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I am an American, so it pains me to discuss the supposed stupidity of my countrymen, but this is an election year and the subject comes up.

Sometimes the s-word is just used rhetorically, as in James Carville's much-recycled “It's the economy, stupid,” now more true than ever. But often it is employed by partisans to deride their opponent of choice, and Barack Obama spoke it recently in ridiculing John McCain's vow to take on corporate lobbyists when his campaign is packed with them.

“I mean, come on,” the Democrat told an Indiana crowd, “they must think you're stupid.”

Well, yes, that does seem to be part of the strategy. And why not? Even the Republicans seem astonished that, after eight years of George W. Bush – after senseless war and soaring deficits and financial meltdown, after incompetence and mendacity and a debased national brand – they have an actual shot at holding on to the White House.

The reasons aren't all that complicated. The U.S. is a centrist nation but tilts right, and it has spent the last four decades picking mostly Republican presidents. This is partly because Republicans have perfected the art of the political groin kick, which in the States means demonizing Democrats as alien, Eastern, elitist, ungodly, unpatriotic and wussy in wartime.

And now John McCain, the old Vietnam POW – the one-time maverick who, battling an agile Barack Obama, found one arm tied hazardously to Mr. Bush – has settled on a familiar solution: strike a non-partisan political pose while, straight-faced, unloosing the dogs of culture war.

In case it's not already plain, full disclosure: I am a Democrat, from a long line of them. And it so happens I was also around for the early days of the culture war, lo those many years ago.

That was the age of Vietnam, of Richard Nixon calling anti-war activists “bums” and “little jackasses,” of his vice-president blasting the “nattering nabobs” of the press. And it was the time of “America Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers, which were plastered on Detroit-made cars all over the Midwest town where I went to college.

I was an Eastern longhair who, venturing down Main Street, saw kids point and grownups glare. “Hippies,” “Commies” – those were the slings and arrows of the day, while in truth we transplanted students were no less quick to stereotype, viewing the shorn townies as war-mongering rednecks.

Nixon won by a landslide in 1972, his culture-war campaign vindicated, and it's dominated the Republican playbook ever since. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and his son W all contributed to making “liberal” an epithet and branding Democrats as outsiders who don't get real Americans. Guns, abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, stem-cell research, the Pledge of Allegiance – all have proved effective wedges, dividing to conquer.

John McCain was supposed to be a different kind of Republican – a man of conviction, of bipartisanship, not preoccupied with social issues. But that was before he switched positions on everything from tax cuts to torture, immigration to offshore drilling, and before his handlers told him that, no, he could not name pro-choice Democrat Joe Lieberman as his running mate without setting off a hissy fit by the Republican right.

And that was before Steve Schmidt, proud protégé of “Bush's brain” Karl Rove, took over the McCain campaign. Thus, speakers at the Republican convention slammed “Hollywood celebrities” and “Eastern elites” – the media – and mocked Mr. Obama as “cosmopolitan” and a former “community organizer,” to accompanying guffaws.

And the mocker-in-chief was someone the GOP standard-bearer had met just once before summoning her from Alaska to offer up the VP slot – one Sarah Palin, Mr. McCain's mail-order political bride.

A hard-right Christian from an oil state, Ms. Palin is certain, decisive and, as evidenced in her few scant interviews, unburdened by much actual knowledge, in the great W tradition. But she is skillful on the stump and survived the VP debate by ignoring questions and canning her answers with trademark sprinklings of winks and you-betchas. She is at once winsome hatchet woman and pep-rallier of the base – conservative catnip, as radio ranter Rush Limbaugh enthused: “Babies, guns, Jesus. Hot damn!”

Of course, if you're going to portray your opponent as an alien, it helps if your target audience is mostly white and your opponent is, you know ... black. Not that Republicans say anything of the sort. But in a country where 40 per cent of whites hold at least a partly negative view of African Americans – where 13 per cent think Mr. Obama is a Muslim – there's a rich tradition of speaking in code and reason to believe the GOP will get a hidden racial bounce at the ballot box.

Which is part of the great Republican hope: that for all the Bush baggage – for all America's Wall Street woes and Mr. McCain's contorted efforts to recast himself as a regulator – the GOP culture warriors can work their manipulative magic yet again. They'll certainly try: Expect a last desperate blast of ads painting Mr. Obama as a crazy-preacher-loving, terrorist-connected, radical left-winger in mufti.

And then we will see whether Americans are ... no, not stupid. Maybe just exceedingly forgetful.

–- Bob Levin is an editor at The Globe and Mail.