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I agree with you to large extent. Palin excites social conservatives, but not every conservative is a social AND fiscal conservative. As I mentioned in a different post, I know a bunch of conservatives who are fiscal conservatives and were turned off by McCain AND very much by Palin who represented to them a kind of ignorant, Bible-thumping brand of American they can’t relate to.

Are these kinds of conservatives “RINO”s? I don’t know. They consider themselves serious political junkies and take elections seriously. We lost them at “bailout” with McCain and also with his choice of Palin rather than someone they would consider more serious and knowledgeable.

I know Palin got a bum rap and is intelligent and knows a lot about many issues. But let’s be honest - she would not win the presidency.

Bottom line is that we need to start communicating with our own people - call and do surveys about what the most impt issues are to people who consider themselves “conservative” and see what they don’t like to see/hear. We need to find the common denominator of conservatives and find a candidate who is YOUNG (a lot of the loss is due to McCain’s age) and presidential and represents a strong stance on these issues.

If you really look through these exit poll data (7 pages)http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1 you will see we lost in virtuallyevery category except 1) old people; 2) white males; 3) white protestnts; 4) weekly or more oten church goers; 5)gun owners. To me, this says we got the repub base all out to vote. But, are we really just white people clinging to guns and bibles? why did we lose EVERY OTHER category? Why did we lose these categories at the same time things like Prop 8 are winning? In some way Obamas comments came true as the McCain supporters were mainly gun and bible toting white people. Now - I’m one of these people, so believe me I’m not putting them down - it’s just disheartening to see this statistic.

We are losing every ethnicity except white. What is going on here? Losing Asians??? Hispanics?? We need to to get our ideas in order and find venues for them that are not talk radio and blogs. As much as the old media is dying, it actually still has influence and we are no where to be found. Esp. with the death of fox news conservativism.

Your article assumes their will be genuine elections in the future, with Obama's ACORN now fully funded and in control + his civilian security forces (brown shirts) it remains to be seen if there will be elections. The Fairness doctrine, control of the Internet, etc. are also probably all coming. We may have pseudo elections to make things look good, they had them in the USSR too.

If there is anything actually remaining of a democratic process, only a principled conservatism will have a prayer of defeating the forces about to assume power with all the propaganda at their disposal.