Michael Ramirez cartoon for November 6, 2008, Investor's Business Daily.
No finger-pointing, just take time to regroup. That’s the major push of a piece by the editors of National Review. They find hope in the fact that voters haven’t rejected conservative ideals outright (President-elect Barack Obama only won by a six-point margin, after all). Now is the time to devise a clear agenda and make a new pitch to voters in advance of the elections in 2010 and 2012. But one dissenter in their ranks sees Tuesday as a wholesale disaster.
Republicans should stop trying to appeal to moderates and beef up their conservative platform. Right-wing blogger John Hawkins lays out his top seven reasons why the party needs to move to the right. In brief, moderates don’t have a uniform ideology, so it’s impossible to build a platform around them; moderates don’t give as much money to campaigns; and moderates tend not to know much about politics, so they’re easily swayed by the left-wing media.
Reluctant concessions from the right. Talk radio personality Hugh Hewitt congratulated Obama on his victory, though his prayer for Obama’s wisdom and judgment and “for his safety and the safety of his country, and for the continued prosperity and greatness of America” seem a subtle warning that we’re going to need it. Bill Dyer, a guest-blogger for Hewitt’s Townhall page, was not so subtle.
Obama is bad for the economy, and it showed when the stocks dropped after news of his victory, writes John R. Hinderaker. His broker attributes some of the decline in the market in recent months to investors’ apprehension of an Obama presidency. So Hinderaker expresses surprise that so many employees on Wall Street invested in the Obama campaign. Of course, the nation is in a recession, and another bit of news was at play: analysts are expecting a Labor Department employment report on Friday to be bleak.
Obama may have bought the election with a fundraising campaign that broke records and employed questionable tactics, including accepting money from foreign donors. An article in Newsmax claimed the press was lax for not holding Obama accountable after he reneged on his commitment to talk to John McCain about using public financing. It also referred to an investigation by its own correspondent back in September which uncovered thousands of dollars donated using fictitious names like Good Will. Bloomberg reported that Obama’s fundraising campaign may forever change the way presidential election campaigns are financed in the future.
Sarah Palin takes more heat, as previously off-the-record news about quarrels and questionable behavior with McCain staff and her spotty knowledge of geography were uncovered. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron appeared on the conservative show “The O’Reilly Factor” to report what he knew, and while the the typically pugnacious and quick-witted Bill O’Reilly challenged some of Cameron’s findings, he didn’t seem to be on his game in defending her.