I believe you can best judge a party's own assessment of their candidates and platforms by their strategies to win elections - especially their unethical strategies. Democrats believe their platform and their candidates are the best for the most people and carry out that belief through massive voter registration drives and encouraging everyone - even sometimes those not permitted - to vote. Their strategies reflect their honest assessment that the more people who vote, the more likely they are to win because they are the best party for the most people.

Republicans pursue strategies to limit voter participation and suppress even legal voting. They place obstacles in the way of voting such as voter id requirements and through challenging voters' right to vote based on spurious assumptions that if their home is in foreclosure they can be living there. The post flyers threatening prosecution for voting, claiming police will be serving warrants, and so on. They send out notices with false precinct addresses. They have a new one, though, in Florida that has gotten even Republican elections officials pissed off.

They are sending letters to registered Democrats to check and averify their registration claiming they are registered as Republicans. I kid you not. See the store here.

Yes, it helps them win elections and confirms for the record that even in their own minds they believe their platform and candidates can not win an open, honest and fair election.

The Republicans always love to talk about cultural abasement in terms of the poor and most particularly in terms of African Americans. They trot out Moynihan's phrase "defining deviency down" and complain about single mothers, absent fathers and rap music.

However, I submit that the most successful effort to define deviency down has come from the Republican party itself. From Nixon to Reagan to Bush to McCain, we have had a string of administrations and campaigns marked by corruption, secrecy and lies. And the result is that McCain's campaign staff arrogantly and flippantly boasts that they don't care that the media calls them on their lies.

Yes, they know they are lying in the ads. They know that using words like disrespectful and arrogant to talk about Obama is code talk to white folks to tell them to shut down the "uppity" black man. They don't care though, because they have so successfully lowered expectations of integrity and honesty among Republicans, it's not a story when they are corrrupt, lying conmen.

Corrupt Republican? Yawn!  Been there, done that.

And so they get away with it - there's no outrage because they have exhausted and outlasted outrage.