For years, golf has been touted as a growing market: Any product, business, or contract that was golf-related was supposed to be a sure thing.

But it wasn’t really golf. It was Tiger.

When Woods had to miss months of competition last season because of his knee injury, TV viewership of golf events dropped by nearly 50 percent.

People hadn’t bought golf; they’d bought Tiger. Woods spoke to their hopes and aspirations: His was a success story marked with grace, graciousness, and conservative values. Yet the reality of his life couldn’t have been more different, and people are now looking at the ever-growing procession of girlfriends and saying, “Where did these come from?!?” The yuck factor has gotten pretty high, and it is not just Tiger, but golf itself, with all its self-deluded premises, that will take the hit.

Democrats are just starting to realize they’ve made the same mistake. They thought the 2008 election meant people bought the ideas of the Left. In fact, voters were both rejecting various policies of the last eight years — the Iraq War, runaway government spending, and so on — and embracing a fill-in-the-blank-slate version of “hope” and “change” embodied by Barack Obama.

But now that people have seen the pork-filled stimulus bill, the economy-ravaging prospects of cap-and-trade, and the authoritarian nightmare of government-run health care, they are saying, “Where did these come from? This is not what I bought.” Like Tiger’s many girlfriends, the policies that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hope to pass reflect reality, but they are not at all what people fell in love with or wanted to see.

Now Democrats have a choice. The Left is demanding they pass something, anything, to mobilize their base for 2010, claiming that the party lost seats in 1994 because its voters were dispirited by the failure to pass HillaryCare. But choosing to pass health care now is rather like saying to Tiger, “Go have another fling — heck, have several! You’ve already made your money and can afford to be yourself. The hell with public reaction; the public will get used to it.”

Tiger is smarter than that, as are his sponsors, who know that the damage done is almost irreversible. Salvaging the image of “Tiger” will requires huge mea culpas and timeouts. Whether motivated by his family or his future, he’s publicly sworn off the women and is trying to be what he sold himself as, both to the public and to his wife. That’s the only way he might be able to regain some of the critical trust that he squandered. And that’s the plan of a man who doesn’t have to face re-election next year.

Democrats seem to be figuring out how dangerous the path they have chosen might be. Many now view their health-care plan as politically suicidal. More sober campaign strategists might suggest that, if Democrats don’t pass this legislation, liberals can be motivated to turn out to elect more liberals as part of their caucus, while moderates and independents will be grateful that they went back to the drawing board, and Republicans will find that a key issue that motivates their own base is much diminished.

By contrast, if Democrats do pass legislation that more than 50 percent of Americans reject (many of them intensely), the Republican turnout will be extraordinary. And those Republicans will be joined by furious independents who feel betrayed that the man and the party they elected turned out to be something very different from how they were advertised.

We’ll soon learn if Democrats are willing to change their ways so that they can salvage the public’s trust, or if they are willing to sacrifice their credibility for years to come.

— Heather R. Higgins is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Voice and an erratic but enthusiastic golfer.

Howard Kurtz does an admirable job in today’s Washington Post listing examples of the over-the-top media fawning over the President-elect, which he suggests has clearly crossed the line away from objective journalism.  Yet he avoids actually talking about what this does to media credibility and indeed to the health of the public debate when the press is so entirely in the tank for a politician.  Can we really expect the mainstream media to properly vet Obama’s appointments or to dissect his policy proposals?  And Kurtz ignores the media treatment of Obama before he was elected – which was just as embarrassingly cheerleading and lopsided as it has been since he was elected.  Is this really healthy for our democracy?  Kurtz assures readers that eventually journalists will get back to business, but I don’t know why we should believe him or why we should bother trusting what those so-called journalists write in the future.

Like this story: She-horrors!-opened a  hotel room door for them wearing a bathrobe because she had been taking a shower when they knocked. “Whore-y,” pronounced an aide. Another aide claimed Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. (Does anyone seriously believe this stuff? Oh, right, David Frum and Peggy Noonan probably do.) And a third anonymous “angry aide” described-to Newsweek, no less–the campaign-trail shopping spree Sarah and her family took (at the behest of the Republican National Committee, mind you) as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”

Very classy thing to say about a state governor from your own party that’s now kind of dwindling in terms of its elected representatives, folks. How about, say looking in the mirror, “angry” aides, and wondering if maybe the fact that McCain lost might have had something to do with the dumb, unfocused campaign you ran for him. As Michelle Malkin points out:

“Sarah Palin worked her heart out. She energized tens of thousands to come out who would have otherwise stayed home. She touched countless families. I didn’t agree with everything she said on the campaign trail. But two fundamental conservative stands she took mattered greatly to me: She vigorously defended the Second Amendment and the sanctity of life more eloquently in practice than any of the educated conservative aristocracy.

“And she did it all with a tirelessness and infectious optimism that defied the shameless, bottomless attempts by elites in both parties to bring her and her family down.

“Shame on the smearers who don’t have the balls to show their faces.

“Thank you, Sarah Palin. Thank you for stepping up the plate and serving your country.”

And Jennifer Rubin of Commentary points out that the in-house nastiness oozing from the McCain campaign suggests that maybe it wasn’t so bad that McCain lost: 

“Watching his team engage in vicious, public fighting suggests that perhaps he was never the ideal person for a chief executive role. After all, if the campaign was this bad, imagine what the White House would have been like.”

The best reaction of all comes from this commenter on the Hot Air:

“If the Republican party wants to make [Palin] the scapegoat, and is complicit in portraying her to be an idiot, then we don’t deserve to win another election.”

Darned right. If Sarah Palin hadn’t been on the ticket, there’s a good chance that McCain would have lost even more dramatically than he did. Meanwhile, Malkin has posted an online “Thank you, Sarah Palin” petition. Sign it (click here), and show your gratitude to the tough and gracious woman who brought high spirits, street smarts, and boundless energy to a battle to restore faith, personal responsibility, and loyalty to country and its defense to the central place they ought to occupy in American public life.

But McCain will definitely lose if his supporters lose heart during these next couple of days and give up, feeling drowned in the flood of Obam-adulatory stories and predictions of shoe-in victory gushing like Niagara from the mainstream media And that’s my main quarrel with the high-profile GOP defections we’ve been reading about. Their influence on voters’ choices is zilch. Who’s gonna change his or her mind after reading that Christopher Buckley thinks Obama’s a “rara avis” or Kathleen Parker thinks Palin’s a sexy bubblehead who wears her skirts too short? (Gee, if the great Buckley and the even greater Parker think that, why they must be right! Dumb me!) My view is that it’s a free country, and it’s great that conservatives can robustly disagree with each other. The real effect of the defections hasn’t been to convert McCain supporters. It’s been to demoralize them-as the left-wingers well know who have embraced Parker like a long-lost sister and invited Buckley and others to blog ad infinitum on the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post. The idea is to drive down GOP donations, volunteer efforts, and even votes-on the why bother? theory.

This is why this post on the HillBuzz blog should be required reading for all Republicans-today. HillBuzz was started last February by supporters of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries who believe that their candidate, who overwhelmingly won the Dems’ popular vote in states that held primaries, was blindsided by Obama-ite lobbying (by professional outsiders) in the cacucus states and by an in-the-tank media that could scarcely contain its leg tingles for The One. The result was a lot of demoralized Hillary volunteers who just gave up-”Eeyores,” HillBuzz calls them, after the gloom-and-doom donkey in “Winnie-the-Pooh.”. HillBuzz, which now supports McCain-Palin, says the Obama staff and its media groupies are now using exactly the same tactics on Republicans:

“It’s so funny, but when you work on these campaigns every day and give up all of your free time and all other activities for this, you just know when the media’s lying and reading from an Axelrod [David Axelrod, Obama's campaign manager] script. The coerographed calls for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race before New Hampshire, before Super Tuesday, before Ohio and Texas, before Pennsylvania, before West Virgina, before Kentucky, before Indiana, and before South Dakota were completely ridiculous to us – and yet, Eeyores always listened, and lost enthusiasm and drive because ‘the TV said Hillary needs to just quit’. We know this kept some Eeyores from going out to vote, because they thought, ‘Why bother? The TV told me she’s gonna lose!’.  Well, the TV lies. And the toaster says you’re fat. Unfortunately, the toaster’s telling the truth. The microwave tells you to set fires – and that just means you’re nuts, because why would it do that?

“The ONLY way McCain loses this race is if the media, operating as a full-fledged wing of the Obama campaign, breeds enough Eeyores amongst you to keep enough people home for Obama to squeak out wins. Hillary Clinton should have won Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, by larger margins that she did. Ohio should have been a 13-point win, Pennsylvania should have been a 12-point win, and Indiana should have been a 9-point win. Eeyores staying home, saying, ‘Oh bother, TV say me stay home, me sad, need dydee changed!’ is what cost Hillary those extra points.

“Don’t be Eeyores on Tuesday! Get those Eeyore butts off your couches, away from toxic TV, and GO VOTE. Get everyone you know to vote – tell them if they don’t, then Obama will turn America socialist, and we’re going to start with their house and bank account when we begin redistributing wealth. That should motivate them.”

I discovered HillBuzz via conservative bloggers Kathy Shaidle and Jim Treacher-and Rush Limbaugh has also called attention to the site. I’ve also kind of rediscovered and started to kind of like Hillary. She’s too liberal for me politically, but you know what? She’s a liberal. She’s not a socialist (er, I mean “progressive”). She doesn’t want to “spread the wealth around” via my taxes. She doesn’t kick reporters off her plane if their newspapers disagree with her. She doesn’t let her campaign incite her supporters to try to jam radio shows airing views critical of her. Her supporters don’t riffle through the personal records of a Joe Shmoe who happened to ask her a question she didn’t like when she was driving through his neighborhood. She doesn’t hang with an unrepentant Sixties bomber whose girlfriend plotted to massacre hundreds of young men and women at an Army-base dance. Or hang with an apologist for Palestinian terrorism. Or get endorsed by Al Qaeda. Don’t you wish Hillary was the Democratic Party candidate this election?

So join the dissident Dems during these last few days and do something. Give some money to the GOP, or to the HillBuzz people, who are in Ohio this weekend trying to turn out the Hillary Democrats. (I’ve contributed to both.) Drive some elderly or disabled neighbors to the polls. Most important of all, vote. Every vote for McCain-Palin will be counted, even here in overwhelmingly Dem D.C., where I live. And every vote for McCain-Palin will mean something, even if, as predicted, the Great Redistributor happens to win.

“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.”

Huh? We only won the war in Iraq. When I last looked, a couple of weeks ago, the second-in-command of Al Qaeda, along with a bunch of his operatives hiding out in Iraq, was dead, dead, dead. What’s to rebuke about that. 

“He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts.”

Plus an education (thanks to the grandmother he threw under the bus) at Honolulu’s elite Punahou School, Columbia and Harvard.

“He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.”

Yeah, like throwing  the reporters off his plane from newspapers that didn’t endorse him.

“We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics:”

Yes, a “Triumph of the Will”-style acceptance speech in front of a fake Greek temple.

“He took down a political machine without raising his voice.”

No, Barack Obama is part of a political machine: the Richard Daley/ACORN axis in Chicago.

“A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd ‘I have no comment,’ or ‘We shouldn’t judge.’ Instead he said, ‘My mother had me when she was 18,’ which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn’t have to.”

Well, yes, Obama did show class in his response to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. But “shamed the press and others into silence”? C’mon, Peggy! Haven’t you ever heard of this guy named Andrew Sullivan who can’t shut up blogging about Bristol’s pregnancy and Bristol’s brother Trig for the Atlantic, one of the most prestigious representatives of the “press” in the country?

“There is something else. On Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama won the Alabama primary with 56% to Hillary Clinton’s 42%. That evening, a friend watched the victory speech on TV in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, saw on the screen ‘Obama Wins’ and ‘Alabama.’ She said, ‘Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school.’ She said, ‘That’s where they used the hoses.’ Suddenly my friend saw it new. Birmingham, 1963, and the water hoses used against the civil rights demonstrators. And now look, the black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

“This means nothing? This means a great deal.”

Yes, it means that Obama was 2 years old when Sheriff Bull Connor turned hoses on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham. And if you can pooh-pooh criticism of your palling around with an unrepentant bomber as an adult because you were only 8 when his pals tried to murder hundreds of Army recruits and their dates, shouldn’t you not try to piggyback yourself to victim status over an event that occurred shortly after you learned how to walk?

Look, I’m as happy as the next person that an African-American is the candidate of a major party for president of the United States-but that’s not a sufficient reason to vote for someone who wants to raise my taxes so he can “spread the wealth around” and to play dead in the face of terrorism. Voting for someone strictly on the basis of his skin color is, well, racist. Are Peggy Noonan’s friends racist?

Then we come to Peggy’s assessment of John McCain:

“John McCain’s story is not of rise so much as endurance, not only in Vietnam, which was spectacular enough, but throughout a rough and rugged political career of 26 years. He is passionate, obstreperous, independent, sees existential fables within history. His self-confessed role model for many years was Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Mr. McCain, in his last memoir: ‘He was and remains to my mind a hero for the twentieth century . . . an idealistic freedom fighter’ who had ‘a beautiful fatalism’ and who sacrificed “for something else, something greater.’ Actually Jordan fought on the side of the communists and died pointlessly, but never mind. He joined his personality to a great purpose and found meaning in his maverickness. In his campaign, Mr. McCain rarely got down to the meaning of things; he mostly stated stands. But separate and seemingly unconnected stands do not coherence make.”

Actually, Peggy, for whatever its politics and those of its author are worth, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was almost the only readable thing that Ernest Hemingway wrote after the brilliant short stories he penned as a teen-ager catapulted him to a fame he could not handle. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is surprisingly even-handed, narrating gruesome leftist atrocities (which did not endear Hemingway to the Communist Party) and highlighting the hollowness of leftist rhetoric and the omnipresence of Soviet handlers on the anti-Franco side of the war. It’s not surprising that McCain, tortured for a cause denounced by almost every member of the chattering classes for whose favor Peggy Noonan now seems to eager, would identify with the loner Robert Jordan

At any rate, Noonan’s column goes on and on, wondering why Obama hasn’t sounded more serious on the abortion issue and crossing her fingers, hope to die, that an Obama presidency won’t be so destructive to the U.S. economy and U.S. national security as it sounds. And she ends with this:

“Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves”

But not so much-to make another allusion to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”–as the earth seems to move for you, Peggy, whenever the “steady,” the “calm,” the “good judgment”-filled One We Have Been Waiting For clacks his silver tongue.

Peter Robinson highlights Wendy Button, a Democrat and a former speechwriter for Democratic candidates, who’s jumping on the McCain-Palin bandwagon-and Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, says it’s “A Trade We’ll Take.” She can express reasons-real reasons-why she has made what must have been a hard decision:

“Governor Palin and I don’t agree on a lot of things, mostly social issues. But I have grown to appreciate the Governor. I was one of those initial skeptics and would laugh at the pictures. Not anymore. When someone takes on a corrupt political machine and a sitting governor, that is not done by someone with a low I.Q. or a moral core made of tissue paper. When someone fights her way to get scholarships and work her way through college even in a jagged line, that shows determination and humility you can’t learn from reading Reinhold Niebuhr. When a mother brings her son with special needs onto the national stage with love, honesty, and pride, that gives hope to families like mine as my older brother lives with a mental disability. And when someone can sit on a stage during the Sarah Palin rap on Saturday Night Live, put her hands in the air and watch someone in a moose costume get shot-that’s a sign of both humor and humanity.”

As for the Niebuhr dig-take that, David Brooks!

Naturally, the liberal Los Angeles Times editorial staff twisted itself into giant soft pretzels trying to approve Morisette’s taking down the effigy while at the same time saying the only thing wrong with it was that it offended “conservatives.”. A sample from the Times editorial:

“It is undeniably true that if a figure of [Barack] Obama had been depicted hanging from a noose, it would have attracted more outrage than the image of Palin. That’s because of a horrifying history of lynchings of black men in the American South, a history that makes the noose as offensive among blacks as the swastika is for Jews. It’s also true that as long as it was clear that the hanging figure represented Obama or another prominent black politician rather than a private citizen, it wouldn’t be legally actionable as a hate crime. Our laws give broad latitude to clear expressions of political opinion, as opposed to incitements to violence against ethnic groups. So while conservatives are right to suppose that such an offensive depiction of Obama would attract enormous anger, they’re wrong to think it would be treated differently under the law.”

And of course, the L.A. Times editorialists couldn’t resist getting in some passive-aggressive digs in at Us Who Don’t Worship at the Feet of the One:

“There are some forms of expression that poison our political discourse and needlessly deepen our divisions. They include inflammatory and untrue statements, such as the McCain campaign’s assertions that Obama is a socialist or that he ‘pals around with terrorists’….”

Well, call me a discourse-poisoner and a division-deepener, but isn’t Obama actually a socialist and doesn’t he actually pal around with terrorists? Oh, I forgot-Obama is merely a “progressive” (there’s a big difference, don’t you know?), and bombing the Capitol isn’t really terrorism if no one gets hurt.

Meanwhile, I like what Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women (no conservative she!) had to say to the L.A. Times about the Palin effigy:

“‘It is a shock to the senses for those of us who work to stop violence against women to see such a public depiction of violence,’ she said. ‘This has no place in a civilized dialogue. If you oppose Sarah Palin’s policies, say why you oppose them.’”

Right.

But yes, it’s happened. Elaine Lafferty, a self-proclaimed pro-choice Democrat, blogged this riposte (on the Daily Beast, former New Yorker editor Tina Brown’s competition to the Huffington Post) to the scads of liberal feminists-plus some conservative pundits whose names we shall not mention–who have assumed that Palin must have a brain the size of a lentil because she’s deeply religious and anti-abortion, she dresses Middle American even with a Saks wardrobe, and she stumbled over a couple of questions posed to her by that mental giant, Katie Couric:

“As Fred Barnes-God help me, I’m agreeing with Fred Barnes-suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.”

Lafferty continues:

“Now by ‘smart,’ I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a ‘quick study’; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her ‘confidence’ is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is…..

“For the sin of being a Christian personally opposed to abortion, Palin is being pilloried by the inside-the-Beltway Democrat feminist establishment. (Yes, she is anti-abortion. And yes, instead of buying organic New Zealand lamb at Whole Foods, she joins other Alaskans in hunting for food. That’s it. She is not a right-wing nut, and all the rest of the Internet drivel-the book banning at the Library, the rape kits decision-is nonsense. I digress.) Palin’s role in this campaign was to energize ‘the Republican base,’ which she has inarguably done. She also was expected to reach out to Hillary Clinton ‘moderates.’ (Right. Only a woman would get both those jobs in either party.) Look, I am obviously personally pro-choice, and I disagree with McCain and Palin on that and a few other issues. But like many other Democrats, including Lynn Rothschild, I’m tired of the Democratic Party taking women for granted. I also happen to believe Sarah Palin supports women’s rights, deeply and passionately.”

And yes, Palin does. She’s a woman who believes that it’s possible for a woman-and a mother of five children at that-to hold down a full-time CEO job overseeing a multi-billion-dollar budget in a state that, resource-wise, is one of the most massively wealthy in the nation, and also to seek the second-highest office in the land. Women’s rights? Palin personifies women’s rights.

When Elaine Lafferty took over the faltering Ms. in 2003, she immediately boosted its circulation by 30 percent and brought life back into that dreary, faltering granola-feminist journal. Now, I almost wish I’d subscribed to Ms. during the Lafferty years. I’m a registered Republican, and on issues such as abortion Lafferty and I don’t see eye to eye. But that’s true about a number of women whose brains and honor I deeply respect. Elaine Lafferty finds common ground with Sarah Palin. I find common ground with Elaine Lafferty.

That is, unless the victim of the artistic noose happens to be Sarah Palin. Then it’s OK.

That’s why an effigy of Palin (known, by the way to belong to a despised gender, femaleness, and a despised religion, Christianity) currently hanging by a noose from a front porch in West Hollywood, Calif., is getting a free pass from the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department and civil libertarians everywhere who would be up in arms, if, say, Palin were an Islamic gay male. The owner of the house says the hanged Palin image is “art,” and the sheriffs are saying, hey, it’s Halloween week!

I myself am leery about expansive hate-crime legislation that penalizes free expression, even highly offensive free expression, just because it happens to “annoy” someone. Yet I can’t help but recall the nationwide outrage over three white teen-agers who hung nooses from a tree on school premises in racially charged Jena, La. two years ago (see my story about Jena in the Weekly Standard). It seemed that the boys had simply blundered into bad taste in an excess of school spirit, but there were calls over the country to have them somehow criminally prosecuted. Too bad the noose incident in Jena occurred in early August instead of late October so the youths could invoke the Halloween defense.

                 –Thomas Jefferson

Recently, the press has done so little to actually inform the public that I’m not sure I’d still endorse Jefferson’s view. Much ink has been spilled over Sarah Palin’s clothing budget, but we know too little about the man who will very likely be our next President.

Jefferson’s idea was that the press was essential in providing the information voters need in a democracy. But what about a press that doesn’t provide the information required for properly forming opinions? I think that is our current situation.

Michael Malone, a technology writer, has a piece on ABC’s website noting that we’re on the verge of electing a stranger to the highest office in the land-and that this is because the press refused to do its job. Only mainstream media outlets are equipped to do the kind of digging necessary. But they won’t do it.