Cracked Republican Coalition

As the McCain-Palin campaign veers Wild Westward, the GOP Eastern elite is dropping off the wagon train.

CNN reports a "conservative backlash" to McCain's mortgage proposal with the National Review deriding the plan as "creating a level of moral hazard that is unacceptable."

George Will says "the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seems surreal--or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, 'like being savaged by a dead sheep.'"

Peggy Noonan issues "a warning" to Republicans: "When your crowds go from 'I love you' to 'I hate the other guy,' you are in trouble, you are on a losing strain. Winning campaigns are built on love."

David Brooks observes that "no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality."

David Gergen goes from his CNN gig to the Colbert Report to repeat his warnings about Palin's stirring of racial hatred.

As the best Republican brains desert the McCain cause, he is in danger of being isolated among the yahoos and crackpots.