Posted by
Bill Crawford on Saturday, May 09, 2009 3:42:01 AM
Conservatives have a distinct advantage over their detractors here: they can see both sides of things.
If you live in New York or California, and you happen to be one of those who think that Obama is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is as easy for you to dig up your viewpoint in the media as it is for me to find it. All you have to do is turn on the television. Or read any of the major news weeklies. Or pick up a local newspaper.
Since I am a conservative, I can do this any time. When I start reaching for the air sickness bag, I know full well where to go to find a more conservative viewpoint, in any format I choose. I also am far more likely to encouter other conservatives in person. Obama-ites would have to dig for this stuff, and they often have no desire to.
There is a ground swell building in middle America. The last Presidential election was not a Reagan landslide, folks. I'm not the only one out there who feels like they are living through the first six chapters of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The leadership in the White House and on Capitol Hill are feeling their oats, are thinking (rightly) that this is the time to strike, and they are going way too far and fast to hold the swing voters for the duration.
The area I live in in North Carolina has been dominated by structural Democrats for eons. They have never seen a surge in Republican activism as is happening here right now, not even after Bill Clinton was elected. This is happening in many places. The party is struggling to organize the participation to make it do something, but if it keeps up, the money and the structure will follow.
This is the unholy surprise for the people on the coasts: there is virtually no reporting of this going in in your media. It is all happening under the radar. The only instance of it getting out that I've seen was the Tax Day rallies, and they were often used as some sort of comic relief in the mainstream media.
My sympathies to those who really need to get out more. Your lack of perspective will kill you politically. If you wait until October of 2010 to wake up to what is happening, you will have not one, but two miserable national election cycles.
I understand the Republican leadership of yore is where they are because they are still woking out the machanics of governing. When they ran out of easily enacted ideas in the '90's, they fell back into maintaining a coalition and using their power to stay a majority. Their followers thought they were capable of more.
But its not that they lacked followers. Karl Rove's voter targeting in 2002-04 did not pull the voters out of thin air, a la ACORN. These people are out there. The numbers are there. They are begging to be organized.
And they are angry as hell. You under estimate them at your peril.