Perspective

6:51 pm, 11/3/08

Over the last six months, professional obligations have caused me to miss a lot of opportunities to participate in the blogosphere, which has been depressing. I originally imagined I'd have the willpower to continue blogging at a normal pace, but being surrounded by this election cycle all day, every day, pretty much beat that out of me.

However, from the Democrats' embarrassing mistake in opposing offshore drilling to the comical spectacle that they billed as their convention, I missed out on opportunities to say some things that probably needed to be said. Still, I think what I've been working on will prove significant, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow night, to the extent that I might have my work vindicated. Even if we don't get what we wanted, we've done damage in places it needed to be done.

As for the Presidential race, I'll say the same things here that I've told others:

Barack Obama isn't going to win by the dramatic 10 and 12 percent margins some polls are suggesting, it's going to be more like 5. Still, we're losing this election. John McCain made huge mistakes, let down his base, and Obama had money, a willingness to shift to the right in his rhetoric, and an anti-incumbent, anti-Bush current running in his favor. McCain's powerful strategic choice in Sarah Palin turned out to be an epic tactical error, and his handling of the bailout was a disastrous miscue that all but ended the race for him.

The bailout package was, indeed, "bipartisan", but only in the sense that both parties were working together against us. It left me disgusted enough that I'm opposing anyone who voted for it, for any office, forever. With the Early Voting collapse of the "Write in Fred Thompson" suicide pact I'd made with friends, that leaves me forced to join them in voting for Bob Barr.

However, if McCain has failed conservatives, Obama is already preparing to fail America:

Barack Obama's senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week's election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harbouring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.

One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, "so there's not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair".

Interesting. Who's fault would those ridiculous expectations be?

Maybe I'm being needlessly harsh, but it seems as if "hope" is a fallback for people who have trouble with economics. Consider this poor woman, who thinks that, somehow, under Obama, she "won't have to worry about putting gas in her car, won't have to worry about paying her mortgage".

What?

Democrats accuse Republicans of using "the politics of fear", while warning from the other side of their mouth that if they aren't elected to office, our children will never have a future and might even be killed in a natural disaster caused by carbon emissions. Feminist Erica Jong warns that "blood will run in the streets", and, in a dramatic overestimation of the commitment and small arms proficiency of Obama supporters, that an Obama loss will spark a "second American civil war".

We're told, live on major news networks, most dramatically by apparent rabies sufferer Keith Olbermann, that we're the ones somehow suppressing dissenting viewpoints, even as Barack Obama bans disapproving newspapers from his plane and blacklists stations that ask his running mate pressing questions, even as a left-liberal radio host wishes death on Joe the Plumber for defying "Him" and liberal Democrats try to reimpose the so-called "fairness doctrine" on conservative commentary.

Truly, as Mark Steyn has noted, satire is dead.

Still, no matter what you hear on your favorite cable news network, this is not the most important or contentious election in American history and the nation is certainly not "more divided than ever". It's another Presidential election between two perfectly fallible human beings who are ignorant of many things, and we do have these elections like clockwork. We will do it again in four years, and the media will doubtlessly describe that, too, as the most important election in our history, as if our very lives hinge on the outcome.

A certain percentage of voters believe that the sheer power of their faith in Obama will somehow grant him the power and the wisdom to solve all their problems, a fallacy that would quickly be dispelled by a good civics course. In truth, real reform and good governance requires constant vigilance from an informed electorate that realizes the Presidency is only one piece of the puzzle, not faith in "change" or "experience" or any other buzzword a campaign pays to place on television. If government is full of hypocrites or sell-outs, it's primarily because we don't pay enough attention to stop electing them.

Jeffrey Kuhner, writing for the Washington Times, fears the end of days for individual liberty and free markets.

New Deal-Great Society liberalism has put America on the path to creeping socialism. The Democrats are now on the verge of completing it. A socialist America will be a poorer, weaker America. More importantly, it will spell the end of American exceptionalism - the experiment of a free people in constitutional self-government.

Once that happens, there will be no turning back. There will be a conservative movement after an Obama victory. However, it will be one fighting a desperate, rear-guard action. Like the conservatives in Canada or Western Europe, the question will no longer be how to stop the statist juggernaut but how to manage it.

I don't believe that's likely to happen. Whether his promises are sincere or he's a closeted radical Marxist, there are going to be very practical limits to Barack Obama's political capital, because his party wants "change" that looks nothing like what voters are signing up for. He's going to be helpless to find a happy compromise, as there's clearly no mandate for socialist reforms: 84% of Americans prioritize economic growth over an "equitable" distribution of wealth. Democrats weren't elected to "give their ideas a chance", they were elected in the hopes that they might give the public's ideas a chance for once: right now, half of all Americans believe that this Congress, a Democrat-controlled Congress, is no better than a random sample from the phone book, and three quarters believe that their elected legislators don't even understand the bills they're passing.

To predict that the Democrats will massively overplay their hand in this environment is to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the next Pope will be a practicing Roman Catholic. They will confuse this for a mandate, and then they'll burn for it. The next few years are, ultimately, going to be about getting the GOP back on track.