Posted by
Patrick "Sarge" Murray on Monday, November 17, 2008 11:00:00 AM
This was supposed to be an election with a record-setting voter turnout. Extra emphasis is to be placed on “supposed,” especially when the actual numbers don’t bear that out. Obama’s total vote count was 64.84 million compared to McCain’s 56.16 million votes. That adds up to about 121 million votes. Compare those figures to the election returns of 2004, where Bush-43 garnered 62 million votes and Kerry received 59 million tallies, and whaddya know, both respective vote totals are roughly the same. So much for this allegedly huge turnout that the drive-by media has been hitting us over the head with for the past month!
So, if there was no “largest turnout in history” or some such garbage, how does one account for such results? Obviously, more swing voters sided with the Democrats this time. The “undecided,” independent voters pay less attention to candidates’ ideology and more towards events. As things turned out, a slight majority of swing voters did not care about B. Hussein Obama’s past affiliations (Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi), and were paying attention to the stock market and the housing bubble having burst, and somehow blamed President Bush for the whole mess. They voted for generic “change,” not entirely understanding what this “change” might actually entail.
But the swing voters having been misled by events and deceptive advertising probably would not have been an issue had more fundamental problems been addressed earlier on, namely the flawed nature of McCain’s candidacy in particular and the Republicans’ perfidies in general. Simply put, too many Republican voters stayed home. The question becomes, “why?”
The properly discerning conservatives understand that if you don’t vote for Republicans, Democrats, with their machine-like interest group systems in place, will always have a large turnout. Certain groups will always vote for Democrats because the Dems provide them with tax-funded goodies or leftwing policies that most of these groups like (abortion, minority set-asides, gay and other pervert-friendly social engineering legislation, environmental restrictions for the enviro-socialists, you name it). At the very least, the Republicans can act as a dam that can hold back these liberal-leftist tides that could crush/drown our society. But if enough perfidies are committed by this party that is supposed to favor limited government, the base will become demoralized and cease to support the GOP. These folks would certainly not pull the lever for the Democrats, but they just will not vote for the Republicans; they will stay home as a means of “disciplining” the Republicans, thus ensuring victory for the Dems and allowing for liberal-leftist policies to rule the day.
Many of these “perfidies” include lots of Republicans in Congress trying to mimic Democrats with “me too” policies that were watered-down versions of the opposition’s. The out-of-control spending that happened on the Republicans’ watch is one of the most sterling examples. Furthermore, both Bush-41 and Bush-43 have made it hard on Republicans by trying to modify conservatism away from its basic, core message of limited government, economic liberty and robust foreign policy. Bush-41 immediately tried to compromise Reagan’s good works with his “kinder, gentler nation” baloney. Then along came our current president with his “compassionate conservatism” mullarky. Such climates bred a perfect environment for many weak-kneed Republicans to wander off the ideological reservation and engage in their own nest-feathering, either to buy off votes, or to try to make themselves look good in front of the drive-by media or Washington elites.
Which brings us back to John McCain. Throughout George W. Bush’s entire presidency, McCain’s senatorial tenure seemed to be marked by posturing as a “maverick,” trying to ingratiate himself to the drive-bys at the expense of the party in general and Bush’s presidential agenda in particular. As Star Parker pointed out in a recent column, as soon as a president is inaugurated, it is critical for him to demonstrate he is a leader, for him to consolidate his political power, and move his agenda forward. George W. Bush was hamstrung in this regard in two ways, one being the liberals still nipping at his heels for a supposedly “stolen” election, thus denying him the political honeymoon that most presidents get in their first few months in office. The other was John McCain, who was preventing fellow Republicans in Congress from going in lockstep with their new president because of his myopic obsession with “campaign finance reform,” another ploy to suck up to the leftwing media at the expense of the party and the president’s agenda.
As things have turned out, McCain has been burned by the fire he himself started. Carol Platt Liebau offers four hard lessons for the Republicans as we move forward. One is that “campaign finance reform” will always favor liberal Democrat candidates. These new laws that McCain himself advocated end up stifling competing voices against the onslaught of leftist-oriented news from the drive-bys, meaning that many independent voters rely on news organizations more than ever before: advantage, Democrats. Another hard lesson is that this “maverick” shtick will only take you so far. Being a “maverick” is great when you can get brownie points from the liberal drive-by media by making the president of your own party look bad with initiatives like the “Gang of 14” and cap-and-trade regulations that will make it more difficult for us to be economically competitive with the rest of the world. But when you yourself are running for president against a Democrat candidate, all that fawning press coverage instantly evaporates, leaving you to answer to the Republican base that you’ve done your best to alienate for the past eight years. At that point, you need the base more than they need you. Some are willing to forgive your perfidies of the past because the alternative -- a pseudo-Messianic figure who is all style, zero substance, and very left-wing – is less palatable than bile mixed with hemlock. But others in the base will never forgive your apostasies, and that portion will simply stay home on Election Day, leaving you – and the country – at the mercy of hoards of leftist minions dutifully showing up at the polls.
As we move forward, I would add a fifth lesson to Mrs. Liebau’s four: in an electoral climate as polarized as ours is, the key to victory is turnout. As we’ve seen in 1992, 1998 and now in 2008, conservative Republican voters will not show up and help campaign for candidates simply because there is an “R” to the right of their names: they have to demonstrate fealty to conservative principles. Conservatives are the ones who do all of the heavy lifting in the party, and if we are betrayed with “maverick” policies, no one else in the party has the guts – or the strength – to pick up the slack (Mrs. Liebau hit the nail on the head when she noted that a maverick is ultimately a party of one). Perhaps that was why there was more enthusiastic support for McCain’s VP nominee than for his own candidacy!
It would not hurt to be more diligent in nominating someone who is less of a “maverick” during the presidential primaries 2012. Doing so will ensure us a stronger turnout come the general election four years from now.