Not Ace - Why I'm glad we didn't take the Senate [krakatoa]

PLEASE NOTE! This post isn't by Ace. He's far too drunk / hungover / trying to un-stick his pudding-covered bag from his thighs to be bothered with posting this early.

I know this cuts against the grain of the crowd here at Ace's, which is why I shied away from discussions & posting this election. It would have amounted to little more than a distraction.

The efforts made by Ace & the readers here were extraordinary & commendable, and everyone should be ecstatic with the results.

We took the House going away, tossing out everything from first-term blue-dogs to creaky Committee leaders who had suckled the Capitol teat for decades.

And we closed the gap in the Senate, leaving use poised beautifully for more pick-ups in '12.

This, in my opinion, is the best-case scenario. I would ask everyone to remember 1994, when Republicans swept into power in both the House and the Senate. We all felt like that was the moment that our policies would return to fiscal sanity and the horizon-less bloat of government would finally be reduced.

Instead, President Clinton and his media allies executed a perfect strategy in three parts:

One - Co-opt every Republican economic success as that of President Clinton.
Two - Cast every economic failure, public or private, as the responsibility of the Republican legislature.
Three - Paint every bit of the Conservative Social agenda as dangerously prurient and out-of-touch.

This worked remarkably well, and gained Clinton a second term while beginning to poison the electorate's minds against fiscal Conservatism.

Then, power did what it inevitable does, and many of those who swept into office in '94 became more interested in their own stature than the interests of their constituents.

While it could be reasonably debated on many grounds that this scenario wouldn't play out the same in our new media climate, I am far more optimistic going forward now than if we had taken the Senate.

Over the next two years, the Democrats control two of the three levers of power, so the job of blaming the Republicans will be only slightly less difficult than those arguments they tried to sell over the past two years to growing jeers from their constituents.

Let's continue to hold our own representatives accountable to the principles on which they ran. Continue to be vigilant, and continue to be the antidote to the MSM poison.

Yesterday's election was a great win in the ideological war for our country's future. It was a win for American exceptionalism and the concepts of liberty and free markets.

But, in the words of Side-Show legend Barnaby Wolf's pet squirrel - Let's not start fondling each others nuts just yet.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:47 AM

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