‘Cause reading Associated Press articles lately, I could swear it sounds like the past thirty years never happened.

Headlined “Poll: Pocketbook Issues Push Past Iraq,” an article quotes Linda Zimmerman, “a 50-year-old sheep farmer from Thurmont, Md.” (Which makes me wonder again: Where do they find these people?)

From the article:

Her daughter and son-in-law are having trouble keeping up with two mortgages on a town house, she said. One street in her neighborhood has five homes for sale, and one has been on the market for two years.

Registered as a Republican, she’s ready to reconsider.

“We’re Republicans and I’m very unhappy with them, and I’ve been watching the Democrats,” she said. “We did better when (Bill) Clinton was in than we did with Bush. It’s just terrible.”

But wait, there’s more:

Bill Hine, a 65-year-old Vietnam veteran from Warrenton, Va., considers himself a “soft Republican” who is partial to John McCain. But the nation’s health system needs fixing, he said, and he’s not happy with what he’s hearing.

“A lot of Republicans are just anti-anything, anti-changing anything, and that’s one of the things I’ll be looking at,” he said.

“Anti-changing anything.” You’d think many if not most Republicans are conservatives or something. This is yet another example of what passes for political thought these days. Republicans are in fact rather united (though not nearly so much as they used to be, and should) in their opposition to solving problems through government, particularly at the federal level, and for good reason. Government’s track record should be all the explanation necessary to persuade someone that entrusting our health to government bureaucracy ranks with Superman IV as a really bad idea. So yes, Republicans will and should be “anti-changing anything” if it involves using the government. Offer up governmental solutions for problems more effectively and fairly solved through the marketplace and I would hope and expect Republicans to challenge them every time.

Then there’s the idea that Clinton was better than Bush. By what measure, exactly? Better economy? Clinton inherited an economy that was coming out of a recession, and Bush inherited an economy that was heading into one. Both then helped oversee several-years-long growth periods—the defining difference, of course, being that Bush actually helped create one by his own actions (the 2003 tax cuts for which he pushed), while Clinton simply got out of the way of the growth that had started (particularly with the Internet sector) and agreed to Republican budget policies. On the foreign policy front, Clinton did little to contain (and lots to encourage) the growth of the radical Islamic threat, while Bush has waged an imperfect though effective war against it. (Yes, effective, certainly in the sense that we haven’t been attacked again, while other countries have.) I’m not a great fan of what Bush has done in the past five years, but his accomplishments at least match those of Clinton’s, and arguably have accrued more to our favor.

But expecting anyone in the major media to recognize that is apparently as Quixotic as ever.