Squandered Opportunities

Listening to the Sean Hannity radio show today, I found it humorous to listen to a caller who said McCain deserved to and should win.  If only Hannity had argued with that statement.  Alas, I guess Hannity is to much of a partisan to see reality.

I really don’t see how anyone can argue that McCain deserved to win.  Aside from the fact that he’s not and never was a conservative, he’s run a dismal campaign!  Until the last week or ten days, he wasn’t even really fighting.  Coming on strong late in the game was simply too little, too late.

The fact is, though, McCain didn’t lose this by himself.  The roots of this loss go back to 1994 and the Republican take over under Newt Gingrich.  In ‘94 the Republicans ran on a very specific platform that was completely grounded in conservatism.  Four decades of Democrat control of Congress had demonstrated the folly of liberal big government.  So too had Ronald Reagan the 80s. To bad those Republicans who swept in to Congress in ‘94 didn’t hold to the conservative principles that got them elected.  Instead, they abandoned conservatism in favor of big government and the nanny state.

Republicans in Congress weren’t alone, however, in squandering power.  The top of the party, none other than the President, really took us down.  Together the President and the Republican controlled Congress lead us to the largest expansion of government since LBJ’s Great Society.  We got the new Medicaid Prescription Drug Benefit and the No Child Left Behind Act, both enormous spending bills that dramatically increased the federal bureaucracy.  We got the Department of Homeland Security, a cabinet level agency that dwarfs its predecessors both in bureaucratic bloat and inefficiency.  We got “compassionate conservatism” which is just a euphemism for Republican liberalism that bears no resemblance to actual conservatism.  From a big government perspective and from a spending perspective, Republicans had become as bad as or perhaps worse than Democrats!  And that cost Republicans control of Congress in 2006.

In the two years since the ‘06 election, not much has changed among Republicans.  With few exceptions, Republican leadership blamed the ‘06 losses on the Iraq war instead of their big government, big spending habits.  While the war didn’t help, it was by no means the primary reason for the overwhelming losses.  Combine that with the fact that the vast majority of Democrat gains in Congress were attained by running candidates who ran as conservatives.

We all know, of course, that those “conservative” Democrats turned out not to be so conservative.  Indeed, with the abysmal single digit approval ratings for the current Congress, it should have been possible for Republicans to retake some of those lost seats.  But alas, hardly a conservative was in sight.  There are notable exceptions to be sure but by and large, the term conservative Republican has become a virtual oxymoron.

So here we are in 2008.  Obama has won the White House and, in spite of their horrible ratings, Democrats have substantially increased their leads in the House and Senate.  Even though they have not achieved their hoped for 60 vote margin in the Senate, the reality is, with RINOs like Snow and Collins they won’t have much trouble stopping any principled conservative filibuster.  Republicans are now basically bystanders with no hope of stopping anything Democrats want to do.

For most Republicans this is a bleak picture indeed but I see a bright silver lining.  I said several months ago that this was the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party.  A McCain win would have set conservatism back a generation both because McCain would do all he could to rid the party of conservatives and because Republicans would get the blame for all the harm McCain would do as President.

As it is the Democrats have taken full responsibility for everything going forward.  If the economy is bad in 2010, it’ll be the Democrats fault.  If we have major foreign policy problems, Democrats get the blame.  Pretty much everything that goes wrong will be their fault.  And who doesn’t believe the Democrats will screw it up?

As well, the complete and utter failure of liberalism in the Republican Party has been fully unmasked.  I’ll be surprised if the Republicans in the House and Senate don’t replace their inept leadership with some real conservatives.  From there it will be possible to rebuild the party from the ground up.  It would then, perhaps, be possible to get some national support for real conservatives as opposed to the tendancy the RNC has had to support moderates (read RINOs).

None of this is a sure thing of course.  Democrats could do a decent job.  Republicans could continue to embrace the strategy that has been such a failure.  Pigs could learn to fly.  Who knows?  One thing that will certainly be required is for grass roots conservatives to become involved and work to make the needed changes.  We need to recruit and field solid conservative candidates for 2010.  We need to put extreme pressure on the Republicans left in Congress to be conservative.  We need to let them know their political futures depend on it.  If we won’t do that we deserve the party we’ve got.