PoliticalHeresy

Face the facts:
Barack Obama is President-elect.
The democrats gained 5 seats in the senate and roughly 17 in the house.

Where do Republicans go from here?
I hear whining and moaning about how Socialism has officially come to the United States and how the outcome of this election changes everything.  In all honestly, they might be right, but it is NOT because we elected Obama as president.  Let me be clear about this.  I wish things had gone differently yesterday, but they did not.  However, the saving grace in all of this was the congressional results.  The democrats did not secure the 60 seats that were needed to ram through their agenda without the republicans!

When Obama becomes president, it will be on his shoulders to figure out how to govern most effectively.  The one thing that can be gleaned from watching how he ran his campaign is that this is a man who knows how to hide his liberal stripes when he has to.  He is a slave to public opinion.  All of his career, he has flipped and flopped his positions on issues to please those with whom he is the closest.  This is not an admirable trait in a man who should be known for his backbone of steel, but it might be a glimmer of hope for those mired in dispair.   

He also knows that in order to be a successful president, he needs to keep himself positioned to be reelected in 4 years.  This will most certainly lead to a tempering of his liberal agenda in order to appease his supporters in the center.  Don’t get me wrong, there are many reasons why this man’s judgement is a cause for alarm, but we are still Americans and we still get our say.

As recently as the bailout only a month ago it was quite clear that if we as Americans deeply care about any particular issue, we can have a strong impact on the outcome.  Not only republicans, but democrats in the House stood in opposition to a bailout bill that was being pitched as the best thing since sliced bread by both president and senate.  They are still our reprsentatives…up for reelection every 2 years.  You’d better believe that they will listen if a majority of their constituents stand up to them.  We still have our voice.

No one knows what Obama will do over the next 4 years as President, but what you can count on is that he doesn’t want this to be one and done.  With congressional elections 2 years away and surely an almost immediate begin to his next campaign and with many major challenges facing our country immediately, Obama will truly have to show that he is the One in order to get even a handful of his ideas enacted…something he has never been good at.  His inexperience might be the republican’s saving grace on domestic issues.

Although it might hurt for a while, hopefully this is the low-point of conservatism and out of this will emerge a more clear, focused and Reaganesque GOP.  Get over your disappointment and make sure the representatives know that we’re the ones who gave them their jobs and we’re the ones that can take it away.