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With the Republican victories in the midterm elections the GOP dog has caught the car they’ve been chasing, the Senate; now, one wonders, what are they going to do with it? This is not like the “Contract with America” Gingrich House takeover during the Clinton administration, or even the Tea Party wave of 2010. Both those victories were run with clear objectives and agendas. This victory is a victory of attrition. Despite what the President and other Democratic truth twisters have paradoxically suggested, this is not a statement by the American people that they want to see things getting done, and certainly not the Democratic agenda. In what universe do voters hoping to see cooperation elect a divided government? Remember when President Obama told Republicans they could come for the ride but they’d have to sit in the back? Well, this election bears witness that Americans are no longer comfortable having Barack Obama driving unchecked, hurtling down the road at breakneck speed with only his crony Harry Reid in the front seat with him. Apparently the voters wanted cooler heads within reach of the brake pedal. It remains to be seen if the Republicans can be those cooler heads.<\/p>\n

Lest Republicans get too excited about the wave indicating that the voters are turning to embrace the Republican agenda, it should be recalled that most of the Republicans who ran had no real agenda beyond “We’re not Democrats!”. Republicans are playing the part of the rebound lover… it’s not that she likes you, it’s that she hates him! The perfect storm of vulnerable Democratic seats, disenchanted voters and an unpopular President caused more Democratic voters to stay home than Republican ones. This was not an election that people were so much excited by the prospective GOP candidates as they were angry and disillusioned by the failure of the Democratic ones. Trust me, no one out there is saying Mitch McConnell is exciting, except in comparison to Harry Reid. Here in New York we missed an opportunity to rid ourselves of a truly horrible Governor. Blame is being laid at the feet of a less than enthusiastic electorate, or the overwhelming influence of New York City voters. We can whine all we want about these facts of life, meanwhile Massachusetts and Maryland elected Republican governors. New York voter participation set a record low with New York City at the bottom, so don’t blame the City’s voters; they can’t vote much less. Truth is “Cuomo’s Got to Go” was an insufficient slogan to drive people to vote for Rob Astorino. New York’s default state election results are Democrat. That doesn’t mean a Republican can’t win, but he needs to inspire voters. Banking on the other party’s weakness worked to a certain extent in some red and purple states, but not here in blue New York. Instead of spluttering about lazy voters, and New York City, and fantasizing about an upstate secession, attention should be paid to how to educate and excite voters to win elections you should not lose.<\/p>\n

I was interested to find that the idiom “preaching to the choir” originated in the 1970’s. It refers, of course, to spending time proselytizing among those already converted, arguing your positions before those who already agree with you. Now there is some value in that, especially in low turnout elections. Sometimes getting your “choir” to turn out and vote is enough to successfully get elected. The problem is that it’s seldom enough to successfully govern, as Mr. Obama is discovering. Politicians who can resist the urge to have their ego stroked, who can embrace the idea of serving rather than being served, can begin to reach areas unavailable to them in the past. As opposed to preaching to the choir, they need to reach out to the lost in what could be called missionary politics. An evangelist can only speak the truth as he understands it, and while politicians may engage slightly more in bending that truth, both must stick to their core principles, while at the same time not alienating those they are trying to convince. If a politician considers himself a servant to all the people, he will have no enemies list, only undiscovered friends.<\/p>\n

IMHO: There are those who see the nation as a collection of disparate groups. If one group benefits then another must be suffering because of it. Government, in their minds, is there to fairly mete out the suffering and the benefits. Of course this comes down to a calculation of numbers. If your income is sufficiently low, benefits will be added to you; if it is sufficiently high, benefits will be taken away. It’s a cold calculation that pretty much leaves out any other factors except the math. Likewise, these calculations extend to winning elections based on math rather than based on principles. And so the nation is divided by this math, and the poverty goes on, chiefly because it makes the math work for the powers that be. But, as Patrick McGoohan implored in The Prisoner “I am not a number… I am a free man!”<\/a>; these are people, people with hearts and minds, people who have it within them to be convinced of the higher virtues of freedom, goodness, and earned prosperity. Let us not relegate these to the merciless math, lost souls, walking dead; these are free men and fellow citizens. Any political map will demonstrate how the nation divides along urban and rural\/suburban lines. The harvest for conservatives is a focused one, reach the cities and you take the nation, you already have the rest. Oh, it won’t be an easy task, there are many obstacles, we don’t send missionaries to Miami Beach; but look at our failing cities and you’ll realize the fields are ripe for harvest if you can show them a principled way of hope. Or I guess we can go home to our comfortable houses in the country, raise our Gadsden flags, preach to the choir, and just hope there’s more of us than there are of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dogs are peculiar creatures. They do things in earnest for no apparent reason. They chase their own tails; they bark at other dogs great distances away, or even sometimes at their own echoes; they howl at train whistles and sirens; and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\r\n