.