The Dems are indeed terrified; they’re right to be, because it’s looking more and more like ‘04 all over again:

Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party’s most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall.

“It’s more than an increased anxiety,” said Doug Schoen, who worked as one of Bill Clinton’s lead pollsters during his 1996 reelection and has worked for both Democrats and independents in recent years. “It’s a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them.”

“They were set up to run ‘experience versus change,’ what they had run [against Hillary] Clinton,” Trippi said. “And I think Palin clearly moved that to be change [and] reform, versus change. They are adjusting to that and that threw them off balance a little bit.”

A major Democratic fundraiser described it a good bit more starkly after digesting the polls of recent days: “I’m so depressed. It’s happening again. It’s a nightmare.”

Delicious, and so good for you.

Lake joined other Democratic veterans, some speaking not for attribution, in emphasizing a classic liberal woe: that the Democrat let the Republican define him.

“Obama needed to define himself,” Lake said.

See, that’s your problem. He already has, and Americans don’t necessarily like what they see. Because what they see is a callow hack, a typical machine politician mouthing meaningless platitudes about “hope” and “change,” without anything behind them except the promise of more taxes, more spending, and more intrusive government. They see a guy who willingly associates with terrorists and bigots, and they know you don’t hang out with America-hating scumbags for all those years without having at least some sympathy for their views. They know Obama is the most extreme Left candidate ever to get as close as he has to the Presidency. In short, they know he’s just another statist, weak-on-defense, shallow liberal.

They see him as another in a long, long line of condescending elitist scolds who don’t respect or understand the values and standards most Americans live by. They’re tired of being preached at about America’s faults and failures, by people who think it’s not only acceptable but entirely just for America to assume the second-class power status most of Europe resigned itself to long ago. They see America not as the source of the world’s ills, but the only real hope for coping with them. And until Democrats understand that we’re not just going to sit back and meekly accept their finger-wagging lectures, they’re going to keep right on scratching their heads and wondering why it is we don’t want them running our government and our lives.

You can put all the lipstick on that pig you want, but it’s still a stinking, rotten fish, to mix a couple of slightly-used metaphors.

Update! As good a definition of political elitism as you’ll find anywhere:

Elitism is a sense that the hoi polloi are simply incapable of governing themselves, let alone a nation, and that a small group of “experts” have to take control of everything they do. That goes far beyond mere matters of state. Elitists see people getting more obese and believe that government has to intervene to remove food choices from individuals, as one rather timely example, as in New York City. They believe that removing personal choices will keep people from making bad decisions, because they — in all their wisdom — will make the right choices for them.

This describes perfectly the policy direction of the Democratic Party, and perhaps even a part of the Republican Party as well.

It does indeed. And it also explains why, about this time every four years, Democrats find themselves frantically waving their arms around and plaintively wailing, as in my title, “what’s WRONG with you people?”