It was a rough and bitterly disappointing week
for conservatives with the re-election of Barack Obama. After all,
many conservatives had reason to believe that Mitt Romney would be
in 2012 what Ronald Reagan was in 1980. Instead Romney ended up
with fewer votes than John McCain received in 2008. Obama was no
Jimmy Carter. This resulted in both record levels of smug amongst
liberals and the depths of despair amongst conservatives. This
despair was perhaps best
summed up by Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review
Online in an essay appropriately titled, “Why I
Despair”:
In 1980, when faced with a set of policies that demonstrably
hadn’t worked and a president who wanted to take America leftward,
America chose a different path; in 2012, it doubled down. That says
a lot about a people. The central problem, then, is not that Obama
will be president for the next few years, but that the American
people — knowing him — chose to reelect him….That this was not a
clear-cut repudiation of the president should sound the alarm.
I was certainly not immune from this despair. Following the
election I
wrote that “conservatives must recognize that the American
electorate has changed and that 1980 has come and gone, never to
return.”
While it could be said that America once again got the President
it deserved, conservatives must resist the temptation to embrace
this argument. The simple reason for this is that conservatives
can’t give up.
Not now, not ever.
Let me put it this way. What if conservatives had decided to
pack it in after Barry Goldwater won only six states in 1964? Well,
it’s quite simple. If conservatives had given up in 1964, Ronald
Reagan would never have triumphed in 1980. The last thing we should
be telling young conservatives is that it’s all over and that this
country isn’t worth the fight anymore. I hate to say that this is
for the children but this is about the future. What kind of example
would we be setting if we threw in the towel, took our ball, hung
our heads and went home?
That doesn’t mean we should be under any illusions that things
are going to be easy over the next four years. They won’t be and it
may very well not be for many years. It also doesn’t mean
conservatives won’t have tough choices to make. We conservatives
are going to have to choose our battles wisely. The course of
choosing those battles will no doubt be bruising. But as the old
saying goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
The upside of this is that the liberal euphoria over Obama’s
re-election will recede. If America continues to lose the respect
of it allies, the fear of its enemies and if the economy continues
to stagnate while the deficit continues to increase, Obama’s legacy
is that he will have spent eight years in the White House blaming
George W. Bush for his failures while presiding over the decline of
the greatest country in the world. Since President Obama is
unwilling to accept the responsibility for a mess of his own making
that means someone else is going to have to clean it up because
that mess will still be here after he leaves office in January
2017.
While his policies will leave America worse off than when he
took office there will be life in America after Barack Obama. While
his policies may very well transform America beyond recognition it
must be said that America is far more than the sum of the cult of
personality that is Barack “I…Me” Obama. No man, no President is
forever.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama will be in the Oval Office for
another term. If one is need of inspiration then consider the words
of 17th century English poet John Dryden, who
wrote:
Fight on, my merry men all,
I’m a little wounded, but I am not slain;
I will lay me down for to bleed a while,
Then I’ll rise and fight with you again.
And if that doesn’t work for you then we can always look to what
George Gipp said to legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne on his
deathbed (as famously portrayed by
Ronald Reagan in Knute Rockne, All American):
Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are
wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there
with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.
Well, America is surely up against it and there’s no guarantee
conservatives will win. But one thing I know for certain is that
conservatives can’t win one for America unless we go in there with
all we’ve got. So don’t give up.
