The American Spectator

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The problem with the Movement is not in its constituent parts, but in its disassociation from actual officeholders. This plan, or something like it, would bridge that gulf.

Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator and an associate editor at The Washington Examiner.

Terence P. Jeffrey

No matter what conservatives write or say today, our movement will be defined in the coming months by where we stand and fight--because President Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Congress will give us plenty to fight against.    In my view, conservatives must always fight on three principled fronts: 1) for laws and cultural norms consistent with the Ten Commandments and the natural-law vision of the Declaration of Independence, 2) for limited government as defined by the U.S. Constitution, and 3) for a realistic foreign policy that, through the best moral and practical means, defends the liberty, security and prosperity of the American people.

George W. Bush often departed with conservatives on 2) and 3), embracing big-government programs such as No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug entitlement while pursuing the utopian idea that the United States should somehow go about “ending tyranny in our world.” 

President-elect Obama is unambiguously on the wrong side of all three fronts. 

He has vowed to sign the Freedom of Choice Act and repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, threatening the sanctity of life and the traditional family. Conservatives must fight him here. 

He is committed to enacting a constitutionally unjustifiable national health care plan that would lead to the socialization of medicine, diminish the self-reliance of the American people, and hasten the day when entitlement spending bankrupts the country. Conservatives must fight him here.

He declared, when campaigning for president of the United States in Berlin, Germany, that: “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.” Conservatives must fight all the naïve and internationalist impulses in Obama’s foreign policy.

And just as our movement will be defined by where we stand and fight, our political leaders will be defined by who fights with us.

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.

David Keene

Liberal pundits, analysts, and camp followers are already suggesting that Barack Obama’s victory on November 4 has forever changed American politics in ways that will make it virtually impossible for Republicans and conservatives to come back for a long, long time.

They have every right to celebrate, but they shouldn’t get carried away because we’ve all been there before. Barack Obama is only the second Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to win more than 50 percent of the vote. Jimmy Carter managed to do it by a hair in the post-Watergate election of 1976. After both of those elections, an earlier generation of pundits predicted the end of conservatism and of the GOP. In both instances, things ended badly for those celebrating the demise of the right as Republican candidates retook the White House in 1968 and 1980.