Good news for conservatives tonight

Conservatives don't realize it for the most part, but they lucked out with President Obama's re-election.

I'm not alone in this estimation. Lifelong Republican General Colin Powell (U.S.Army, Ret.) and The Economist, the world's most prestigious conservative publication, agree with me and me with them.

Winning isn't everything. If Romney had won he'd have won with a campaign that was deceitful and lie-ful even by Washington's low standards. He'd have won as the willing tool of the radicals who have gained control of the GOP through its influence in closed primaries.

For the Republican Party to become a conservative party again it has to lose, like an alcoholic has to hit rock bottom before he'll change his ways.

Until then, true American conservatives need a Democratic President to moderate the radical Republican House. President Re-Elect Obama won't be able to carry out any domestic policy that requires money or legislation or both--and that's 90% of domestic policy. So whatever conservatives think of President Obama's policies, they hardly matter. What matters is how President Obama can force the House to act more in keeping with the average American conservative as opposed to the minority of Republicans who live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land where all taxes are wrong, the President is a Kenyan Muslim Terrorist Socialist who isn't legitimately President, where all abortions should be felony even in cases of rape and incest, and which spends wildly on unnecessary war and "war on drugs" expenditures, return to the pre-Obamacare status quo on healthcare, more deregulation of Wall Street (contrary to what Adam Smith prescribed), and more tax cuts for the highest-incomed 1% of Americans.

None of those things are suited to moderate, Eisenhower-style conservatism. They add up to a harsh, doctrinaire, all-Daddy State no-Mommy State, America Tarzan the rest of the world Jane stance that would be incredibly bad for us. A CEO-in-chief might be palatable if the guy were the former CEO of a manufacturer or services provider. But a CEO who's really just one of those Wall Street financiers, and who stood to profit personally and enormously from his proposed tax policies, fails to fit the Mormon principle of avoiding both sin and the appearance of sin.

I could imagine Governor Romney being a successful President if Congress were Democratic, as was the case in Massachusetts. But that was so not the situation here and now.

Read the Economist's sour endorsement of Obama. It details the conservative argument for voting for Obama and for an Obama win being better for American conservatives than a Romne win would have been, in more detail than I gave here, with plenty of criticism of Obama included.

One last reason for Obama to win re-election is that it enhances our standing abroad with our political and economic partners, and somewhat reduces the poison of Anti-Americanism abroad (except in Pakistan and Israel, the only two countries that would have voted for Romney).

Conservatives in American need to pry themselves loose from the grip of tribalism, and from the grip of being and being seen as the Party of White People. It does the conservative cause no good to have the albatross of Southern White racism wrapped around its neck, just as it did the Democratic Party no good when it had that dead bird on it for the previous century.

Right now Republican radicals will inevitably say this proves Romney wasn't radical enough. The job of real American conservatives is now to try to take back their party.

The path to doing so is to work for stuctural reforms like those California has adopted: nonpartisan redistricting, open primaries, fall elections with the top two vote-getters in each district regardless of party, elimination of winner-take-all electoral college delegate selection--things like that.

As long as the parties are calling the shots instead of the people, this push towards extremism on both sides will go on. The parties need to be less central, less inserted between the voters and their representatives, for conservatives to produce a Republican Party that gains adherents through attractive policies rather than gerrymandering and Rovian propagandizing.