The American political scene on both sides of the aisle is inhabited some relatively shallow individuals in their understanding of the world. To most Republican operatives, the problem in this election is obvious: The Republican Candidate lost. The solution will equally obviously involve some way in which the Republican candidate ends up winning.
There are many hare-brained proposals out there on how the GOP can find its way back to success that involve various compromises of principle. We need to become a party that favors rewarding illegal aliens for breaking our countries laws, we need to become more socially liberal so that we can attract non-religious voters, apparently that the GOP should operate on the theory that two birds in the bush is worth pursuing at the cost of the birds in the hand. Or that the GOP needs to become all things to all people.
Never mind that the GOP nominated the most liberal, big-time political chameleon in the entire field. Folks, if trying to be all things to all people really worked, Mitt Romney would have won in a landslide.
For this same reason, I categorically reject attempts to blame conservatives or principled voters for the defeat of Mitt Romney. They got their candidate nominated and it was their job to get enough votes for their candidate to win. If they failed to do that, they have no one to blame but themselves.
To these people, what the Republican Party actually stands for and what a Republican victory actually means doesn’t matter as much as the Republican winning whatever that is supposed to mean.
Then we have the purveyors of hare-brained schemes. There are the advocates of a third parties who say what our divided country needs is yet another political party. Logic seems to escape third party advocates. The reason they advocate for a third party is generally because they’ve lacked the intelligence, skill, and financial resources to change the Republican Party. So, apparently what we need is a political party that’s broke and where none of its leaders are possessed with any political skills. We all ready have both the Libertarian and Constitution Parties that serve as living monuments to the total unadvised nature of such proposals.
Then we have the concerns about fraud, which are not entirely illegitimate. However, there is no way isolated cases of fraud will change the outcome of this election. Obama won this election by votes in four states. And if there were a serious chance of proving massive fraud by recounts, don’t you think the guy who has spent the last five years of his life running for President might do something about it?
Then we have those who are calling for the dissolution of the union. Yes, even as most of us are celebrating Veteran’s Days, there are those who are eagerly circulating on Facebook and posting on Twitter about petition for dissolution of the Union. Yes, Millions of men and women have died for our country but let’s break it up because we don’t like the way the election went!
Let me be clear, there is no such thing as peaceful secession in 21st Century America. Sorry, if you don’t like that, but that’s the fact. We have been taught in schools that if there were ever another secession, it would be perfectly okay for the federal government to come down on the offending state like an avenging angel. Even if you think America would let states go, you can’t find a single state of the country where a majority want to break up the union.
The good news out of this election is that the results of an Obama victory are not nearly as apocalyptic as some of his most outspoken supporters believe. There probably will be some tax hike on people earning $200,000 or more a year. We better pray every day for the health, safety, and job satisfaction of every member of the Supreme Court because Obama could do great harm to our nation’s future and culture with more radical judges. And Obamacare is going to be very hard to get rid of, if not impossible. Nothing will be done to avoid the fiscal cliff because this president lacks the guts to actually do anything, so we’ll face an even sharper economic crisis in coming years.
However, for those who simply want an (R) to win, there’s good news. The second term of most presidents are usually much rockier than the first. And with the Democrats certain to have an epic primary struggle and not having an incumbent president, or a particularly deep bench, there’s a strong chance of a Republican victory in 2016 given that the election came down to 400,000 votes in four states.
However, the Obama presidency is not the problem. It’s a symptom of a much larger series of problems that grip our Republic. We must address these problems if our country to survive in a recognizable form at all in the next years. We’ll begin talking about those problems tomorrow.