Its like a big liberal wet dream. Thank god this article was posted in opinion. That does lower the requirement for facts.. right? For instance, the mockery of orange county in fictional TV programs created in... Hollywood? Wow. Hard evidence. Then the claim Hispanics are changing the outlook of Orange County? With all undue respect Mr. Darman, you are an idiot. I was raised in a coastal community in Orange County 40 years ago and half of my secondary and primary school classes were, you guessed it, Hispanic.
It seems that many liberals, like the author of this article, have gotten high on their own cool aide because of a landslide victory. I got news for you. Even those in America who are left of Fidel Castro re for widening the deficit by a trillion dollars so we can have socialized health care, If you really believe that conservative places like Orange County have suddenly socially shifted and are now in favor of such ideas, it might be a good time to but down the bong (or crack pipe) and get a grip on this thing most of us call reality.
You Can’t Go Home Again
Reagan called it the place where good Republicans go to die. But has the very idea of Orange County expired?
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Something is not right in Orange County, though at first it's hard to see. In the morning, women with tight ponytails and yoga pants still walk briskly up the Southern California canyons. In the afternoon, high-school girls still fly through the Fashion Island shopping mall clutching lattes and their parents' credit cards. The smiling faces that fill the bars and restaurants in the beach towns at night are still almost exclusively white.
And, still, this string of suburbs south of Los Angeles, a birthplace of the modern conservative movement, is unmistakably Republican. On its front page, The Orange County Register announces a new arrival, John Yoo, distinguished visiting professor at Chapman University's School of Law. In blue enclaves, Yoo is reviled for his advocacy of torture during his time in the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel. At Berkeley, where he previously taught law, he clashed with "hippies, protesters and left-wing activists," he says. Orange County is different. Yoo loves the lifestyle, a "total change of pace."
But the Register itself, the nation's premier clearinghouse for Western conservative thinking, is losing money and readers. Cruising through the county on a summer Sunday last year, Barack Obama picked up a cool $1.2 million. In November, a place that fancies itself "the reddest county in America" gave the Democratic nominee for president nearly 48 percent of the vote.
At his law firm in an office park near John Wayne Airport, county Republican chairman Scott Baugh is unconcerned about his party's local pros-pects. Last fall was an anomaly, he says. The GOP was forced to play a horrible hand, and it strayed from its core beliefs. But Republicans shouldn't worry: "Every 16 years, the Democrats come to power and instantly overreach. In less than 100 days … that's what we've seen from President Obama." Faced with a "march towards socialism," he says, Republicans need only "be true to our old ideas."
This is the best hope for the Republican Party now—that the enemy implodes and the old magic still works. The 2008 election, the party faithful pray, was a misguided and momentary lapse. More desperately than ever, Republicans want to believe in the old idea of Orange County—that a suburban nation wants freedom and traditional values.
For half a century, this idea has served Orange County well. In the two decades after WWII, the county's population quadrupled, absorbing new residents seeking a piece of California's postwar prosperity. This wave was largely white, Midwestern, conservative— solid working folk who defined themselves in opposition to Eastern elites and the urban, ethnic muddle on the other side of the Los Angeles County line. As historian Lisa McGirr describes in "Suburban Warriors," they embraced a conservative ideology that spoke to their core beliefs, offered a coherent prism through which they could view their new lifestyle and provided a community that, in isolated suburbs, was not always easy to find.
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