The self-regarding Obama campaign has reached a new height. They're offering designer wear from Isaac Mizrahi and nineteen other designers. Who have all lined up to offer clothing marked with Obama's imprimatur.

How cool is that? Diane Von Furstenberg, and it frightens me that my spelling checker does not flag her last name, initially supported Empress Hillary, but decided that Obama was her guy after reading his autobiography. This is reported in New York Daily News. The article helpfully tells us not to expect that the new lines will come with a designer price tag; in fact one piece was originally a $400 silk Georgette dress for Michelle Obama but it was rejected to be replaced with an $80 tee-shirt. I think that I'll buy a whole closet full of $80 tee-shirts, advertising someone else. Paying to advertise someone else is sad. This is the saddest.

Up until recently the more affluent white voters had trended Republican, afraid of the nanny state and its taxes. But I've heard a theory, sensible to me, that this group is now postmaterialistic, in that they have enough money for their needs, and spend the excess in ways that make them feel good. And since they have the creature comforts that they want, they vote Democrat, wreathing themselves in virtue by reason of their fine feelings. Since they hire their needs done, why not use the Democratic party as their personal shopper for their conspicuous compassion?

But recall the 1992 election--H. Ross Perot threw that one to Bill Clinton. Perot understood that many white voters of lower incomes are worried in ways that the MSM just doesn't get, and doesn't have time for or sympathy for. Much more dramatic to do stories on urban problems, next door you know, or cute overseas children or bugs and weeds than on those dreadful NASCAR people who have the effrontery of being independent and unimpressed. Those NASCAR people who are worried about jobs in a day-to-day fashion; NAFTA was a threat; immigration too. These people vote for their jobs and not their fine feelings. And I don't think that the current Republicans get it either.

These will be the truly important voters in the 2008 election for the other demographics are spoken for: blacks, Hispanics, single women, gays. The Perot voters, now that the Little General is, fortunately, out of the picture will decide the election. It wasn't all that long ago that the Democratic party was resigning itself to being a party of the universities, the coasts and the cities, and they had conceded the South and the Midwest to the Republicans but an unpopular war, and an unpopular president, have given a look-in to the Democrats.

I cannot claim to be a psephologist, but I have watched these voters halt their realignment to the Republicans, mostly, I think, out of irritation. Do the Republicans look as though they can govern? I have for a couple of years, in these pages, said that I'm a Republican because I see nothing better. This is not a rousing battle cry to be a Republican and inspires no loyalty. Evidently other people, enough other people, do not take sides loyally either.

But I do worry about an Obama presidency. The man is simply callow and self-obsessed and his acolytes, and the word is fit, are too. He is wrapped in a mist of vacuous rhetoric--is there anything to him but his rhetoric? His refusal to disavow truly repulsive friends indicates he has no moral standards, and the refusal of his supporters to disavow him because of his poor judgment indicates that they too have no moral standards. If I thought that the world were only as dangerous as, say, it was during the Cold War, then perhaps the nation could endure an Obama presidency but the pressing danger of this time is that the threat is not well defined--Soviets with missiles aimed at us and bullying thugs banging shoes on tables. The problem is that Muslims are saying they want to die to kill us, are running airplanes into buildings to prove it and are outbreeding us. In Britain 40% of Muslims feel that it is acceptable to murder for Islam, and I'm currently reading books which stress the totalitarian nature of Islam. And all of this is denied, strenuously, by the left who feel a good group hug will sort things out. And this is ignored, loudly, by the Obamaniacs who just want to get on with their solipsism and their cultural circle-jerk. I have a definite fin de siècle feeling.

If there is one thing that I could have asked for for the election of John McCain, it would have been to have Isaac Mizrahi promoting Obamawear.

And I got it.