Saturday, November 15, 2008

It Is Time for a Republican Renaissance

It Is Time for a Republican Renaissance

Now that the smoke of the election is clearing, it has become obvious that most of the predictions were wrong. There was no movement in favor of the young Obama, there was no great increase in the number of voters.

What happened was that many conservatives refused to vote for McCain. He was hardly a republican, and he was no conservative.

Of course there was a propaganda campaign by the media elites, but that does not tell the story. Few conservatives were swayed by Katie Couric or David Brooks. And the young new voters did not make the difference. New voters were no more of a factor than they are every four years. The negativity of the campaigns were not the problem. Even in this most negative campaign in living memory, both sides gave as good as they got.

McCain lost because very few voters voted for him. They refused to vote for a liberal who is against a few social issues the liberals usually support. They failed to support a stand against generational change. They denied victory to the candidate who was old enough to be the other guy's father, a man who stood for very little. A maverick with no mandate and no coherent idea of how to move the nation forward.

Even so, McCain could have won if he had merely voted against the bailout. Instead he voted for the most bloated power grab ever seen. He voted for government, against people. That was unforgivable. At least Obama ran on a pro-government platform, so his vote for the bailout was consistent.

For the conservative side in our national debate to get back into power, they need to get back to first principles. The republican party may be the vehicle to get us there, or it may be some other party. First principles of a winning platform include:

- A party which will stand for our unalienable rights;

- A party which will stand for what the Constitution actually says;

- A party which will stand for smaller and more limited government;

- A party which will stand for Judeo-Christian morality and which is not so cowardly that it will not take on the baby killers and sexual anarchists;

- A party which will find a way to give people the freedom to educate their kids as they see fit;

- A party which will stand for an actual border to our country, and for living within the law;

- A party which will smash our terrorist enemies;

- A party which can find a charismatic leader who can eloquently communicate its platform to the electorate.

This may be a tall order, and it may be a while in coming. The republican party may well be too bound up in recovering its power from the ashes of yesterday, and thus be unable to return to first principles. If so, it will be a long time in the wilderness for conservatives.