I, like almost every true conservative, was disappointed when John McCain lost out to Barack Obama on November 4.

Let us clear one thing up right here and now: Barack Obama's race has NOTHING to do with the previous statement. I, too, congratulate and celebrate his election as the "first black president" in American history. But that is where those sentiments end. Obama, I mean President-elect Obama, is a self-avowed socialist that campaigned as a socialist, a wealth redistributor and someone more interested in "social justice" than the American history of capitalism and individual freedom. My hope is that after the reality of actually having to govern set in, Barack Obama chooses to govern from the center instead of trying to pull the wheel of the nation hard left. I hope for the best, but I expect the worst.

So why did John McCain lose? After all, he was head and shoulders more qualified to be president than Obama. The main reason that he lost was that he was never our candidate. He was the candidate that the Republican Party foisted on us after he managed to finagle his way to the nomination. John McCain didn’t engender any conservative support for his presidency until he picked Sarah Palin to be his vice president in the last week of August.

So what have we learned from this election cycle to prevent this sort of debacle from happening in the future? Please let me count the ways.

1. No more open primaries - We need for the Republican Party to end open primaries. Too many times, Democrats voted for the Republican candidate in order to muddy the waters for the Republican nomination. The fact remains that John McCain did not win a single primary with registered Republicans on Super Tuesday, but because of the open primaries of South Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida and Missouri, he was able to win the nomination. This is because of Democrats and self-proclaimed “Independents” swinging the vote his way. The GOP could very easily use the power of the pocketbook to say “If you have an open primary, the GOP will not spend one dollar for any of your candidates in your state.” Is it blackmailing the states to close their primary? You bet your sweet bippy it is, but that is life in the big city. No longer can we allow anyone but Republicans to select our candidates for us. If we can’t even select our candidates without being undermined by outsiders with their own agendas, what legitimacy do we have as a party?

2. We need a clear and understandable philosophy of governance to run. What does “conservatism” mean? What does the Republican Party stand for? It is obvious from the election results that the Republican Party is lost and wandering around aimlessly. The comparative advantage that Reagan established in 1980 no longer exists. Republicans spent like Democrats. They were liberal like Democrats. They sided with Democrats against President Bush. The Republicans in Congress were indistinguishable from Democrats. As others have said, why should the American people vote for look-alike Democrats when they can vote for the real thing? We conservative need to retake the Republican Party and populate it with people that can articulate a clear philosophy of governance to the American people. By doing so, we conservatives can provide the American people with a frame of reference to compare the Republican and Democrats candidates against.

So what should the Republican Party and conservative candidates stand for? We need a return to Reaganism. Ronald Reagan spelled out the timeless problems of liberalism as the “Great Communicator”, educating the American people on the dangers of runaway government. Reagan’s immortal words should be enshrined as the

You all should stop right now and read the speeches of Ronald Reagan.

Read his 1964 convention speech at http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/speech.asp?spid=1

Read this speech in the context of the last eight years of Bush liberalism with an eye to the future President Obama liberalism/socialism. The foresight of Reagan to talk, nearly subject by subject, to the problems of today is stunning. Stunning in how nothing has changed in 44 years and will not change as the “change” candidate, President Obama, governs to the left of center. How far remains to be seen.

Read his 1976 impromptu speech on the future of freedom
http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/speech.asp?spid=3

Read his 1980 nomination acceptance speech at http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/speech.asp?spid=18

What did Reagan encapsulate in his speeches?

1. Low taxes leads to economic freedom
2. Perseverance in the defense of freedom is a virtue
3. The power of the individual to solve many of their own problems
4. Government many times makes problems worse with their good intentions
5. Socialism fails as it enslaves the people to government handouts
6. America and Americans must live within its means
7. Energy independence leads to economic security
8. America has a rendezvous with destiny as the last, great hope for humanity

3. We need conservatives that live conservative values as well as talk about them. The Republican Party is absolutely the party of hypocrisy when it comes to morals and values. Everyone knows that Democrats are morally bankrupt. So there is no surprise when a Democrat gets caught up in scandal; it is par for the course. But since Republicans have aligned themselves with the Christian Right in America, we Republicans are being held to a higher standard. We have been sabotaged by the human failings of Rep. Newt Gingrich R-GA (adultery), Rep. Bob Livingston R-LA (adultery), Rep. Mark Foley R-FL (soliciting pages for homosexual “activities”), Rep. Tom De Lay R-TX (dealings with corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff), Rep. “Duke” Cunningham R-CA (corruption and graft), Sen. Ted Stevens R-AK (corruption), Rep. Bob Ney R-OH (corruption), Sen. David Vitter R-LA (soliciting “escort” services while married), Sen. John McCain R-AZ (adultery in ‘70’s while wife lay in comatose state), Sen. Larry Craig R-ID (soliciting undercover cop for sex in a Minneapolis Airport men’s room) and on and on. These are just the politicians that have been busted or embarrassed in one way or another. This is not counting all the Reverend Haggards and Reverend Hagees that are out there. What we conservatives need to do is get Republicans to run that actually live conservative values, not just talk about them. Sarah Palin talked about her opposition to abortion and the value of abstinence-only education, and yet her daughter gets pregnant at 17 and is going to get married. The presumption is that it was a shotgun wedding. The liberal media had a field day with the apparent hypocrisy of her stance vis-a-vie her actions. Which brings me to my next point…

4. Stop trying to make friends with the media. What good did it serve John McCain to say that his number one constituency was the media? None what so ever. The media itself knows that it was in the tank for Barack Obama. It is an undeniable fact of life, like the sun rising in the east. So what good does it serve to play the media game by media rules? Again the answer is none. We conservatives need to begin to dominate the discussions with the liberal media by becoming more media smart and savvy. Conservatives need to understand that the media has an agenda that is wholly their own and they do not care a whit about your agenda insomuch as to the degree it matches theirs. John McCain was the media’s Republican candidate so long as he was the “maverick” talking trash about President Bush and tearing down his fellow Republicans. They immediately turned on him when a) he started campaigning as a “conservative” and b) when he was opposed by a true liberal in Barack Obama.

A follow-on point to that is that we conservatives need to stop letting anyone else define for us what a “conservative” is. The media told us that right and honorable men like Rudy Giuiliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain were the future of the Republican Party and were the “new” conservatism. What bunk! They are Republicans, sure, but are in no way “conservative”. Maybe they are conservative in aspects of their lives and policies, but not conservative throughout. George W. Bush was the first, actually, to start redefining conservatism with his bogus “compassionate conservatism”. That, in my book, is the definition of pandering. He tried, successfully I’ll admit, to straddle liberalism and conservatism. But what does that really mean? By saying he is a “compassionate” conservative means that real conservatives are mean. For the record, George W. Bush was a liberal Republican on domestic issues and was a conservative Republican on defense and foreign affairs issues.

The media also tried to convince conservatives in general and Republicans specifically that Reagan Conservatism is dead. Nothing could be further from the truth. True conservatism wins every time it is used as a platform. Look at Proposition 8 in California. Regardless of where your personal politics on the issue of gay marriage lie, you have to admit that saying that marriage is an activity solely between a man and a woman is a very conservative position. And yet, Prop 8 passed with around 63% of the vote. In a traditionally liberal state, where Barack Obama won the state and the election the moment the polls closed on election night based solely on exit polling and where blacks voted 95% to 5% in favor of the very liberal Barack Obama, Prop 8 won hands down. Barack Obama ran a quasi-conservative campaign that was more convincingly conservative than the so called conservative candidate in John McCain. Obama promised a tax cut to “95% of working families”. That is conservative. Consider Heath Schuler in North Carolina. He won re-election in that conservative state whereas Elizabeth Dole lost her seat in the senate when she tried in vain to play the seldom used “my opponent doesn’t believe in God” card. Bottom line here is that the American people appreciate genuineness in their candidates.

5. Have a coherent, consistent and easily repeatable message. “Hope”, “Change”, “Yes we can”. Messages the Obama campaign put out couldn’t get any simpler than that. What was John McCain’s message? No one knows. First, it was that he was “bipartisan”, than it was that he had been “tested”, later it was that he was a “fighter for Americans”. But through all of the campaign, we never knew what John McCain stood for in terms of what John McCain was at his core. And what was the McCain campaigns message about Obama? That was inconsistent and incoherent as well. First, the popular “Paris Hilton” ads talked about how Obama was more a celebrity than a politician. Then it was Obama was too radical for America with his ‘ties’ to William Ayers. Then it was that Obama was a socialist wanting to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around. The tag line to the string of ads was that Obama was too inexperienced and not ready to lead. Who did John McCain pick to be his Veep? Half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, that’s who. Palin was my choice, too, back in July. But if you are going for the maverick team label thing, you really can’t bring up “inexperience”. Obviously by the result, America disagreed with McCain and found Obama okay to lead.

If I were to have been in charge of the McCain campaign, I would have had “lack of good judgment” be the singular campaign theme that everything tied back to. Obama wants to raise taxes on individuals making somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 (The Obama campaign did a good job of making the exact figure fuzzy). That shows a lack of judgment good judgment because most small businessmen and women make $250,000 in profits as sole proprietors and yet have to reinvest that money into the business in the form of operating capital to keep it a going concern. Thus, they bring home less than $60,000 a year in “salary”. Obama has ties to shady characters like Ayers, Tony Resko, and others. That shows a lack of good judgment because what person in their right mind has business dealings with felons and domestic terrorists. Repeatedly throughout the campaign, we were told that Obama wants to sit down with bad guys like Ahmadanejad and Hugo Chavez, face to face and without preconditions. While that was a direct quote lifted from a Clinton-Obama debate, McCain never explained the “so what?” factor. Part of having a clear and consistent message is that it has to be relevant and meaningful to your audience. That’s the “so what?” factor. If you go through a litany of failings of your opponent and your audience has to go “So what?” in an effort to get you to explain why that failing is important, you have failed to get not only your message out, but any message out. You are just talking trash about your opponent.

Therefore, the “so what?” factor for the whole campaign should have been “because Obama shows time and again that he lacks good judgment and that is why you don’t want him doing (/---insert issue here---/).” Sarah Palin in the Katie Couric interview should have used that for her answer on which Supreme Court decisions she didn’t like. If I was her, the answer would have gone something like this:

“Well, Katie, there are several Supreme Court decisions I take serious issue with, Roe v. Wade aside for a second. First, there was the Dred Scott decision where nine white men said it was okay to hold another human being in bondage. As you well know, it took the first Republican, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the bloodiest war in American history to overturn that decision. Then there was Plessy versus Ferguson in which another group of nine white men said it was okay to segregate whites and blacks so long as the State provided equal resources to both groups. That decision, if you know anything about human nature, would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. Blacks for generations were forced into substandard schools, received substandard medical treatment; the list of failings of that decision is endless. Not until that brave soul, Rosa Parks, said “no, I will not sit at the back of the bus” for America to find to moral courage to overturn that decision with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed over the objections of white supremacist Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party and with the assistance of the Republican minority in the senate. More recently, the court passed down a decision that legalized theft by a city or a state in the Kehlo versus New London, CT which authorized a city or state to steal your property to build a strip mall if they so choose, so long as they could claim that the people of the city of state benefited from that theft in a perversion of imminent domain. The court sits in a pretty precarious balance between the five justices that sided with this legalized theft and those that oppose it. This is why it is so important that America elects John McCain president. A man with McCain’s impeccable judgment on such critical matters is crucial in selecting the next Supreme Court justice to sit on that high court, should anyone retire or something unfortunate happens. Our opponent has demonstrated time and again that he lacks the good judgment to make the right choice for Supreme Court justice. That is why the only right choice for president is John McCain.”

So what did I accomplish with that answer? I demonstrated a level of understanding of history. I created a sense of urgency for John McCain’s candidacy. I tied the answer back to the overall campaign theme of “Obama lacks good judgment” and I did it all without mentioning Obama’s name once. This segues me to my next point…

6. Don’t become an advertiser for your opponent. The only people to say Obama’s name more than the mainstream media was John McCain himself. Conversely, I’m not sure that throughout the campaign that Obama said McCain’s name more that 100 times, and that was over the course of six months. Furthermore, our conservative talk show hosts, like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity for example, spent three hours a day every day for nearly two years talking about Senator Obama. They talked about his ties to Tony Resko, his ties with Jeremiah Wright, his ties with ACORN, his ties with William Ayers, his brother George in the hut, his aunt Zeituni in the slum, blah blah blah blah blah. All that did is spend three hours a day every day putting Obama’s name out there. The smart way to campaign is to not even mention your opponents name if you can help it. Why? Every time you mention your opponent you are advertising for them. You build name recognition with your opponent in the minds of the masses you are trying to connect to. You plant in the minds of your audience who your opponent is and build a comparative advantage case against yourself. “Why is he spending so much time talking about his opponent and not himself?” As a candidate, you don’t want your opponent to dominate the conversation. That is exactly what happened during this campaign. McCain would criticize Obama and then the media would ask McCain about the criticism. McCain, and later Palin, would then spend all of the time in the interview talking about Barack Obama. The way to circumvent this is, after the interviewer asks a question about Barack Obama, McCain should have answered, “Yes, my opponent believes X, Y and Z, but here is why I am the better candidate.” Or if you are going to criticize your opponent, you have to bring it back to the “So what?” factor of your coherent message.

7. Run a “positive” campaign. When I use the terms “positive” and “negative”, I am using them in terms of what you are saying about yourself and your candidate. Most of the time, negative campaigning is associated with smears and attacks on the opponent. But in reality you are trying to establish a reason to not vote for your opponent. John McCain ran a “negative” campaign in that he only gave reasons to not vote for Barack Obama and really never made the case for why voting for him was a positive. The American people do not like voting for the lesser of two evils. They do want to vote for a candidate instead of voting against their opponent. This was the message in the later stages of the campaign. By running a “negative” campaign, McCain was trying to establish that he was the better candidate because he was not Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Barack Obama was establishing that he was the better candidate because he wasn’t the sitting president of the last 8 years. There was a lot more history behind Bush’s 8 years than there was in Obama’s last four years. McCain’s “negative” campaign underscored the weakness inherent with John McCain’s candidacy in the first place. In the final analysis, most Republicans were voting for John McCain, not because he was the best candidate, but because he was the last line of defense to keep Obama out of the White House. Not a good bet to place all your hopes on.

8. We need a candidate that can educate as well as articulate the principles and philosophy of Reagan. John McCain claimed to be a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. Maybe so, but his recent record was anything but Reagan-esque. John McCain was implicated and then cleared in the Keating Five scandal. He pushed and got passed the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance “Reform” that did nothing to stop money going into campaigns and ensured that over a billion dollars were spent on the presidential election this year. He pushed the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty Bill. He was a founding member of the Gang of 14 that guaranteed that senators could filibuster the nomination of federal court judges. He is pushing the McCain-Liebermann “cap and trade” bill. How can McCain claim to be a Reagan foot soldier when he lives his life as a RINO Republican? We need legitimate conservatives that are able to educate the American people on Reagan conservatism.

America is still a center-right nation. What a strange world it is when liberal Democrats are running on tax cuts and Republicans are crowing about how they “walk across the aisle”.

The time has come to select candidates at all levels of government that live Reagan conservative values and principles, understand those principles and have the ability to articulate them to educate the American public. We need campaigns that have clear, concise, coherent and easily remembered messages. We need candidates that understand American history and the ties the future to the present with lessons from the past.

I don’t know who these people are or where to find them, but we have to act fast. Realistically, we only have two years to make the case for a return to Conservative values. If conservatives can’t make that case to the American people in a positive and constructive way, we will lose the 2010 midterm election. If we cannot adopt a platform that not only halts Obama’s leftward push but start to move the nation’s policies back to the center, then President Obama will win reelection and we will have eight years of liberal, socialist policies. Time is short and we need to start TODAY!