What do the election results mean to conservatives?

American Thinker ^ | November 09, 2008 | Bruce Walker

[vietvet67]

The results of the 2008 election mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.  What do those results mean to conservatives?  The results do not mean conservative candidates lose elections.  Obama got a big slice of the conservative vote, largely because he portrayed himself as a post-ideological as well as a post-partisan candidate - and McCain tried to do just the same thing.  Ronald Reagan in 1984 was the last man to run as an unabashed conservative, and he won by the last true landslide in an American presidential election.

President Bush, admired for his personal honor and deep faith, was respected by many conservatives, but he was hardly a conservative himself.  No man who nominated Harriett Meiers to the Supreme Court could be considered a true conservative.  Anyone who could embrace the vision of Ted Kennedy for our national education policy was not a true conservative.  Anyone who could create a new entitlement for prescription drugs was not a true conservative.

Bush was simply a decent man who was not a Leftist Democrat.  As McCain found out, being a decent man who is not a Leftist Democrat means nothing at all to the Left.  Both men, like Bob Dole and like George H. Bush, are good Americans, admirable people, and men blissfully unaware that the Left is not just waging battles on issues like more socialism but are rather waging war on our entire way of life.  Bush, Dole, McCain, and Bush Sr. were not wicked failures because they were not conservatives.  They were more like Chamberlain at Munich:  They did not grasp the true depth and nature of their adversary and, they thought, their adversary might be reasonable.

How far have "conservatives" come from Ronald Reagan's famous maxim "If you can't make them see the light, then let them feel the heat."  In other words, conservatives must lead.  Or, as Reagan also said "All they can do is hang us from a higher tree."  This homey, typical truth trumped all the mush of moderation that brought Republicans in such disrepute over the last ten years or so.  Courage is contagious and so is cowardice.  

When Republican "leaders" like Trent Lott sabotaged the impeachment trial of a sitting president because they feared political fallout, conservatives cringed.  We conservatives, after all, do not involve ourselves in the public arena because of the goodies we might get.  That is what Leftists do.  We intend to protect the sacred values of the Declaration of Independence, which are utterly nonpartisan (the founding fathers, of course, dreaded political parties) and we do this recalling that the signers of that document risked all in taking their stand for transcendent liberty.  Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood star with a starlet wife and lots of money, did not enter politics to get but rather to give.  He entered to lead and not to herd.  This is what conservatives used to do.

And this is the way conservatives used to talk:  "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.  Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."  Barry Goldwater defiantly rejected the idea that Leftists could place him on some invented "Far Right."  He stood for specific things, which he recorded in books, and which represented an actual platform for conservative ideals.  John McCain, the other Republican nominee from Arizona, would never have embraced extremism, even in the defense of liberty.  The soft, warm, middle was his true home.  The safe, predictable consensus was his real party.

He was in the good company of pleasant and worthwhile citizens like Tom Dewey, Wendel Wilkie, Herbert Hoover, and Gerald Ford.  In a world at peace on a planet unscarred by a relentless ideological jihad on our values and our faith, these nice sorts would have made excellent managers of the republic.  But war was declared on us long ago, long before September 11. 

War was declared on us by militant atheists who sought to deconstruct all our values and to mask their crimes as science.  War was declared on us by active, pernicious agents of the Soviet Union who sowed the seeds of racial hatred, gender warfare, and every other discord they could inflame and poison - they were not in the business of calming and healing.  War was declared on us by jealous and irreligious Europeans, who view our faith in anything as hopeless naivete which it is their pleasure to debunk.  War was declared on us by radical Moslems, who saw the version of God which serious Christians and Jews embrace as too loving and too peaceful. 

War was declared on us, and the Left here joined the fight against us.  War was declared on us, and notional "conservatives" tried to lead us.  But, of course, they could not.  While Ronald Reagan embarrassed the establishment by calling the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," our putative conservative nominee would not even raise the malignancy of Jeremiah Wright.  While Barry Goldwater nobly challenged federal grasping in 1964, his Arizonan successor called for Washington "solutions" to a Washingtonian financial disease forty-four years later.

What does this mean to conservatives?  It means we must choose leaders who believe, even if their cause seems hopeless.  It means that we must recall that liberty was not born in our nation in easy ways but at Valley Forge when Washington saw his men's bloody, frostbitten feet as he contemplated the loss of everything he possessed in life if he were to lose.  It means remembering that Goldwater was routed in 1964, but came back to the Senate in 1968 with everyone - liberals included -- respected his courage and dignity.  It means going back four years to the Reagan Funeral and seeing the long lines of thankful Americans who waited for hours just to say goodbye to the last true leader they had known. 

We have hope now.  Obama cannot end democracy in America and he probably cannot impose a melancholy quasi-official censorship.  Obama can only assume total responsibility for what happens to us over the next two years.  Please, conservatives, resist compromise!  Make stands upon principle, like Reagan and Goldwater.  Take the heart of Washington, the true leader of all conservatives, in fighting for what we believe even if the outcome is uncertain and the struggle is long.  Contemplate Churchill in 1940, when he promised to resist rather than parlay with evil. 

If we believe in God, then hope is ever certain.  If we hold sure and proven laws of human experience, then we know that failed ideas in practice also fail.  If we believe in the spirit of the American people and their nation, then we sense that though change comes in elections, the liberty to which we have become accustomed longer than any people in human history cannot be simply crushed. 

We fight -- even today -- for our lives and the lives of our children.  If we have not had leaders, we must find them.  Victory may seem far off.  But we can see it still.  As another American wrote almost two hundred years ago:  "Oh, say does that Star Spangled Banner still wave?  Ore the land of the free, and the home of the brave."  Francis Scott Key, like George Washington, were models of what conservative leaders must be.  We had these men once, and we shall have them again. 

Bruce Walker is the author of  Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and the recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

[TwelveOfTwenty]

...(ever hear Bush say Pelosi economy???)...

This is where we lost, IMHO. We could have countered Obama's "eight years of the Bush economy" with six years of the GOP economy vs. two years of the Pelosi economy. McCain had the opportunity during the debates and in his commercial messages (which played a lot in the blue area I was in), but he didn't.

[pray4liberty]

Obama got a big slice of the conservative vote

No, unfortunately he got a big slice of the Catholic vote. Read this and weep.

With the Help of Catholics...Obama's Victory

These people have chosen Obama over the Lord Jesus Christ. They will pay.

[Vn_survivor_67-68]

“Courage is contagious and so is cowardice.”

The key message is probably the sentence above.....among many other things, McCain is a cowardly slave to political correctness, and political correctness is as outcome based in elections as in schools.

[arthurus]

Well, if we can’t stop Amnesty, conservatives, Republicans, and other non-Party elements have no future in this country at all.A rapid amnesty of all the illegals already in the country will bring a substantial portion of Central America and Mexico across the Rio Grande and they will have to be amnestied, too. The logical extension of Amnesty will be the granting of citizenship and the Franchise to anyone born north of the Panama Canal.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Bush was simply a decent man who was not a Leftist Democrat. As McCain found out, being a decent man who is not a Leftist Democrat means nothing at all to the Left. Both men, like Bob Dole and like George H. Bush, are good Americans, admirable people, and men blissfully unaware that the Left is not just waging battles on issues like more socialism but are rather waging war on our entire way of life. Bush, Dole, McCain, and Bush Sr. were not wicked failures because they were not conservatives. They were more like Chamberlain at Munich: They did not grasp the true depth and nature of their adversary and, they thought, their adversary might be reasonable.

How far have "conservatives" come from Ronald Reagan's famous maxim "If you can't make them see the light, then let them feel the heat." In other words, conservatives must lead. Or, as Reagan also said "All they can do is hang us from a higher tree." This homey, typical truth trumped all the mush of moderation that brought Republicans in such disrepute over the last ten years or so. Courage is contagious and so is cowardice.

When Republican "leaders" like Trent Lott sabotaged the impeachment trial of a sitting president because they feared political fallout, conservatives cringed. ...

A good explanation of what happened to the Republican Party and the conservative movement along with it. When the Republican Senators, not all of them but enough of them, failed to mount a spirited battle to win a slam dunk impeachment case, not just Lewinsky but campaign contributions from China, Indonesia, in quid pro quo deals, many of us were dispirited. (Trent Lott later learned some of the lessons described in this article when the Democrats he had protected turned on him and he was bounced from his Majority Leader position.) Then Bush failed to address any of the Clinton abuses, including blatant voter fraud. Bush signed the McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform, Republicans stuck their noses in the public trough just as deep as the Democrats and the conservative movement in the Republican Party was pretty much over.

[meyer]

What do those results mean to conservatives?

It means that they should have dealt with the voter fraud issue when they had majorities in the House and Senate.

It means that they should have fielded an actual conservative instead of a moderate-leftist RINO. And it means that the only reason to "reach across the aisle" would be to grab one of the leftist communists by the throat and shake the stupid out of them.

It means that even with an inept campaign that fails to mention all the obvious flaws that their opponent exhibits, one can still grab 47% of the vote just by not being the other guy.

It means that owning the media still counts.

It means that running against a sitting President in the same party is not the key to success.

It means that despite having an excellent vice Presidential candidate, a lame Presidential candidate cannot win.

[sickoflibs]

One reason I do not cry over McCains loss is in September with crisis his automatic response was to claim to be non-party reformer who will work with dems, he made our sweetheart on fire girl Palin mouth this crap sandwich and cowardly voted for bailout, and acted like he didnt later. Only after democrats humiliated him for his ‘reform together’ approach did McCain attack dems in congress. By then it was to late, he had switched positions too many times to be believed.

I am glad he went negative, we need that for now, but it alone wouldn't win it for him.

[knarf]

"Clearly the idea is to make her such an object of disgust that she won’t dare surface on the national stage again, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen."

Exactly.

I said this on another thread ... we must protect Sara ..... and Alaskan Freepers are needed to keep that watchful eye out for the wolves and do to them what we all think Alaskans do to marauding varmints.

[TwelveOfTwenty]

I am glad he went negative...

I'm not. The Wright-Ayers-ACORN-Hussein issues that impressed Freepers and like-minded voters didn't matter to the Democrats and undecideds who ended up voting for Obama. All they cared about was the economy, and our response on that issue was just plain inadequate.

[mgist]

We got what we deserve. We've killed 48,000,000 babies in this country most "conservatives" care less. We can't even pretend to be moraly superior. Obviously we have a lot of work and praying to do. We really have to pray hard for the conversion of souls, beginning with our own.

Mother Theresa explained it well, “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.” It is a violent act that takes place in what should be the safest place for innocent babies, the mother’s womb. Thomas Jefferson, once stated: "The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the just and only legitimate object of good government" (March 31, 1809)

[Woebama]

The Democrats have consistently nominated men of the left with the possible exceptions of Kennedy and Clinton. Republicans have consistently nominated moderates with the exceptions of Goldwater and Reagan.

So the ball is moved for the left more often because when the political environment is such that the Democratic party wins — the left also wins.

[Woebama]

We MUST fix the Republican primaries - 1. They MUST be closed so that we alone control our destiny. 2. The early ones CANNOT be held in traditionally Liberal/Democrat states.

Yes. Demographics and the rules of the election decide the outcomes.

[sickoflibs]

If you read my posts I agree with that, I knew it wouldnt help McC get elected, See I know McCain would lose long ago but when he aimlessly flipped around then came out with, “forget about that, Ayers is going to get you”, he lost. You are on mark there, only those who disliked Obama to start with cared .

It was when McCain went negative on socialism drove Bobs negatives up which we need as a starting point now.

[Carley]

Since conservatives most likely did not vote, they really have nothing much to say.

I’m sure the troops, the working class drones, and our allies will be thanking them any minute now.

[dools007]

Post ideological, post partisan—The Marxist Onada? I’d to get whiff of whatever this guy is smelling.

[XenaLee]

It would probably help our conservative cause....if we could somehow fix it so that the leftists/DemocRats are unable to ‘cross over’ and vote in our Republican primaries.... like they crossed over and voted in McCain. This seems rather obvious to me, but then...maybe I’m just dreaming here.

It would also help if we could somehow fix the massive and rampant DemocRat voting fraud that has been going on for half a century or more now. (again...dreaming)

Another thing we could (or must) do...is take back our damned mainstream media from the leftists. It’s starting to look like communist Russia over here. (still dreaming)

Unless or until we manage to do at least ONE of those things...we will probably continue to lose elections from this day on.

Somebody wake me up from this ongoing nightmare....PLEASE!

[FunkyZero]

what does it mean to conservatives? Nothing in the long run.

Obama's election is a variant exception. He won for 2 reasons.

1) Hatred of Bush

2) Minorities had a chance to vote for a minority.

Period.

This was nothing more than the public lashing out against over spending on that part of government and their own personal failures, they are looking for someone to blame. What cannot be explained is why 53% were dumb enough to vote for someone who is easily twice as bad. My guess is they were willing to vote for anything not republican. They are too stupid and too lazy to realize and research the fact that the current issues are not conservative issues, they are the fruits of liberalism. This is why I am not at all concerned about the Obama win. You see, to liberals, it's not about doing what is right, it is simply about winning. The voting public will not accept the consequences of liberal policy, and we will see that in 2012 if the full effects of Pelosi/Reid/Obama are visible already by that time.

Party loyalty is the achilles heel of democrats rather than the advantage they think it is. you see, now they are expected to perform and deliver. Liberalism, especially fiscal liberalism, is guaranteed to fail every single time without exception. The ideal in itself is fundamentally and fatally flawed. The basic ideals around liberal philosophy are dependant on successful conservative functions in which it feeds from. They cannot survive without us. SOMEONE has to produce results and SOMEONE has to generate dollars to support their habits. Liberals are incapable of calculating a chain of events beyond step 1, the step that provides all the free stuff they are expecting. They are too ignorant or lazy to figure out that the "top 5%" can't possibly support all the programs they are now expecting democrats to deliver on. They will eventually see the top 60% supporting the bottom 40%. They are going to be quite upset when they realize they are also now a provider rather than a recipient. It's going to be hilarious.

To the typical liberal, this was about getting back at the man, it's about torturing "big oil". It's about "making them pay". It's about the philosophy of "if I can't have it, nobody can". Wait until they realize those windfall tax penalties on big oil are coming straight out of THEIR wallet when they pump gas.

In the end, the ones who crossed over and voted for this travesty will suffer the consequences and will vote themselves out of it next time around. Just be patient, we aren’t all going to die.

[Thermalseeker]

President Bush, admired for his personal honor and deep faith, was respected by many conservatives, but he was hardly a conservative himself.

And this, IMHO, is one of the biggest reasons why we find ourselves licking our wounds after the election.

We allowed GWB to be branded a Conservative back in 2000 and it's been a pox on our brand ever since. As we rebuild the party we must cast out the fake Conservatives (CINO's) and RINO's as well as fake Republicans like McCain's lapdog Grahamnesty.

True Conservatism wins every time it's tried. Obammy just proved that running on tax cuts. This has traditionally been a solid conservative principle and Obammy used it to win over fence sitters. Obammy won't do it, but a true Conservative would.....

[jackv]

“Name ONE REAL conservative that voted for the MARXIST?? Just ONE.”

I’ll name one. My brother, to whom I can barely speak. A Bush supporter all the way. Suddenly smitten by the cool black guy in Armani.

[Fishrrman]

“Well, if we can’t stop Amnesty, conservatives, Republicans, and other non-Party elements have no future in this country at all.A rapid amnesty of all the illegals already in the country will bring a substantial portion of Central America and Mexico across the Rio Grande and they will have to be amnestied, too. The logical extension of Amnesty will be the granting of citizenship and the Franchise to anyone born north of the Panama Canal.”

If what you say is to be taken as a reasonable and logical prediction of what’s to come (and I believe it is), then I would like to predict that the often-derided concept of “Atzlan” will eventually become reality, too.

I would call what’s happening _right now_ the phenomenon of “emerging Atzlan”. I remember seeing a graphic presentation of Hispanics in America posted right here on FR. On that map, the greatest concentration was from California (of course) across the southwest into Texas.

Having said that, perhaps the best way to re-define _where_ anyone born “north of the Panama Canal” has “citizenship” might be to redefine America’s southern boundary to “north of Atzlan” - that is, to cut the “Atzlan states” off from America, and let them exist either as their own nation or give them [back] to Mexico. Thus, by amputating a gangrenous appendage, the rest of the body of the United States might have a chance at surviving a while longer.

Stop laughing, and consider for a moment:
- Would an America without Atzlan (all “blue” and leftist) be less, or more conservative?
- Would an America without Atzlan elect a Congress composed with less or more conservatives?
- Would an America without Atzlan be less or more predisposed to elect conservative-leaning presidents?

Just sayin’,
- John