The irony is isn’t lost on me as as I read the Arizona Republic in and Arizona Starbucks this morning (free wi-fi), ground zero for many of the issues Americans are deciding on today. Thinking back I remember see Jimmy Carter in Eugene, Oregon on afternoon quite by accident (my last vote as a Democrat) and even Theodore Sorenson (aid to John Kennedy who died last week — a very interesting and gifted man although he could never shake the Kennedy mystique even late in his life) during a Mondale-Ferraro rally in Minneapolis (I was not a Mondale supporter but I went to the rally just to hear Sorenson). Today is a very important day. America may be changing.
Below is an editorial that makes the case a fundamental shift is occurring. I agree with the thesis. I think this election marks a significant shift beyond the usual back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. We may be witnessing an unstoppable cultural shift, the reversal of the liberalism of the New Deal forward. I am not making a case for the Republican party here (the Obama election was a repudiation of Republican leadership; the notion that it was a vindication for liberalism however will cost the Democrats dearly). I am only pointing out what might be a seismic shift the outlines of which we are just beginning to see.
The Conservative Moment
By Peter Wehner
One of the more interesting facts surrounding the midterm elections is that Barack Obama, the most activist, liberal president since Lyndon Johnson, is presiding over a collapse of confidence in government.
According to ABC News, optimism in the country’s system of government has dropped to a new low when measured against polls going back 36 years. In 1974 — shortly after Richard Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal — 55 percent of Americans were optimistic about “our system of government and how well it works.” Today, 33 percent say that, the lowest number in nearly a dozen measurements taken through decades.
In addition, a Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll reported that 69 percent of independents say they have less faith in government now than they did just before Obama was elected.
A president who appears to have almost limitless faith in big government is the architect of growing public disdain for it. “Our ills are creating their own antibodies,” Margaret Thatcher said in 1977, as the conditions were being put in place that swept her to the position of prime minister in the United Kingdom.
In America today we are seeing something similar occur. Mr. Obama’s unchecked liberalism, combined with a struggling economy and a growing sense of governing ineptness, is creating a new conservative moment. The most powerful political idea in America today — the one that is creating the framework for today’s election — is the need to re-limit government as a means to restore economic growth.
Over the next several years, the task of the GOP will be to demonstrate that they have a plan that matches the gravity of this moment. Whether they achieve this or not is an open question. But the fact that they have this opportunity is not. Like Jimmy Carter before him, Barack Obama — by discrediting liberalism — is creating a large new opening for conservatives. It is up to them to seize it.
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