Republican Lemmings
In an e-mail to me, my father asked the rhetorical question:
Why do so many of the middle income people, who are the largest segment of the U.S. population, think they are so well off under the Bushies?
I think the short answer is: greed. I believe this is related to a phenomenon about which I've planned to write at some length (naturally), related to the differences in perspective between 1) those of us who understand our statistical chances of winning a lottery and don't waste our money; vs 2) those people who understand the chances, but go with their overwhelming feeling that "someone's got to win–it might as well be me!"
Middle-class Republican Lemmings remain mired in the mid-twentieth-century brainwashing that Democrats are tax-and-spend, wild-eyed liberal pinko-homo-commies, while Republicans believe in small government and fewer taxes. They persist in these erroneous notions despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, particularly the middle-class Lemmings, who have apparently missed the insurgency of wild-eyed theocratic & despotic reactionaries that have taken over the Republican (cut-taxes-and-spend) party.
So, even though the Republican party has now become the spend, spend, spend party of ever bigger government and severely reduced civil liberties (not to mention elective wars for profiteering corporations, etc.), Republican Lemmings continue to think that voting Republican will give them, individually, a better chance of getting ahead where, it is mistakenly assumed in this scenario, that getting ahead means leaving lots of others behind.