Many conservatives are feeling pretty confident these days - just holding on until November and then until 2012.
I learned something recently when reading The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes; FDR's presidency looked alot like Barack Obama's. He went in and made monumental changes from the get-go, he went after industry, he pitted people against one another, he introduced Social Security - which was deemed to be (and was) a policy of socialism, he was influenced in great measure by a "brain-trust" of idealist intellectuals that were all about "planned societies" and level playing fields and such, he introduced the idea of a "jobless recovery" and when election time began to roll around, things did not look good for FDR.
But he quickly pulled away from his Utopian friends and began to set in motion a political strategy and has been characteristic of democrat campaigns ever since. He played to various constituency groups - Labor, African-Americans, Senior citizens, etc. He pushed legislation favoring these groups and purchased their block votes. With that plan he pulled out the next election and more to follow.
I have a couple of sincere concerns regarding our next presidential election: there is a possibility that Barack Obama could mellow out or move to the center and woo the voters back that his idealism has lost. This might not even be so bad, in retrospect Bill Clinton took that tact and didn't do too much damage his second term.
My second concern is a more sinister one - I am concerned that the right to vote could be severely altered by that time. While that may seem unthinkable . . . so was national healthcare, and the government's take over of numerous industries.
But as you will see in my next post, I am no longer so sure that winning elections should be the major goal in all this. I think the problems we face in this nation go much deeper than "who is in office".
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