Blogs For Victory

Jennifer Rubin over at Pajamas Media has an excellent run-down on how things are going – pointing out that in spite of conventional wisdom to the contrary, McCain has managed to make this a race where either side can win. Certainly as 2008 dawned, the conventional wisdom wasn’t just that the Democrats were going to win, but that they were going to win big. This Conventional Wisdom missed a few salient points:

1. America didn’t really turn left in 2006. Sure, the Democrats won Congress but only by combining conservative Democrats in some GOP districts with a general dismay amongst the GOP for the way the Congressional GOP had been behaving. As Pelosi and Reid congratulated themselves, the plain fact of the matter is that America remained a center/right nation just waiting for a compelling reason to back center/right candidates and programs.

2. Americans don’t like to lose wars.

3. Democrats – no matter how hard they tried to parse it – were (and are) in favor of America’s defeat in war.

4. No overtly liberal Democrat has won the White House since 1964 (and shortly after that infamous liberal victory, I was born. Coincidence? I report, you decide) and, as a matter of fact, no Democrat of any type had scored a majority of the Presidential vote since 1976. As a rule, Americans don’t warm up to liberal Democrats in the White House.

5. The top contenders for the Democratic nomination in January of 2008 were all out-and-out liberals.

6. Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, Harry Reid is Senate Majority Leader. I suppose in the legislative history of the world there have been worse leaders…but I’m a fair to middlin’ historian and I’m not aware of any.

7. The MSM was going to cheer lead for whomever the Democrats nominated, and once Obama emerged as the front runner the MSM went absolutely nuts in overtly supporting his candidacy.

8. It could very well be that most Americans would rather their son become a piano player in a whore house rather than an MSMer. To say that Americans have a low opinion of the MSM is to put it in amazingly overly kind terms.

9. The kook left had become predominant in setting the Democratic agenda and, furthermore, convinced that a majority of Americans wanted to implement a kook left agenda.

10. The Republican party wasn’t just going to roll over and play dead.

That last point is the most important – and anyone who has been paying close attention to what people do as opposed to what people say could see in an instant in January of 2008 that things weren’t exactly as Conventional Wisdom was asserting. If the year was really for certain the Year of the Democrat, then why did the GOP field include four first rate GOP candidates while the Democrats only mustered one serious national contender (I know that Obama won it, but you have to think back to pre-Iowa when it was all Hillary all the time…everyone else, including Obama, seemed like a weak also-ran mostly looking for a VP slot – except to me, who figured Obama for the Democratic nomination as early as September of 2007)? If Democrats were surging to certain victory how come they couldn’t pass anything which didn’t pass muster with President Bush? If Democrats had it in the bag then why did Congress’ approval ratings sink even lower than President Bush’s? The GOPers who were paying attention (and this would include those who were willing to plunk down the time and money in seeking the GOP nomination) realized that while the year was strong for the Democrats, there was still plenty of opportunity for a well-managed GOP campaign to take the big prize.

To be sure, there were some blessings for the GOP along the way – most notably in the lengthy Democratic nomination process which damaged the ultimate nominee as well as dividing the Democratic party and drying up many sources of Democratic funding. If we GOPers do win in November, we’ll owe a bit of it to Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos”. But, by far, it was the way the GOP coalesced fairly swiftly around the one man who could really take it to the Democrats on their own terms – and, of course, the way McCain and Team have run the campaign to this point. There was much fear and carping from conservative punditry over McCain’s campaign until the Palin pick, but all I’ve seen from the start is a well-managed campaign designed to capitalize on McCain’s strengths and highlight the Democrats’ weaknesses. Even if McCain loses, he has provided an object lesson in how to get a candidate off the ground and into the running.

Who will win? I’m hoping for McCain – and while I have prayed for both Obama and McCain, I do add that I pray McCain’s efforts will be crowned with victory. But I don’t know who will win – I thought I’d know within a week of the end of the conventions, but there are just too many variables out there for me to latch on to the scenario for the last 50 days. But I rest content each night knowing that, win or lose, we will still win in the end.