Steve Jobs and the Coolness Factor

Now they tell us.  Steve Jobs apparently told Barack Obama in 2010 that he was on track to be a one term president.  From HuffPo:

"You're headed for a one-term presidency," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America's education system, saying it was "crippled by union work rules," noted Isaacson. "Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

But Jobs offered to author campaign ads for the president in 2012.  So here's a question.  Just how bad would it have to get for the cool kids like Jobs to vote for a Republican?  Here was Jobs, who lived and worked in the most anti-business state in the Union, yet he obviously went to his grave a Democrat.

We know why, of course.  Democrats and liberals have managed to define Republicans and conservatives as narrow-minded bigots, "anti-science," racists, and bitter clingers.  So they have persuaded generations of Jobses and "economically conservative, socially liberal" educated people that Republicans and conservatives are radioactive extremists.

Jay Cost describes how this process of political irradiation works.  He calls it "front-lashing."  Here's how it got Harry Reid reelected to the Senate in Nevada even though Nevadans were both anti-Obama and anti-Reid.

A solid majority of Nevada voters disapproved of both President Obama and Senator Reid, yet the latter was able to win a secure victory. The reason? A decisive minority of this group found Angle to be unacceptable. She only won 78 percent of the Obama disapprovers and a terrible 82 percent of the Reid disapprovers.

Over 90 percent of the Obama/Reid approvers voted for Reid.  Only 80 percent of the Obama/Reid disapprovers voted for Angle.  "A staggering 45 percent of voters thought that Angle's positions were "too conservative," and 75 percent of them voted for Reid.

Obviously, Cost writes, the Obamis are going to be trying this strategy.

Any time you hear the Democrats squawking about how the Republicans are “anti-science,” that’s the frontlash in action. The goal is to tag the GOP as a bunch of flat earth throwbacks who are too extreme for the independent swing voters to support.

Notice that in 2008 it was difficult for Republicans to play this game by painting Obama as "too liberal" without running into the race card, especially as Obama was presenting himself as "post partisan."

It really is about time that conservatives broke out of the box we've been put in, and start to define liberals as narrow-minded and intolerant and anti-science.  It's not as if there's no evidence to prove it, e.g., political correctness and climate "science."

Some day we conservatives are going to have to get Steve Jobs and the cool kids back on the side of conservatism.  After all, conservatism ever since Edmund Burke has been a moderating influence against the craziness of modern secular religion, from Jacobinism to Communism to environmentalism. What could be extreme or uncool about that?