Scary as Ever: Liberalism and the New Culture War

Most folks probably wouldn't quibble with Peter Beinart's argument in new his piece at Time, "The New Liberal Order." Public demands for activist goverment - a new liberal order - are high, and the public is optimistic that the coming Barack Obama administration will achieve great things in the years ahead.

But Beinart offers a flawed analysis of the cultural trends likely to shape the emerging era of American politics. Specifically, Beinart claims the culture wars are over and liberalism's won, for example:

Culturally, liberalism isn't that scary anymore. Younger Americans — who voted overwhelmingly for Obama — largely embrace the legacy of the '60s, and yet they constitute one of the most obedient, least rebellious generations in memory. The culture war is ending because cultural freedom and cultural order — the two forces that faced off in Chicago in 1968 — have turned out to be reconcilable after all.

The disorder that panics Americans now is not cultural but economic. If liberalism collapsed in the 1960s because its bid for cultural freedom became associated with cultural disorder, conservatism has collapsed today because its bid for economic freedom has become associated with economic disorder ....

Starting in the 1990s, average Americans began deciding that the conservative economic agenda was a bit like the liberal cultural agenda of the 1960s: less liberating than frightening. When the Gingrich Republicans tried to slash Medicare, the public turned on them en masse. A decade later, when George W. Bush tried to partially privatize Social Security, Americans rebelled once again. In 2005 a Pew Research Center survey identified a new group of voters that it called "pro-government conservatives." They were culturally conservative and hawkish on foreign policy, and they overwhelmingly supported Bush in 2004. But by large majorities, they endorsed government regulation and government spending. They didn't want to unleash the free market; they wanted to rein it in.

Perhaps Beinart thought he could develop a nice thesis using neatly contrasting poles of culture and economics in making the case for a comprehensive left-wing ascendency. But even his own citation of Pew survey data undermines the argument: These "pro-government conservatives" are not abandoning the political firmament of traditional culture. They are recognizing that "privatizing" conservativism indeed exposes families to the raw instabilities of markets, and this is at a time when the economic autonomy of the American state has grown uncertain in an age of both the globalization of markets abroad and the unrestrained growth of entitlement spending at home. With the imprudent monetary policies of the Greenspan Fed, combined with the Democratic Party's Fannie and Freddie interest-group liberalism, it's no surprise that market conservative have become frustrated with the lost promise of laissez-faire capitalist economics.

Perhaps many traditionalists simply want to slow down the aggregation of risk that's inherent in the current turmoil of the American economy.

To be sure, Beinart even concedes further down that in contrast to economic concerns, Republicans are "more unified on cultural issues."

You think?

As noted previously, one of the most important outcomes of the November 4th elections was the cultural brick wall erected to preserve traditional marriage in the states as between one man and one woman. Voters in California, Arizona, and Florida all approved gay marriage bans by wide margins, and in California some the most intense anti-establishment protests on record have erupted across the state.

Indeed, it turns out now that militant same-sex marriage factions are alleged to have declared "open season" on Mormons, and not just in California. The news this morning indicates that a suspicious white powdered substance has been found in letters sent to Mormon temples in Utah and California. The investigation is ongoing, but it appears that gay rights activists are escalating from threats of violence to actual terrorist attacks.

Recall that Yes on 8 backers have been savagely beaten, and a mob attacked an elderly woman carrying a cross at a pre-election campaign rally. Moreover, activists are targeting for censure the Yes on 8 supporters employed at majority-gay businesses and secular art institutions, forcing people off the job for excercising their rights to participate in the electoral process. As Melanie Morgan notes:

I guess it's time for Christians, Jews and African-Americans to prepare for the lions and jackbooted leftist thugs who plan to disembowel the Constitution and anybody who votes contrary to their beliefs.

But today's culture war goes far behind the totalitarianism of the No on 8 forces.

There have been a number of reports, for example, of violence directed against conservatives by supporters of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, college student Annie Grossmann was beaten for wearing her McCain-Palin campaign button to a post-election gathering. In Illinois, 8th grader Catherine Vogt was told to just "go die" - that she "should be killed" - when she wore a "McCain Girl" shirt as part of a class experiment on political tolerance.

Across the country, we see reports of a society that's turned its back on decency and basic values: We have a news report this morning indicating that a judge in Portland, Oregon, has ruled that cycling naked is a form of "symbolic protest." On Wednesday, an hours-old infant was abandondoned in the restroom of a McDonald's restaurant, a not so infrequent occurence. We have transgendered men who keep their feminine organs bearing children who will grow up confused and bewildered by the total obliteration of traditional defininitions of a man and woman. And we have a crisis in the urban schools, where, for example, a majority of high school students drop out before graduation (often because they are pregnant), and where the education of many disadvantaged students is shortchanged by a militant Afro-Centric curriculum.

The list goes on, but a final word is needed on the left's challenge to the sanctity of life in America.

The Democratic Party's 2008 abortion plank stated "we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine" the right for a woman to obtain an abortion on demand. President-Elect Obama has pledged to pass the Freedom of Choice Act upon taking office. Of course, Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion president-elect in American history. To date, Obama has fudged the issue, hoping to join pro-choice and pro-life forces in a deathly marriage of political convenience. But as we will see, nothing more illustrates the left's hostility to moral righteousness than its campaign to abandon the inalienable rights of the unborn.

On questions of political culture, Peter Beinart's "new liberalism" is as scary as ever. His cookie-cutter thesis of a Democratic realignment omits the crucial place of moral values in politics. If America abandons its tradition of moral truths and cultural exceptionalism, there won't be much point to having a two-party system anymore: The Orwellian new age will have arrived.

Self-Sacrifice of the Conservative Pro-Life Tradition

Michael Barone spoke this week at a meeting of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. A number of those in attendence walked out when he made an offhand yet politically incorrect comment on the feminist reaction to Sarah Palin:

A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans' vice presidential nominee, because "she did not abort her Down syndrome baby" ....

"They wanted her to kill that child. ... I'm talking about my media colleagues with whom I've worked for 35 years.”

Barone, a popular speaker on the paid lecture circuit, is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal coauthor of “The Almanac of American Politics."

About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Of course they walked out.

No leftist wants to be confronted by someone who's more than willing to call out extreme left-wing pro-choice fundamentalism and liberal intolerance of difference.

As I was thinking about this, I came across this article on a series of letters that Camille Paglia's readers sent her about the ideological and spirtual suffocation of modern feminism.

This letter, from Cindi Tanner, is simply inspirational:

I am stunned by your sensitivity to what a conservative pro-life traditional woman feels about old-school feminism and our rude exclusion from it -- until now. Sarah Palin does indeed give women like me a voice at last.

I am a 51-year-old, devout Latter-day Saint. I have been married 32 years and have five children and one grandson with a granddaughter on the way. My two sons are both Eagle Scouts. I am a published fine artist. My work with the Arizona State Game and Fish Department has been distributed to universities, schools and libraries throughout the state for many years. I have been a working mom as well as a stay-at-home mom.

I, like millions of women, have volunteered countless hours to church, school and community service. In addition to that, I have donated my time to many world-relief efforts through the humanitarian service arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On a more local level, I have taken meals to the invalid, packed relief boxes, sewed humanitarian kits, tied quilts for Kosovo, and organized collections for local charities, and I babysit for neighbors in a pinch. As an avid animal lover, I am known to rescue dogs and stray birds.

Women who deem themselves "liberated" have always grossly minimized women like me who feel great, genuine joy in being a wife and mother. In the workplace, I was brutally criticized by other women who felt my large family reflected poor planning and a drain on national resources. It didn't matter that my children could cook, sew, excel scholastically at school, perform community service, teach younger siblings music lessons and complete long chore lists while I was at work.

The work ethic of my very functional and social children then prompted my female co-workers to criticize me for being too harsh on them when I brought the Nintendo controllers with me to work (so the boys at home would read a book instead). They said I should let my children "have fun." If I mentioned a fun Sunday school lesson craft we did, I was criticized for being "religious." But later, the office manager asked me to draw visual aides for her church nursery class. She also asked me to teach her how to sew after I gave the office girls homemade Christmas gifts. The liberal women I worked with seemed uncomfortable with someone like me who cheerfully ignored their personal attacks and shared my talents with them when asked. I was never fully accepted. I didn't see them as obstacles to me being me; yet that is how they regarded me.

It seems many feminists talk large about the world family and our accountability to it, yet do little to personally follow through on that ideal. As a conservative woman, and especially as a conservative LDS woman, I invest quite a bit of myself in the world as a lifestyle choice. My family is no different. My oldest daughter spent a semester abroad as a literacy employee of the Mexican government, living at the base of an active volcano in a one dirt-road village. She voluntarily served an 18-month mission to Brazil. Later, she used her Portuguese language skills again in Mozambique, working with families directly affected by TB, malaria and AIDS. My husband and two sons all were volunteer missionaries for two years, serving the people of Japan, Ukraine and Mexico. The missionaries pay their own way and love the people and cultures that they serve for the rest of their lives.

Ours is hardly a myopic, sheltered or uninvolved view of our neighbors, our countrymen, and our world family. Our contribution to the larger society is unsung but quite alive and well. Thank you very much for your remarkable articulation of a force that should have been invited into a more flexible "sisterhood" a long time ago.

Respectfully yours,
Cindi Tanner

Read Paglia's response - she was deeply moved.

Great Expectations for Obama ... and the GOP

CNN reports new polling data finding two-thirds of Americans indicating that President-Elect Barack Obama "will make major accomplishments as president of the United States":

The public thinks it's likely that Obama will improve race relations, improve economic conditions, bring stability to the financial markets, make the U.S. safer from terrorism, reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil, reduce global warming, win the war in Afghanistan and remove U.S. troops from Iraq without causing a major upheaval in that country.

Whoa! No wonder some Obama staffers have been lowering expections for the Obamessiah!

Here's Gaius with more on that:

Soaring campaign rhetoric gets sucked into the intake of the jet engine of harsh political reality. This is one of the reasons I have been telling folks not to panic, not to start up a circular firing squad. Obama’s aides are clearly facing the harsh reality that Obama simply can not possibly deliver all that he promised. If the Republican party spends the next two years diligently building a strong, modern message based solidly in the bedrock principles of conservativism and runs very, very hard at the state levels, a huge turnaround can be made.

It is utterly certain that the Pelosi-Reid-Obama triumvirate will overreach - badly - and provoke a backlash. It is also utterly certain that Obama’s policies in the next two years will badly disillusion his true believers.

The next two years, concentrate at the state levels (this includes House and Senate), the two after that, aim higher. But first, get that message put together. And pull together as a group. I’m betting we’ll have plenty of disillusioned former Obama supporters hoping for a change real soon.

Sounds good, but that "pulling together as a group" part's going to be tricky.

County-Level Vote Data on Proposition 8

Here's the vote breakdown on Proposition 8 for Orange County, my home:

For other counties across the state, click here.

Look at the Orange County vote above. Notice how opposition to Proposition 8 - in lavender - is concentrated in South County liberal bastions, especially the Laguna Beach gay enclave and Aliso Viejo, as well as the Irvine area, with the University of California within that territory. Other than that, some of the more economically-challenged parts of the county to the north showed tremendous support for the Yes on 8 side.

Indeed, the city-by-city results show huge traditional majorities in towns like Santa Ana and Westminster (61.82 and 65.74 percent, respectively), which are ethically diverse communities, with a Latino majority in Santa Ana and a large conservative, anti-communist Vietnamese community in Westminster.

On the no side, only Laguna Beach recorded a larger majority, at 68 percent, and only three other cities recorded a bare majority vote in oppostion of the amendment (Costa Mesa, in addition to Irvine and Aliso Viejo, as note above).

What's striking, really, is that Orange County's more traditional working-class and minority communities reflected the larger trends across the state, for exampe, which included 70 percent of black voters supporting the Yes on 8 campaign.

Meanwhile, a huge web-based protest campaign is gearing up for a new round of protests this weekend, and the activists are getting a reputation for in-your face opposition.

At some point, the increasing radicalism of the gay-marriage movement will damage its own cause, and some of the episodes of activists calling black passers-by the "n-word" certainly presage the kind of racist totalitarianism that's inherent in the overwhelming affluent white gay constituency supporting same-sex marriage in California, with radical fringe groups like International ANSWER providing the organizational cells at the grassroots.

McCain Girl Told to Just "Go Die"

As readers know, many of the Obama cult shock troops are out surfing the web as PC commissars dictating demands of utopian post-partisan allegiance to "The One." Meanwhile, any diversion from political conformity is greeted with threats of violence. Here's an example from the eve of the election: "Tolerance Fails T-shirt Test":

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

"In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain," Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

"Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said," Catherine said.

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

"He said, 'You should be crucifixed.' It was kind of funny because, I was like, don't you mean 'crucified?' " Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be "burned with her shirt on" for "being a filthy-rich Republican."

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election. And I thought such politicized logic was confined to American newsrooms. Yet Catherine refused to argue with her peers. She didn't want to jeopardize her experiment.

"I couldn't show people really what it was for. I really kind of wanted to laugh because they had no idea what I was doing," she said.

Only a few times did anyone say anything remotely positive about her McCain shirt. One girl pulled her aside in a corner, out of earshot of other students, and whispered, "I really like your shirt."

There's more at the link.

This is some of the "positive progressive change" we're going to be dealing with for the next for years, at least.

Ultimate Nightmare: Sarah Palin and the Unhinged Left

We're just barely one week out from the presidential election and there's no better sign of the battle lines emerging for 2012 than Andrew Sullivan's utterly hysterical diatribe against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin this afternoon.

I've been observing the anti-Milky Loads delinking campaign, but for purposes of counter-mobilization I'm going to provide the link just once: "Why Palin Matters." To read Sullivan's essay is to witness a literal stream of consciousness of a chronic psychopathology whose affliction is clinically untreatable, and potentially dangerous to the larger society (borderline sociopathic).

I do not use this language freely, but there's nothing short of ghoulishishness to Sullivan's writing, a fundamental belligerence that leaves the transitive verb "demonize" stunningly impotent in explaining the enormity of Sullivan's psychological dislocation.

See for yourself, in any case:

Some readers think my continuing attempt to expose all the lies and flim-flam and bizarre behavior of Sarah Palin is now moot. She's history - they argue. Move on. I think she probably is history. Even Bill Kristol and his minions in the McCain-Palin campaign may not be able to resuscitate her political viability now. But even if she is history, she is history that matters.

Let's be real in a way the national media seems incapable of: this person should never have been placed on a national ticket in a mature democracy. She was incapable of running a town in Alaska competently. The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve. That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling. 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural "identity". Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again. And we have to find a way to prevent this from recurring.

It happened because John McCain is an incompetent and a cynic and reckless beyond measure. To have picked someone he'd only met once before, without any serious vetting procedure, revealed McCain as an utterly unserious character, a man whose devotion to the shallowest form of political gamesmanship trumped concern for his country's or his party's interest. We need a full accounting of the vetting process: who was responsible for this act of political malpractice? How could a veep not be vetted in any serious way? Why was she not asked to withdraw as soon as the facts of her massive ignorance and delusional psyche were revealed?

The Palin nightmare also happened because a tiny faction of political professionals has far too much sway in the GOP and conservative circles. This was Bill Kristol's achievement.

It was a final product of the now-exhausted strategy of fomenting fundamentalist resentment to elect politicians dedicated to the defense of Israel and the extension of American military hegemony in every corner of the globe. Palin was the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset: a mannequin candidate, easily controlled ideologically, deployed to fool and corral the resentful and the frightened, removed from serious scrutiny and sold on propaganda networks like a food product.

This deluded and delusional woman still doesn't understand what happened to her; still has no self-awareness; and has never been forced to accept her obvious limitations. She cannot keep even the most trivial story straight; she repeats untruths with a ferocity and calm that is reserved only to the clinically unhinged; she has the educational level of a high school drop-out; and regards ignorance as some kind of achievement. It is excruciating to watch her - but more excruciating to watch those who feel obliged to defend her.

Her candidacy, in short, was indefensible. It remains indefensible. Until the mainstream media, the GOP establishment, and the conservative intelligentsia acknowledge the depth of their error, this blog will keep demanding basic accountability.

That's a longer segment than I'd like to afford old RAWMUSLGLUTES, but this is so pathetic that the post could very well end up down the memory hole if some coherent editor at the Atlantic decides eventually to intervene for goodness' sake.

In something that should be unbelievable, but isn't, top hard-left blogger Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones, recognizes the depth of Sullivan's psychopathology, and then goes ahead and appauds it!

Andrew's obsession with Palin was often hard to take, and I sometimes wished I could reach through the screen and strangle him whenever he started talking about Trig Palin again. Still, aside from the "clinically unhinged" crack, I agree with all of this.

But that's not the end of it: Sullivan's post is getting the big huzzahs all over the radical leftosphere, as if this screed - this virtual-incitement to political violence - constitutes mainstream political debate and discourse.

As I've already noted a couple of times, the election of Barack Obama is just the beginning of a new culture war for America. The best example is seen in the mobilization of street unrest by the most hardline radical groups in America in an attempt to overthrow Proposition 8, the majority ballot measure in California that preserves marriage between one man and one woman. With the final racial barrier breached in the left's electoral storming of the White House, the Democratic Party's extreme fringe factions are launching a multi-pronged campaign to purge conservatives from the institutions of power - by any means necessary - across the U.S. political landscape.

So, never forget: Sarah Palin is the left's ultimate nightmare.

Andrew Sullivan is simply the most vociferously vocal symptom of a larger implacable movement seeking to wrench any inkling of "center-right" ideology from the heights of influence in the American state. The left wants nothing more than the utter destruction of the Alaska Governor. Once that's complete, the continued ideological escalation of the culture war will branch out from there, with further attacks on "Christianists," Mormons," to the Fox News "ministry of propaganda" and beyond.

Is it any wonder why conservatives have no interest in transcending partisan divisions to join hands in an essential surrender to the nihilism of the left's progressive ideology program?

Post-Partisan Obama Cult

Have you seen this freaky "post-partisan" website, "from 52 to 48 48 to 52 with love?"

This picture says it all for me:

Moonbattery nails it:

Here's how it works: if a centrist wins, they throw a four-year perpetual tantrum, amplified by their control of the media. If a leftist wins, we all join hands and sing Kumbaya. The war's over, everything's settled, we're all progressives now.

Guess again, moonbats.

About that photo: If perhaps she'd had an American flag up there I'd think about it...

Hat Tip: Maggie's Farm.

GOP Must Stay True to Core Values

I noted yesterday that the future of the GOP lies in packaging an attractive message that combines traditional social policy concerns with an economic message the rings true with the stressed middle class.

In an essay at today's Wall Street Journal, Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, makes the best case I've seen so far for the conservative path from the wilderness:

To regain a majority, Republicans must embrace core values with such conviction that Americans will welcome where Republicans will lead them in the future.

The first core value must be a pro-life agenda. Republicans must advocate for all life from conception to natural death. This is the decent thing to do. And there were 70 million white Evangelical voters on Election Day, 74% of whom voted for John McCain. The vast majority voted pro-life, not Republican. If the GOP turns away from a pro-life agenda, they will turn away from the GOP.

Evangelicals, a quarter of the electorate, cannot determine elections by themselves. Without them, however, Republicans face electoral oblivion.

A second core value must be a pro-family agenda. This agenda must include tax policies that revalue child-rearing (doubling the dependent child deduction, for example) and eliminating the marriage tax penalty. It should also promote parental school choice -- empowering all parents to make the choices concerning their children's education that currently only affluent parents are empowered to make.

Pro-life and pro-family agendas can appeal to minority voters in an increasingly diverse society. California, Arizona and Florida approved amendments banning same-sex marriage. They did so at least partially on the basis of African-American and Hispanic voters who "surged" for Barack Obama and then voted against same-sex marriage. In California (70%) and Florida (71%) black voters supported both traditional marriage and Sen. Obama overwhelmingly.

The third core value must be a diversity agenda that aggressively recruits ethnic minorities into significant involvement in the GOP. The 2008 Republican National Convention did not reflect America's ethnic diversity. Demographics dictate that this must change, and decency demands that it should. This must include a more proactive approach on immigration reform.

The fourth core value must be an economic agenda that demonstrates as much concern for Main Street and the average family's budget as it does for Wall Street and multinational conglomerates.

The fifth core value must be foreign and defense policies that protect the homeland and maintain our nation's historic commitment to human liberty as a God-given right for everyone -- not just those currently living in a free country. America must always be more than just a country. She is a cause -- and that cause is freedom.

I'm interested to see what folks like Ross Douthat think about this (see Jonah Golberg on these "self-styled reformers").

The key to Land's program is that he puts the protection of life first, and this is the fundamental driving principle that separates Republicans from the far-left secular humanist base of today's Democratic Party.

I will be returning to the Land program in future posts.

Obama to Escape Damaging Campaign Finance Audit

The Politico reports a genuinely disturbing story on campaign finance in the aftermath of Barack Obama's deceitful underground fundraising operations that propelled him to the White House.

President-Elect Obama's fundraising practices will not be audited because he chose to go without public financing (a system's designed to take corruption out of politics), while John McCain's campaign is looking to a long period of government auditing (go figure?):

Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Especially galling is the fact that existing suspicions of massive financial improprieties are focused on the Obama campaign, not McCain's:

Allegations that the Obama campaign was willfully allowing foreign donations and excessive donations blossomed in the conservative blogosphere and prompted the Republican National Committee to file an FEC complaint.

Seizing on Obama’s reversal on a pledge to accept public financing if his Republican opponent agreed to do the same, as well as his campaign’s refusal to voluntarily release the names, addresses and employers of donors who gave less than $200 each – a group that accounted for about half of the more than $600 million that the campaign had raised through the end of September – the RNC asked the FEC “to immediately conduct a full audit” of all of Obama’s contributions.

It’s very rare for a complaint to trigger an audit, campaign finance insiders say.

I wrote about this in a Pajamas Media essay, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud," where I concluded, "the Democratic nominee may now be running the biggest underground finance operation since President Nixon deployed the “plumbers” as his key operatives for CREEP in 1972."

No wonder some Democrats are worried about an Obama impeachment!

White Ethnic Class-Based Discrimination?

You can't make this stuff up!

It turns out there's something of a symposium on white privilege over at American Prospect, but Robert Farley really lays down the anectodal evidence for the white power elite:

At Patterson, we actually do line up thirty-five or so students and put them in suits, and it's really not all that hard to make educated guesses about social class. Since we cost quite a bit less than our competitor schools, we tend to have a considerable amount of diversity in class and social background. For starters, it's pretty easy to differentiate between someone who's comfortable in a suit and someone who's not. This isn't a 100% proxy for class, but it's an indicator, because people who are unaccustomed to wearing really nice clothes tend to look uncomfortable in them. You get more clues when you start talking to the students. A straight regional accent doesn't tell you very much, as we have more than a few well-off Southerners. But a lower class Southern accent is much different than an upper class, and in any case upper class Southerners will deploy the accent differently. With Northerners it's a bit different, but you can still find clues to class in the accent, speed of speech, and in the word choice. Finally, lower, middle, and upper class people talk about different things in different ways, even when the subject is international security. This has nothing whatsoever to do with how smart the students are; rather, it concerns the kind of discussions that they regularly have with their friends and families. Once you get to the resume and recommendation stage, the game really is up, because school and connections provide are a fantastic shorthand for class. Do you think that a Harvard education is 18 times better than a University of Oregon education straight on its merits? Assessments of class are never scientific and often aren't even really conscious, but I would guess that most people have some sense of the class background of people they meet without ever seriously investigating the subject.

But make sure you read the precious rest!

Poor Barack Obama!

He'll never, like über privileged George W. Bush, be able to "escape" the stain of race!

But no worries: Affirmative action queen Michelle Obama's to the rescue. Leave no quota behind!

Obama Voters Put Prop 8 Over Top

This is something I've covered quite a bit already, but Dan Walters' essay indicating that support for Barack Obama had the ultimate effect of lifting California's Proposition 8 to victory is worth cherishing for a moment:

Supporters of same-sex marriage rights are fuming over California voters' approval of Proposition 8, which would place a ban on such marriages in the state constitution – especially since in other respects voters showed a somewhat left-of-center bent, including a massive victory by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Ironically, however, a mathematical analysis of voting and exit poll data indicates very strongly that it was exactly that pro-Obama surge that spelled victory for Proposition 8.

When Proposition 8's passage first became apparent, it was widely assumed that hundreds of thousands of first-time or occasional voters had turned out to vote for Obama, then left the rest of their ballots blank, thus allowing more conservative voters to dominate ballot measures.

In fact, however, there was very little voting drop-off. There are still some late absentee and provisional ballots to be counted, but as of Monday, 10.96 million votes had been tallied in the presidential race and 10.85 million for and against Proposition 8.

The only conclusion, therefore, is that as Obama was running up a 2.6 million-vote victory over Republican John McCain in California – twice the margins by which Democrats won in 2000 and 2004 – a great many Obama voters were also voting for Proposition 8, sponsored by a very conservative religious coalition.

Proposition 8, in fact, garnered 1.6 million more votes than McCain received. And, it's apparent, many of those votes – enough to make the difference – came from African American and Latino voters drawn to the polls by Obamamania.

The implications of this are even more dramatic than they appear. As I noted earlier, in "Schwarzenegger Model is Disaster for GOP," the same minority constituencies that turned out for Obama may in future elections find more appealing the traditional social policy agenda of the Republican Party. This is especially true of Latinos, who went heavily for the GOP in 2004.

Time will sort out the full implications of this, but Walters' piece is more than just "bittersweet" news to Obamaniacs. This is a repudiation of the counter-culture wing of the Democratic Party establishment, in California no less!

The Left's Passionate Disrespect

Michael Reagan, the conservative radio host, has issued a manifesto for a "New Reagan Revolution," which declares a commitment to expose Democratic corruption, "making sure that no stone is left unturned, every dark corner is filled with light, and every illegal act is paid for with censure, impeachment, recalls, investigations, and jail time for every criminal we expose in Washington, D.C."

Matt Stoller is shocked! shocked! that Reagan is mobilizing for politics by other means so soon:

Anyone who thinks that the left is somehow equivalent to the right in terms of its commitment to anti-democratic norms is wrong. The left is passionate but ultimately respectful, the right does not believe that a Democratic President should be opposed through normal constitutional channels since Democrats are by their very nature criminals. It's almost a bit embarrassing; those on our side who claimed Bush should be impeached were roundly and are still roundly mocked by most Democratic leaders, even after eight years of radical lawless policies and torture planned by high level Bush officials in the White House. And yet, today, a conservative movement icon has called for impeachments of unnamed Democrats (though we can assume Obama is one of them), and the new administration hasn't even named a single cabinet member to even go through Senate confirmation, let alone taken office.

I've written a lot about the balance of grace between left and right, but note Patrick Edaburn's little experiment he performed as a commenter on two top partisan blogs, Daily Kos and Redstate. Edaburn was harassed as a commenter by both sides for dissenting from the party line, but he has special words for the Kos community:

The responses to my comments were divided between the reasonable but opposed and the outwardly hostile (IE using language that I can’t repeat here). In this aspect Red State did a bit better than Kos ....

However, the degree of censorship from the sites themselves were strikingly different. Both sites required registration to post comments.

When it came to Red State I was able to use the same account for as long as I wanted, at least from the point of view of the web masters. I did have to change once or twice because of trolls but otherwise my comments were not limited by the site.

By contrast, I had to re-register on Kos so many times I lost count. Once you started expressing a view that was not in line with the views of the web masters you were banned. I find this a very disturbing attitude for a site that quite properly condemned the Bush administration for their overreaching civil liberties restrictions.

Censorship? The left is ultimately more "respectful"?

At least Stoller's not cursing about it.

Veterans Day

Here's a couple of pictures from the Los Angeles Times' Veterans Day photo gallery:

Veterans Day began on November 11, 1919, and was first known as Armistice Day.

The Australian social democratic economist, John Quiggan, wants us to remember Veterans Day as "anti-imperialism day":

On this Armistice Day, let us remember all those who have died as a result of the crimes of the rulers of the world, and do our best to save more form [sic] dying.

Pure Marxist drivel, but at least Quiggan's got "The One" to cheer on - brought to you by people "who just wanted to live in peace."

John Lennon would be proud.

Obama's One-Term Presidency

My friend Chris McClure, blogging at the home page of U.S. Senator John Cornyn, makes an interesting point on the conflict between sound fiscal policies and demands for large domestic spending increases:

When social engineering agendas drive the legislative process, we see an imbalance enter into fiscal policy. Such imbalances can overload the ability of monetary policy to make corrections and keep the economy functioning properly. Over time, continued pressure for sustained economic growth while creating an overburden of debt, creates a situation in which significant corrections must occur. When such corrections are further influenced by corrupt practices and insufficient oversight, significant economic turmoil will be the result ....

The social agenda espoused by the Democratic Party, coupled with the re-distributive schemes of their nominee for the Presidency [now President-Elect], would cause dire consequences to our economy if enacted. The solution to our current woes is to shift spending away from an inefficient government and into the hands of the people who earned it. Government should return to the role of oversight and policy rather than attempting to nationalize our financial institutions.

Taking this further, James Pethokoukis argues that the economic crisis is so severe that Americans may not see much improvement in their finances over the next four years. Thus, it's quite possible that voters will grow tired of the "Obama malaise," and return the GOP to power:

That's right, the "O" in "Obama" may stand for "One Term." For starters, there's a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful. Not much debate about that. (Good chance the Democrats' two-election winning streak comes to an end.) And while voters may be somewhat patient for two years, patient for four years? Really unlikely. If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States -- be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without "Bush" for a last name. Once again a "change" election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.

Here's the political and economic math: Let's assume the current downturn turns out to be as painful as the 1990-91 recession. It's an apt comparison. As Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Gary Stern said earlier this year," The situation we confront today is reminiscent, in several salient ways, of the headwinds environment that prevailed in the aftermath of the 1990-91 recession."

Among those "headwinds" Stern referred to: an imploding real estate bubble, a construction bust, a banking crisis, and a credit crunch. Sound familiar? The nation's gross domestic product fell 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 1990 and 2.0 percent in the first quarter of 1991. But even after the economy started expanding again, the unemployment rate kept rising until it hit 7.8 percent in June of 1992 vs. a low of 5.2 percent in June 1990. Recall that in January of 1992, President Bush, running for reelection, told New Hampshire voters that the economy was in "free fall" even though the economy was later shown to have grown at a robust 4.2 percent during the first quarter of that year.

See, it takes a while for people to really perceive that an economy has turned around, especially if unemployment is high. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election on the economy ("it's the economy, stupid") even though GDP had been growing for six full quarters. According to Gallup, 88 percent of Americans thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" in October 1992 with some 60 percent saying the economy was "getting worse." Two years later, it was the Democrats turn to feel the brunt of widespread economic anxiety as the Republicans captured both the House and the Senate. Even though the economy had then been growing for 14 straight quarters and the unemployment rate was down to 5.8 percent, 72 percent of Americans still thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" and 66 percent though the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

That's right 3 1/2 years after the 1990-91 recession ended, the economy was still weighing negatively on voters and hurting the incumbent political party. Is it so hard to imagine, then, that three or four years from now voters will also be unhappy about the state of the economy and blame the party in power, the Obamacrats?

Paul Krugman proposed a range of New-New Deal economic and spending policies in yesterday's New York Times.

Name your Democratic Party big-government spending boondoggle, and it's there. Recall, of course, that by May 1939, Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, was complaining, "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Likewise, this year's fiscal stimulus tax rebate checks did nothing to slow the economy's slide toward recession.

Government can reform current regulatory institutions to eliminate corruption, and put a floor under collapsing credit markets; and government can keep taxes low to allow families to keep more of their own earnings and stimulate small-business expansion. But what we're seeing from the radical leftosphere, progressive party activists, and liberal media pundits is a gargantuan push for massive spending entitlements that will put both the New Deal and the Great Society to shame.

Leftist Ahistoricism Rehabilitates Bill Ayers

The economic crisis was the overriding electoral issue that propelled Barack Obama to the White House. Next to economic collapse, Obama's personification of racial change and oratorical uplift fueled a once-in-a-lifetime presidential campaign. With public opinion increasingly validating the GOP's claims of success in Iraq, the most important national security issue was off the table by fall 2008.

John McCain sought to convince the American people of the drastically unconvential background and character of "The One," but to no avail: The degree of crisis in the nation was more compelling than the irrefutable fact that the Democratic nominee was raised from an early age in radicalism, with Marxist mentors and Weatherground associates who worked closely with the Illinois Democrat to distribute million of dollars to hardcore activists and shake-down artists across Chicago's corrupt Democratic Party machine.

With the election, the left has been proclaiming the current era a "Democratic realignment" and a "progressive mandate for radical change."

While the many are focused today on the news that Barack Obama leaked his private conversation yesterday with President Bush to the press - which is seen as an effort to preemptively undermine the remaining days of the Bush administration - lower-level apparatchiks are continuing work on the propaganda campaign that charactized the netroots and leftist media's whitewashing of the Democratic nominee's opposition ideology and far-reaching radical ties.

Not only is ACORN now a "mainstream" group, but the unrepentent terrorist actions and ideology of William Ayers is being written off as a relic of the 1960s, according to this hard-left nihilist blogger:

... the whole attack on Ayers was absurd ...

And for as much as the attacks were vile, they were idiotic for the very reasons Ayers pointed out. The 60's are over. For a lot of people, the 60's are nothing but a mythical creation of the past. But they don't hold a real bond or message anymore. Even for the people who were there, it was forty years ago. Focusing on the events of 1968 to guide us is like people in that year focusing on the events of 1928 to guide them. It's absurd. It's laughable. It's stupid. And it was a large part of McCain's argument for why he should be president. What an idiot!

To understand this mindset is to understand the thinking of today's contemporary left. There are no real threats to American security; it's all manufactured fear. The campaign of domestic terror in the 1960s? It was all a giant misunderstanding: No one would get hurt. Yes, yes, brother! ... the Weather Underground is simply a relic of some mythical past, and deranged dog-whistle Republicans have been shown as hopelessly out of touch with the post-partisan zeitgeist embodied in the cult of Obamology.

William Ayers was a revolutionary terrorist in the 1960s. He never disavowed his campaign of violence against the country (indeed,he wished he could have done more), and he still uses his Weatherman days as a pedogogical tool to indoctrinate students to the glories of the anti-American, anti-imperialist movement.

We can look forward to more of this totalitarian revisionism in the year ahead.

The Obama Moment: Have We Overcome?

Jon Meacham's essay at Newsweek, "The Age of Obama," includes this interesting passsage:

A nation whose Constitution enshrined slavery has elected an African-American president within living memory of days when blacks were denied fundamental human rights—including the right to vote. Hyperbole around elections comes easy and cheap, but this is a moment—a year—when even superlatives cannot capture the magnitude of the change that the country voted for last Tuesday. "If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer," Obama told an adoring yet serious throng in Chicago's Grant Park. He alluded to the historic nature of the victory only indirectly. "This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations," he said. He did not need, really, to add anything to that: that he was saying the words was testament enough.

One of the most interesting questions going forward is: "Have we overcome"? Or, well ... can Michelle Obama now really be proud of her country?

I think so, but then the left won't have anything to rail against.

Hate Campaign Targets Churches in Prop 8 Aftermath

A radical left-wing protest group infiltrated Mount Hope Church in Lansing, Michigan, on Sunday.

The protesters, clad with pink scarves and carrying hatchet and sledgedhammers, stormed the church, yelling epithets and militant gay pride slogans:

The group also handed out fliers ....

“We specialize in confronting homophobia, transphobia and every and all other forms of oppression,” the fliers read. “We strive for the liberation of all people.”

Well, actually, here's this summary of the church's mission statement:

Mount Hope, for the record, is an evangelical, bible believing church whose members provide free 24 hour counseling, prayer lines, catastrophic care for families dealing with medical emergencies, support groups for men, women and children dealing with a wide variety of life's troubles, crisis intervention, marriage ministries, regular, organized volunteer work in and around the city, missions in dozens of countries across the globe, a construction ministry that has built over 100 churches, schools, orphanages and other projects all over the world and an in-depth prison ministry that reaches out, touches and helps the men and women the rest of society fears the most. They also teach respect for all human life and the Biblical sanctity of marriage as an institution between one man and one woman.

Meanwhile, bloggers, gay rights activists, and neo-Stalinist organizations have organized a boycott against the state of Utah, in response to the Mormon Church's sponsorship of California's Proposition 8.

As hard left blog-ringleader John Aravosis wrote earlier:

The Mormon Church has a long history of trying to forcefully impose its will, its religion, on others. Over the next few weeks and months, we're going to educate America about those efforts.

Uncoded, this means simply that the left plans an unprecedented campaign of hate and intolerance against a group that exercised its First Amendment rights to support a cause in which it believed.

Meanwhile, watch this video of Keith Olbermann, especially the passage at 2:30 minutes where Olbermann equates laws preserving traditional marriage with the enslavement of black Americans:

This is the sickest exploitation of the struggle for black equality I've ever seen.

As I've written before, same-sex marriage is not a civil right, and leftists push a false analogy when they compare African American civil rights to the creation of a gay marriage right.

As I've also noted, the developments this last week are demonstrating a new cultural war speading across the land. And as disgusting is the left's campaign of intolerance against a majority of traditional Americans, the inevitable backlash will set back whatever legitimate policy movement toward recognizing same-sex marriage in this country.

A Qualitative Realignment

About a month ago I asked, "Will 2008 Be a Critical Election?"

In terms of pure numbers across the separation of powers (the GOP will maintain the minority's filibuster power in the Senate), I don't think Barack Obama's electoral victory constitutes the sweeping political earthquake that the concept of a critical realignment implies (see Jay Cost's detailed examination of the question: "Is 2008 a Realignment?").

That said, the more I read and reflect on the genuine change coming to America in an Obama administration, it's clear we've no doubt witnessed what might be termed a "qualitative realignment," meaning that the philosophical sensibilities of the electorate have be so transformed that the election signifies an undeniable and lasting break with the past.

George Packer, at the New Yorker, captures the essence of this qualitative realignment:

Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan’s incantations, failed to work, and the need for some “new machinery” is painfully obvious. But what philosophy of government will characterize it?

The answer was given three days before the election by a soldier and memoirist of the Reagan revolution, Peggy Noonan, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment.” The Journal’s editorial page anticipated with dread “one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s.” The Journal’s nightmare scenario of America under President Obama and a Democratic Congress included health care for all, a green revolution, expanded voting rights, due process for terror suspects, more powerful unions, financial regulation, and a shift of the tax burden upward. (If the editorial had had more space, full employment and the conquest of disease might have made the list.)

For the first time since the Johnson Administration, the idea that government should take bold action to create equal opportunity for all citizens doesn’t have to explain itself in a defensive mumble. That idea is ascendant in 2008 because it answers the times. These political circumstances, even more than the election of the first black American to the highest office, make Obama’s victory historic. Whether his Presidency will be transformative, in the manner of Roosevelt and the handful of predecessors named by F.D.R. in 1932, will depend, in part, on history—it’s unclear whether today’s financial troubles will offer a political challenge, and an opportunity, of the magnitude of the Great Depression. But the power of Obama’s Presidency will ultimately hinge on how he chooses to interpret the “modern application” of liberalism in the twenty-first century.

That's probably about as well as it can be said, without sounding full of hubris and spite. As always, we'll really know if 2008 was a realignment in the years ahead, because the theory's essentially "retrodictive" in its explanatory foundations.

Obama and the Pro-Life Vote

Ross Douthat's been doing some writing on the shape of abortion politics under a Barack Obama administration. One particular project he's got going is a slap-down campaign against Douglas Kmiec, the pro-life Catholic law professor and Obama advisor who made a name for himself during the campaing by arguing that pro-lifers should back the Democratic nominee.

It's worth checking Douthat's links, but I like this part on why Kmiec should be given no slack:

Look, there are a variety of not-unreasonable ways for Americans who believe the unborn deserve legal protection to justify a vote for Barack Obama. But to claim that a candidate who seems primed to begin disbursing taxpayer dollars in support of abortion and embryo-destructive research as soon as he enters the White House somehow represented the better choice for anti-abortion Americans on anti-abortion grounds is an argument that deserves to met, not with engagement, but with contempt.

In another post Douthat links to Damon Linker, who makes an encouraging point in a piece at the New Republic:

Consider the voting patterns of the roughly 26 percent of Americans who describe themselves as white evangelical/born again Protestants. Early exit polls compiled by Steven Waldman at Beliefnet show that John McCain won these voters by a margin of 74 percent to 25 percent. That's down somewhat from Bush's record 78 percent in 2004, but still considerably higher than the number of evangelical votes Bush himself managed to win in 2000 (68 percent). That Obama, who aggressively courted these voters with religious appeals, fell five points short of Al Gore's 30 percent showing among evangelicals in 2000 must be judged a disappointment.

Here's the clincher:

As long as the Democratic Party continues to take its cues on social policy from those who refuse any compromise on abortion, it will give the Republicans the gift that keeps on giving: a large, stable, immensely loyal bloc of voters passionately committed to protecting (as they see it) innocent human life from lethal violence and those who champion the right to inflict it. For the moment, there aren't enough of these voters to get the GOP to victory. But there are more than enough of them to ensure that the Republicans will begin their efforts to reconstitute a winning coalition from a position of relative strength, with millions of motivated foot soldiers dedicated to the struggle ahead.

Suffice to say that for all of Obama's success in winning the lion's share of demographic constituencies, the numbers of the GOP share of the religiouis conservatives is a heartening sign for upcoming election cycles.

Schwarzenegger Model is Disaster for GOP

Marvin King, a political scientist who blogs at King Politics, published an interesting essay Sunday at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi: "A Shrinking GOP Needs Plans for a 'Comeback'."

Marvin suggests three routes for a GOP comeback: A "Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee" path; the "Grover Norquist/Club for Growth" path; and a route that "goes west," that is, a move "in the direction of Arnold Schwarzenegger":

While the California governor can never run for president, he epitomizes the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and a template for winning in Blue America. Schwarzenegger works with unions and business alike in trying to create a pro-business climate.

Likewise, he avoids divisive social issues. Not because he does not care; instead, he recognizes that a single-minded focus on social issues is not conducive to developing a bipartisan working environment. He is not as conservative fiscally as Norquist, nor as conservative socially as Palin, but Arnold knows how to win elections.

I've written previously that the GOP has a demographic problem and will need to appeal to the political center in future elections, but the "Schwarzenegger path" is not what I had in mind. The best evidence of this is today's news that Governor Schwarzenegger has announced his support for the same-sex marriage activists who are currently mounting statewide protests against Proposition 8. As today's Los Angeles Times reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage.

I can't stress this point enough: While there are a number of things the GOP must do to claw its way back to power, capitulating to the angry mobs storming the barricades to overturn the vote of a traditional California majority is not one of them.

Seventy-percent of black voters in the state supported Proposition 8, and this is California, a bastion of progressive politics and Democratic Party hegemony. Governor Scharzenegger's a dramatic exception to the rule, and for Republicans to seek a "Schwarzenegger model" at the national level will likely mean the literal break-up of the post-Goldwater GOP coalition. Simply put: Some combination of social policy conservativism with innovative economic policies attractive to the stressed middle class will be the ticket to a revived conservatism.

At the presidential level, Barack Obama took every single demographic category except voters older than 60 years-old and white voters over the age of 30. That's it. Frankly, 2008 heralds a demographic realignment to the Democratic Party. Whether this vast bloc coalesces to resemble Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Coaltion - which endured well into the 1960s - remains to be seen. It's almost certain, however, that Republicans won't be able to win social moderates by aping the interest group liberalism of the Democratic-left.

Note something else about the electoral demographics of Propostion 8 in California: Jasmyne Cannick, an urban civil rights activist in Los Angeles, argues that opposition to Proposition 8 was dominated by affluent white liberals indifferent to the real needs of African Americans - needs which include jobs, safe streets and schools, and remedies to continuing inequalities ("driving while black"). Moreover, the black Yes on 8 vote was grounded in the social justice and spiritual meaning that marks the religion of the black church. That faith-based motivation is naturally antithetical to the secular humanism that drives the left-wing agenda of today's Democratic Party.

Then there's the Latino vote this year: Nationally, Latinos formed the crucial bloc of voters in key states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia. Colorado and Virginia have turned out reliably for the Republican Party for decades, and there's nothing that's particularly permanent about Latino support for the Democrats this year. In 2004, George W. Bush took roughly 44 percent of the national Latino vote, and in states like Texas, the GOP ticket secured a whopping 59 percent of the Latino electorate. This year, John McCain took just 31 percent of the Latino vote nationally, down almost 15 points from the GOP's share of that demographic in 2004.

Yet, there's a large Protestant and Catholic bloc of Latino voters who are attentive to the political and cultural attractions of the Republican Party. Perhaps the most careless and self-destructive agenda for the GOP going forward will be to further alienate the country's Latino voting constituency.

As Scott Rasmussen reports today, public opinion polling shows that 55 percent of Americans believe that tax cuts are good for the economy, and Rasmussen notes that Barack Obama won the presidency by promising tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans. The problem for an Obama administration is that the Democratic Congress hopes to spend billions of dollars on social programs and infrastructure - a new Works Progress Administration is being proposed - while maintaining the deployment of American troops in two ongoing conflicts abroad.

Financing such an agenda will likely require an increase in tax rates beyond the top, high-income marginal hikes already proposed by the Obama campaign. Combine this with the super-progressive social agenda the marks today's Democratic Party, and we can see the contours of a conservative opposition-paradigm taking shape.

In all likelihood, the Schwarzenegger model will be the least attractive program for the emerging post-2008 GOP. A more serious challenge will be to find an alliance of conservative activists among the Palin-Huckabee factions and the Club for Growth cohorts that offers an atttractive economic model while not alienating racial and religious moderates and the fast-growing demographic groups likely key to a Republican Party resurgence.