Rove's Legacy

Ezra, commenting on Brooks, neatly sums up the demographic challenges facing Republicans:

As for the educated class, that's an interesting question. Much like with the conservative wing's mistrust of Hispanics, it's a policy that might have seemed electorally wise a couple years ago but is growing more questionable with every passing election. At some point, the demographic trends predicted by The Emerging Democratic Majority's will reach sufficient maturity and the GOP's decades-long effort to drive away the educated and young and the different is going to leave them making ever more exclusionary appeals to an ever smaller slice of the electorate.

What Rove never realized is that many of us fought hard for intellectual and moral respect for conservatism in college and grad school, only to have our efforts turned into a joke by the crassness of the Party Of Rove. There were only a few self-described conservatives at Harvard when I was there, and I spent a great deal of time losing friends, breaking up dinners, offending professors because I was a) right of center and b) obviously academically serious. And now I'm supposed to defend Sarah Palin? As vice-president? I mean: seriously?