So Now What?

OK, so now that "the worst" has happened, and the next incarnation of Jimmy Carter will take office in January, what's a conservative Republican to do?

First and foremost, let's stop whining. The election is over, the new President has been elected, and he's not a conservative.

Guess what? It didn't matter who won, he wasn't going to be anyway. That was the problem in a nutshell.

Post-election analysis of turnout numbers shows an interesting, if not entirely surprising, trend. Whle Democrats turned out in droves to vote for Barry O., Republicans largely yawned and stayed home. Republican turnout was down from previous Presidential election years, pretty much across the board.

We can speculate all we want about the reasons for this failure of the McCain campaign to turn out the base. His staffers are busily attempting to lay the blame at the feet of Sarah Palin, presumably figuring that the media has already done such a good job of trashing her reputation that they will have little to do but add more fuel to an already large fire.

Unfortunately, for them that is, I don't see this tactic going over well with the base. The selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate was responsible for the single largest bounce in his poll numbers that he ever saw. No matter what the media did to her from that point on, she remained popular with the base, and handled everything they threw at her with grace and dignity. The same cannot be said for McCain himself.

While he certainly handled the media with grace after they turned on him, much more so than many would be able to muster, and for that I give him ample credit, he was consistently unable to appeal to the Republican base. His message was muddled throughout the campaign, and was consistent only in its inconsistency.

His response to the bailout mess only succeeded in angering everyone, supporters and opponents alike, and was practically indistinguisable from Obama's. As has been said often before, when given the choice between two Democrats, the electorate will choose the real one every time.

So we are left with the inevitable fallout, and the usual suspects loudly proclaiming the death of conservatism, much as they did after the defeat of Barry Goldwater. I note, however, that they never were able to explain the rise of Ronald Reagan. Ressurection, perhaps? But then, I thought leftists didn't believe in that sort of thing? ...

Any way you slice it, conservatisim has not died. The fact that the GOP took a much deserved beating for the past two election cycles has very little, if anything at all, to do with conservatism. It has, in fact, far more to do with the lack thereof. If the GOP were as loaded with "right-wing conservatives" as the leftists and their lapdogs in the so-called "mainstream" media like to pretend, we would not be unloading big spending, big government Republicans back into the private sector at the rate we currently are. Any true conservative knows intuitively that there is no such thing as a big spending, big government Republican. Any person who calls himself such is a liar or delusional.

So the lesson is, or at least should be, that it's way past time to get the GOP house in order. It's time to clean out the big tent. We need the general equivalent of a DI and a few First Sergeants to walk through said tent and "weed out" some of the "non-hackers" who do not pack the gear to be in the party of less government and lower spending. Save the PC nonsense for the Dems, they'll need it.

Which brings me to the other side of this point. The Dems are about to embark on at least two years of one party rule, in which they will have no more excuses, no more strawmen, no more anything. They have nothing left to hide behind. There is no more "Big Bad George" to blame everything on, no more "Republican Congress" to lay off their bets on.

No more.

They made a whole lot of promises, and now they have to deliver, with no fallback to rely on.

If we in the GOP are so stupid as to not capitalize on this golden opportunity, and not be standing in the doorway, ready to slam it behind them as they stumble and fall out of it after blowing it as badly as they are likely to, then we truly deserve every bit of what we'll get.