Common Sense Political Thought

First of all, I’m still angry. When I see the pictures of people dancing in the streets following Barack Hussein Obama’s victory, it seems like personal gloating. When I see pictures of people dancing in the streets in foreign countries, I get even angrier.

But anger won’t last through what we must hope is only four years of the Obama administration; anger has to be replaced with something more positive and more useful, determination, determination to do what we can to reverse this defeat in 2010 and 2012.

Senator John McCain was gracious in his concession, as was Senator Obama in his victory speech. He attempted to reach out to those of us who voted for Senator McCain, but that’s something that all winning candidates do; the real proof comes when we see what he actually does as president.

And, as much as I hate to say it, he will be our president. I was critical of some of our friends on the left who ranted that “George Bush wasn’t their president,” and I won’t be so hypocritical as to do the same thing in reverse.

I have already written some rather intemperate things in the wake of the election. I meant everything I said, but things written in anger must pass when anger passes. And the fact is, we do have to give the incoming president a chance, whether we want to do so or not, because the American people will give him a chance. If we continue with the bitterness that followed this terrible election defeat, we will get nothing done: it will empower our friends on the left, because they will be able to use it against us — as they used the Clinton impeachment against us — and it will make our efforts to try to frustrate Mr Obama’s policies less effective.

The Republicans led by Newt Gingrich showed the way in 1993 and 1994. The personal attacks against President and Mrs Clinton never worked, but when the Clinton Administration’s policies were at variance with what he promised during the campaign, Republicans gained a real advantage, one which led to the stunning Republican victories in the 1994 elections. The result was not only a Republican controlled Congress, but a Clinton presidency pushed toward a centrist government because it had to accommodate the Republicans.

This means picking our battles. Not everything that the next president wants to do will be wholly unacceptable; we need to figure out what we really can tolerate, and not waste effort fighting those things. This does two things: it saves our strength for the issues on which we really do have to fight, and it creates the image of Republicans being bipartisan when the Obama Administration’s policies are reasonable.

And we certainly have image repair work that needs to be done.

My first suggestion is to stop sniping at Mr Obama before his inauguration, unless he does something particularly bad or publicly breaks a campaign promise. We should not work against his administration nominees unless someone particularly repugnant is chosen; those we have to fight.

We will have plenty of battles that we’ll need to fight, but the American people, the people who just gave him a solid majority of their votes, are not going to appreciate petty sniping.