E-Minus 12 Days

Progress where it counts....

POPULAR VOTE PROJECTION: Obama 50.0%, McCain 47.2% (Obama +0.1%)

ELECTORAL COLLEGE PROJECTION: Obama 326, McCain 212

“McCAIN MAXIMUM” (Total Electoral Votes including states in which he is within five points - Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio): 261

The Rasmussen daily tracking poll climbs back to 52-45 Obama.

Regaining the lead in Florida is a noteworthy milestone.  If that harbinges like inchings in the aforementioned four swing states and Virginia is being mispolled as grossly as it appears, that elusive Electoral College "inside straight" may yet be possible.

If it isn't, get ready for the McCainiac/RINO winglet of the GOP to blame Maverick's defeat on the "far right" for refusing to get out there and drag itself across broken glass and razor blades through flaming walls of rabid rattlesnakes to drag his wrinkled ass across the finish line.  "This is worse than Pat Buchanan's Nazi speech at the Houston convention in '92," they'll whine; "We even gave 'em Fertilla the Huntress and they still stayed home.  If only Big John had picked Joe Lieberman, we could be measuring White House drapery today!"

The EM is already gleefully telegraphing that line as part of their Obama-overpolling, GOP vote-turnout-suppressing psych-ops gambit.  But it'd be there even without that encouragement; I recall 1992 very, very well, I remember how the one Republican constituency that remained doggedly loyal to Bush41 to the bitter end was Christian evangelicals, and I remember which constituency got blamed by the recriminatory Bushies when it was all over.

McCain will be even more vigorous in his finger-pointing because, unlike Pappy, he won't be simply riding off into the retirement sunset; he'll be going back to the Senate, and he'll have a "maverick"/"bipartisan"/media-fellating image to rebuild.  You know where his REAL loyalties have always lain, and they're far more with Chris "Tingle" Matthews than the Barracuda.  Indeed, by next spring George W. Bush and his presidency will already be fondly and nostaglically remembered (by more than just 'Pubbies) while John McCain will be the most reviled Pachyderm in the party.  GOPers will be wondering what lunacy came over them that they ever threw away the 2008 nomination on him.  Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Sailor jumped parties some time next year.  I can see it now - the newest Democrat senator, and perhaps the one to make a filibuster-proof Donk majority official, grinningly shaking hands with President Hussein at the Half-Black House.

As I say, get ready for it.  Once Lord Barry nationalizes health care, hypertension medications will be strictly rationed, and Republicans won't be high on the waiting list.

So how does the Right dig out of this hole?  As Rush Limbaugh outlined it yesterday, it's all about leadership:

Since there is not a strong elected conservative anywhere, then conservatism right now is sort of like wandering in the distance with every conservative thinking that they're the smartest person in the room trying to show the way to the light.  The way to the light is plainly visible.  But everybody wants to be considered the smartest people in the room, so they come up with all these new things like "the era of Reagan is over."  One of the most recent things going on in the conservative movement is to figure out how we, too, can become distributists... redistributists... redis... redistribute... How we, too, can become smaller. I can't say the word!  I just bugs me to say it.  We've got people on our side trying to figure out how they, too, can make our party one that wants to re... re... redistribute it! But "smarter," but better.  These are people who think the Republican Party has lost the Wal-Mart class because we don't care enough.

We're seen as not caring, so the way to show that we care is to also redistribute wealth, but smarter and better.  This would never be happening -- this would never be happening -- if there were an elected genuine conservative who were showing the way.  So we're in a vacuum right now.  Tony Blankley writes about this today. "The Birth of the Me-Too Conservative." Quote: "Until the election of President Reagan five decades later, these me-too Republicans supported, rather than opposed, Democratic Party policies but claimed they would administer them better. Of course, this led to a half-century of Democratic dominance of American government and politics." Here are the last two paragraphs.  

"I suspect that the conservative movement we start rebuilding on the ashes of November 4 (even if McCain wins) will have little use for overwritten, over-delicate commentary. The new movement will be plain-spoken and socially networked up from the Interneted streets, suburbs and small towns of America. It certainly will not listen very attentively to those conservatives who idolatrize Obama and collaborate in heralding his arrival. ... The new conservative movement will be facing a political opponent that will reveal itself soon to be both multiculturalist and Eurosocialist. We will be engaged in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country. As I did at the beginning of and throughout the Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich conservative movement, I will try to lend my hand. I certainly will do what I can to make it a big-tent conservative movement. But just as it does in every great cause, one question has to be answered correctly: Whose side are you on, comrade?" So this is what I mean.  One step at a time. We're going to drag McCain across the finish line then we start rebuilding the conservative movement.

Now if any of you are anything like me, you don't want to waste any time embarking on this comeback.  You're thinking, "By God, we'll just do another 1994 in 2010 and then get started on sending that miserable pinko idoloter back to Chicago and his buddies' red/hatemongering think tanks."  Trust me, my friends, I share your sentiments.  We realize what's going to be lost on November 4th even if McCain wins, and how much freedom and wealth and national strength and honor are going to disappear over the next few years because of the grievous electoral mistakes of the past two.  It's something that I frankly never thought would happen because I believed the American voter would not entrust the country to the Alinsky/Marxists that the Democrat Party had become no matter how flabby the GOP majority had gotten.  They had discredited themselves too much with their billious,irresponsible, treasonous rhetoric and actions to be taken seriously as a mainstream alternative.

Yes, the Ultimate Cynic was naive.  I forgot that some cycles are inevitable, even if they render their subjects terminal.

The problem with the Big Comeback gambit, aside from the systematic electoral deck-stacking the Donk SuperCongress will do over the next biennium, is that it requires one crucial element that is not immediately apparent in the GOP, at least on the congressional level: bold, visionary, unapologetically conservative leadership.

Go back to the Blankley quote above: for five decades congressional Republicans languished in the minority (with the exception of 1947-48 and 1953-54) before the dawning of the Reagan Revolution.  That appalling ineptitude originated in the death blow delivered to center-right confidence by the Great Depression and the New Deal.  For nearly forty of those years the GOP only managed to elect one president (Dwight Eisenhower), and he was a celebrity/war hero stand-in who might just as easily have opted to front the Dems in 1952 if Dewey HAD defeated Truman (kind of the Colin Powell of his time).  It took until 1964, over thirty years, before another bold, visionary, unapologetically conservative leader arose, and when Barry Goldwater did, his party was so moribund that not even it, much less the liberally indoctrinated country still reeling from the JFK assassination, was ready for the "straight talk" he was delivering.  It took another decade and a half to find another, but when we did, Ronald Reagan led both the GOP and America out of the left-wing wilderness and back to the national prosperity and greatness that ought to be our birthright.

And even then, despite a six year majority run in the Senate, it wasn't until 1994 that the Reagan legacy finally "trickled down" to the congressional level, and that only came at the behest of yet another bold, visionary, unapologetically conservative leader, Newt Gingrich, who had the balls to nationalize the '94 mid-terms with the Contract with America and strike clear contrasts with the corrupt extremism of the Clinton/Foley/Mitchell Axis.

With all that as prelude, let me ask you three questions: Would there have ever been a Gingrich Revolution if Bob Michael had still been House GOP leader?  Would there have ever been a Reagan Revolution to inspire it if the 1980 Republican presidential nominee had been George H.W. Bush, Howard Baker, or John Connally?  And do you see the term "Boehner (or McConnell) Revolution" ever entering the near-term American political lexicon?

Oh, I think Republicans will regain some congressional ground two years from now, for much the same reason that they did in 1966 after the '64 Goldwater wipeout: a lot of Dems will win this time in GOP-leaning districts that will not sustain that alignment.  The "blue" tide, IOW, has to go back out eventually.  And, historically, the party in the White House usually loses seats in mid-term election cycles.  The Senate hole will, of course, take longer to climb out of.  But what is going to fuel a 1994-sized backlash?  Remember, there won't be any "bait & switch" factor to bite President Hussein in the ass like it did Bill Clinton; False Messiah isn't pretending to be a centrist, and while he isn't exactly running a WYSIWYG campaign, there isn't much confusion about Obama being a hyperliberal.  And, back to the central point: who would lead a 1994-sized backlash?  Maybe Eric Cantor, maybe John Shaddeg, maybe Jon Kyl on the Senate side, but not the two men who were XO's to the Hastert/Frist duo under whose incompetent stewardship the house(s) that Gingrich built went down the crapper.

No, I think the next four years will be a matter not of rebuilding the conservative movement but of it languishing in intensive care.  Perhaps it'll be revived by the Carteroid disasters the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Axis will infict upon the country, but it'll be 2011 before we see if there is another Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich figure who can harness center-right ideas and center-right outrage, spread both to the country at large, and overcome the Chicago/Soviet Mafia that will hold the nation hostage beginning twelve days from now.  Sarah Palin, perhaps?  Bobby Jindal?  Will either even make it that far when both have 2010 gubernatorial re-elections that you can count on the Democrats to target with political WMD?

And if McCain does pull it out, tack on AT LEAST four years to the above observations, and remove Barracuda, since she'll be fatally tainted with Sailor's stink.

Leaders, in other words, don't grow on trees.  Neither do special nations like ours has been for 232 years.  It won't take anywhere near a half-century absence of the former for the latter to be damaged beyond even a reincarnated Gipper to resuscitate.  If given even four years, Barry O may take care of that all by himself.