Quin Hillyer, Spectator.org

 

Conservatives may not realize just how difficult it might be to recover from this week's elections.

 

The day after the big defeat, the conservative chatter everywhere was about how the "movement" and the Republican Party (two different things) could finally unshackle themselves from the bad old habits that brought them down, and about how the ability to draw a sharp contrast with the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate would allow us to focus attention, rally the faithful, and re-storm the castle in 2010 and 2012.

 

Fat chance.

 

Too many conservatives think we've seen all this before -- in 1964 and 1974 and 1992 -- and that we know how to handle it. Fly, meet ointment: We're not dealing with the same sorts of opponents. These New Alinskyites who are taking over the White House, combined with the most leftist congressional leadership in memory, will not let us play by the same rules under which conservatives recovered from those earlier debacles. They will try to drastically tilt the playing field, seed our side of the field with land mines and, in short, rig the process to make it next to impossible for the political right, or Republicans, to recover. And they are likely to succeed in at least some of these designs. Read article.

 

Michael Barone, Rasmussen Reports.com

 

Obama ran a skillful campaign. Just as he capitalized on Hillary Clinton's weakness in party caucuses (she won more votes and delegates than he did in primaries), so in the general election he used his unprecedented ability to raise money by breaking his promise to take federal funds and by disabling the address verification system that would have screened out many illegal credit card contributions.

 

Such actions by a Republican, as Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz has argued, would have gotten scathing coverage from mainstream media. Not so for Obama. His campaign outspent McCain's vastly on ads and organization in target states. That probably switched 1 percent or 2 percent of the vote in five key states -- Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Indiana -- which meant that Obama won a solid 364 electoral votes rather than a Bush-like thin majority of 278. All of which shows a certain ruthlessness. But ruthlessness is a useful quality for a president (see Roosevelt, Franklin; Reagan, Ronald).

 

Do Obama and the Democrats have a mandate? Obama got a larger percentage than any other Democrat since 1964, and Democrats have congressional majorities comparable to those in Bill Clinton's first two years. But their policies of protectionism and greater taxes on high earners seem ill-suited to a country facing a recession. Read article.

 

Oliver North, Townhall.com

 

 President-elect Barack Obama said on election night that "change has come to America." Though the next commander in chief has yet to announce exactly how he will do it, he clearly intends to change the commitments, capabilities and cost of America's military.

 

Let's hope that before he pulls the plug on the "Land Between the Rivers" the new commander in chief will listen carefully to the counsel of Gens. David Petraeus and Ray Odierno in Iraq and David McKiernan in Afghanistan. Making decisions now about force dispositions after inauguration may well placate his far-left base but could well prove disastrous for the nation.

 

Pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq would "save" $10 billion per month. Further "savings" can be found by cutting production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-22 Raptor, Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, the V-22 Osprey and the DDG-1000 destroyer. Converting the national missile defense system back to a basic research program, eliminating two Air Force fighter wings, and putting a naval carrier strike group in mothballs would "save" hundreds of billions more. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Service Committee, has called for a 25 percent reduction in the Pentagon's budget -- about $150 billion -- and said, "We don't need all these fancy new weapons."

 

Any of these cuts will have the effect of seriously reducing U.S. defense capabilities. One parochial example: The V-22 Osprey is programmed to replace all of the U.S. Marines' 40-year-old CH-46 helicopters. Without the Osprey, Marines will have to walk to the next gunfight. Read article.

 

Dick Morris, Vote.com

 

If ever there was an election that was not worth winning, it was the contest of 2008. While it was hard-fought on both sides, had McCain won, it might have spelled the end of the Republican Party. As it is, the party is well-situated to come back in 2010 and in 2012, if it learns the lessons of this year.

 

Simply put, all hell is about to break loose in the markets and the economy. The mortgage crisis will likely be followed by defaults in credit card debt, student loans and car loans. We will probably be set for two years of zero growth, according to economists with whom I talk. And the federal efforts to protect the nation from the worst of the recession will probably lead to huge budget deficits and resulting inflation. We are in for stagflation that could last for years.

 

Had McCain won, he would be the latter-day Hoover, blamed for the disaster that unfolded on his watch. Now it is Obama's problem. With the Republicans suffering a wipeout in congressional elections (although not as bad as they feared), the ball is now squarely in the Democratic court. Good luck!

 

If Obama raises taxes, the situation could get even worse. Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

Joe Biden said Barack Obama would have his inexperience tested within his first six months. The Russians waited all of two hours before vowing to target our missile defense sites in Poland. Let the testing begin.

 

In his first state of the nation address, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 Iskander missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad situated between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.

 

Their purpose is to target our missile interceptors that are scheduled to be based there to defend against Iranian missiles. "The Iskander missile system will be deployed in Kaliningrad to neutralize, when necessary, the missile shield," Medvedev said. Read article.

 

Emmett Tyrrell, Townhall.com

 

Obama's seminal victory marks a major moment in the nation's history. It is fundamentally his accomplishment -- for minorities and multi-ethnics, for the meek and humble, for the nation. He merits the highest commendation and praise. Only in the continuing experiment that is America, the great good land, could his victory in such proportion have been even imagined, let alone achieved.

 

A stream of election-related observations . . .

 

Many factors contributed to Obama's win: Iraq, President Bush's unpopularity (though at a favorable level well above the pitiful 9 percent of the Democratic Congress), an economy circling the drain; Republican ethical, intellectual, and political failures that left Republicans hard-pressed to present as better than Democrats. Republicans proved unable to offer a credible, coherent strategic message. The campaign of John McCain found itself insufficient and tactically overmatched.

 

Yet probably no other Republican could have done better -- neither Giuliani nor Romney nor Thompson nor Huckabee. Read article.

 

Marilyn Penn, Political Mavens.com

 

For Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency was nothing less than the final end to the Civil War:

 

 “…..despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism - despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act - the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.”

 

This statement sadly reflects more of Friedman’s liberal pathology than a true understanding of this country’s attitude towards people of color. For the past sixty years, white people have fought and died for the civil rights of blacks, ensuring that nowhere else in the world did they have the same opportunities as they obtained right here in America. In our “all white” Republican party, there have been two black secretaries of state. Black people have been elected congresspersons, senators, mayors, governors and judges; two have been appointed supreme court justices, many have become generals in the Armed Forces.

 

There are black CEO’s of multi-national corporations; a black billionaire who is the most powerful talk show host in the history of television; a black movie star who has consistently been number one at the box office - all in a country where blacks represent twelve percent of our population. Our new first couple elect both attended Ivy League universities and Harvard Law School a generation ago. The advances made by the black middle class in the past fifty years have been remarkable; their achievements in politics, the military, athletics and the arts have been similarly outstanding and yet, for Mr. Friedman, there could be no closure to the Civil War until Obama time. Read article.

 

Gerard Alexander, NRO.com

 

Based on the election results, can we all agree on a few things?

 

Can we agree that George Bush and Dick Cheney did not know all along where Osama Bin Laden is hiding? Can we agree that there were no other “October surprises” either? Also, can we agree that the Administration obviously did not undermine the rights and institutions required for free elections? Left media outlets like the Nation have run many stories over the past few years, some by distinguished scholars, claiming that the Bush Administration has subverted the Constitution, undermined free speech, and even imposed a creeping totalitarianism on America. Can we agree that such narratives about Republican political machinations, dirty tricks, and authoritarianism are paranoid fantasies that aren’t really useful for understanding American politics?

 

Can we agree that Americans are not as bigoted as race theorists say they are? We have been primed for years to expect African-American candidates to under perform on election day compared to their white counterparts and to what white voters tell pollsters. But every four years, a crew of political scientists also tests models that forecast presidential elections.

 

Most of these models assume that the economy is the decisive influence on voters. This year, almost all the models predicted that the Democrat would win by a few points. Read article.

 

Debra Saunders, RasmussenReports.com

 

In the end, American voters serve as the great equalizer. When one party goes too far, voters snap the leash, as they did on Tuesday.

 

I still maintain that John McCain was the better presidential candidate, but I can't blame swing voters for rejecting a party that had lost touch with the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans, and instead deciding to take a chance on the forward-looking Barack Obama. Thus history is made.

 

And the stale GOP leadership deserves to be history. Take Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who was convicted on seven felony violations of federal ethics laws in a trial that paraded before the world a man utterly corrupted by power, and -- worse -- so arrogant that he believed he could convince a jury that a $2,700 Brookstone massage chair that sat in his home for seven years was a loan, and that he was clueless that $250,000 in home improvements were done on someone else's dime. Read article.

 

A.M. Siriano, Canada Free Press.com

 

On election day it occurred to me that one good thing about the prospect of Barack Obama in the White House was its answer to my curiosity. Fearing what happened to the proverbial cat, I cast my ballot for John McCain.

 

It required no great imagination to see that McCain would indeed be “more of the same” of Bush-style politics, with the probable benefit of his predilection for wielding the power of the veto pen against big spending. I’m one of those few in the low 30 percentile who approve of George W. Bush, who believe he has made for a very good president, despite his many flaws (as any leader is sure to have). So envisioning a new, and reformed, Republican presidency that favored smaller government, a strong hand in the war against jihadists, and a free market that remains free—I was good with all that. I knew what to expect with John McCain…

 

Obama was something else entirely. Our two-year introduction to this dynamo from Chicago taught us little about him, and what we managed to find out—no thanks to a sycophantic media—wasn’t exactly comforting. The man we heard speaking so coolly didn’t match the man we were digging out of the inner workings of the notoriously foul Chicago political machine. The more bad stuff that appeared, the more curious I became. The more strenuous his self-revisionism, the more I wanted to see who this man would become.

 

My curiosity now has a chance to be satisfied. The Left—a block that has obviously gained supremacy in America, even nabbing many Republicans—quickly created their Obama-as-Savior version of the man, and it is this image that captured the hearts of Americans, allowing the meaningless phrase “Change We Can Believe In” to actually stick. It is this image that rendered people’s concerns about his character as insignificant. Those who voted for Obama voted for a savior, whether they want to admit it or not. Read article.

 

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

 

Now that Barack Obama has vanquished John McCain, he faces a much greater foe: Democrats on Capitol Hill. They've humbled the last two Democratic Presidents -- and with their enhanced majorities next year, they'll be out to do it again.

 

Mr. Obama may appreciate the threat, because yesterday he offered Clinton White House veteran Rahm Emanuel a job as his chief of staff. But even that savvy, relatively sane liberal will have difficulties grappling with the fearsome committee chairmen and liberal interest groups that did so much to sabotage Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Meet the President-elect's real opposition:

 

David Obey. The Appropriations Chairman wants to slash defense spending as a money grab for more social programs and entitlements. Fellow spender Barney Frank recently added that a military budget cut of 25% was about right. A military crash diet wouldn't leave the funds for the surge in Afghanistan that Mr. Obama advocates, and it's a sure way to hand the national security issue back to the GOP. Read article.

 

The Rightosphere Copes With Defeat

John Hawkins, Pajamas Media.com

 

Conservatives have a deep distrust of polling agencies.

 

Therefore, they tend to simply disregard unpleasant poll numbers. This often causes a lot of conservatives to get the wrong idea about what’s going to happen in an election — and the blogosphere is not immune to that sort of thinking.

 

As late as October 27, 53% of right-of-center bloggers believed John McCain was going to win the election.

 

Clearly, that proved to be wishful thinking. With so many conservatives thinking McCain was going to win, you’d think the howling would have been unearthly after Obama’s victory. There should be conservatives threatening to move overseas, on medication, heading off to the psychologist, and non-stop attacks on the American people for being so stupid. Why not? After all, that’s what the left did after their loss in 2004.

 

And yet, the most common reaction across the right side of the blogosphere was either a congratulations to Obama, a recognition that having the first black president was a historic moment for America, or some combination thereof.

 

Beyond that, there was a real sense of the need to get back to work rebuilding the conservative movement to get ready for 2010 and, naturally, a dread of what the Democrats may do to the country over the next four years. Read article.

 

Andrew Ian Dodge, Pajamas Media.com

 

Barack Hussein Obama is the president-elect of the United States of America. The press, Hollywood, and the rest of the world will be in their element celebrating this “historic” outcome and looking forward to change, however that might manifest itself.

 

However, it is not all champagne and kisses for everyone. And no, I am not talking about Republicans, capitalists, or Israel. I can think of one group, possibly even worldwide, who will have mixed emotions no matter who they wished to win.

 

Of whom do I speak?

 

The comics of the world are of whom I speak. Based on past performance none of them has the stomach, the courage, or the inclination to make even one major gag at the expense of Obama. They have had their way with Bush, Cheney, McCain, Palin (in extremis), and, of course, Hillary Clinton. Saturday Night Live and comedy clubs across the land have been filled with comedians doing their best to mock all politicians — all but Obama.

 

So what are these poor comics going to do now? Are they going to stop doing political comedy altogether? Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, JWR.com

 

Now that all that business is settled, we can move on to something important — the Campaign of '12.

 

Picking candidates four years out is a dinner-party exercise, more fun than Trivial Pursuit but no more enlightening than spin-the-bottle. Nevertheless it's what Washington groupies and junkies do. There's the delicious prospect of what will inevitably be called — gasp! — "a cat fight." Sarah Palin vs. Hillary Clinton. Yum, yum.

 

This assumes that (a) Gov. Palin wants a career in national politics and has caught an incurable case of Potomac Fever; (b) Barack Obama will reveal himself to be the sweet-talking, seductive empty suit with a feel-good speech for every occasion but maybe a one-reel wonder for all that; and (c) Hillary Clinton didn't really mean it when she said the chances of her trying again are approximately zero. Even a cautious bettor will be tempted to go for this trifecta. Hillary has only to watch and wait, to see whether Mr. Obama is headed for Mount Rushmore or to the dustbin, where history consigns honey-tongued pretenders. Read article.

Print This E-mail This

Share It: