Scapegoats & Whipping Boys

The pundits have been chewing on the lessons of this election for a week now, and they don’t seem to have gotten the point yet. They have moved from analyzing rejected policies to blaming voting blocks. It appears that the Christian conservatives are traitors to the Republican Party.

Well, they are partly right. Christians have lost their faith in a party that will not stick to its principles. And that party has lost their votes.

In Colorado, you would have thought they could see it coming. In the last election cycle, the Republican Party dumped conservative workhorse Senate candidate, Bob Schaeffer, in favor of RINO millionaire Pete Coors. Disgruntled Colorado Republicans refused the bait. And in an election which saw massive Republican gains across the country, Colorado lost not only the US Senate seat, but lost control of the state house as well.

The Colorado Republican Party responded by fielding a whole slate of candidates more like Coors than like a real Republican, and now they’ve lost the whole enchilada. And if the national party had been paying attention, they might have taken a lesson from Colorado. We voted conservatively on the ballot issues, even though we refused to elect Republicans who only wore the button and not the values.

It might be profitable to the Republican Party to look at how Coloradoans voted on the issues, if they really want to learn the lessons of the election. Did Colorado actually vote for a liberal Democratic sea-change?

Well, we voted[1]
1) against giving homosexuals all the economic privileges of marriage
2) against requiring pre-school
3) for a traditional Christian definition of marriage
4) against educational spending targets that would likely result in increased taxation
5) against legalizing marijuana
6) for enforcing existing immigration laws
7) against usurping representative government with excessively lax petiton regulation
8) against politicizing the judiciary by limiting judges’ terms

On the issues, Colorado voted solidly conservative. It’s almost sky-writing huge. There are more registered Republicans in Colorado than Unaffiliated voters, and more Unaffilateds than registered Democrats, according to CBS news analysis on election night. The key to winning Colorado voters is putting up candidates who actually support the values the Party purports to champion.

As Capitol Hill FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey put it, "the toughest thing to realize is we did it to ourselves." Armey told a crowd of sixty congressional staffers at a post-election discussion, that Republicans lost because they have lost their way, and they need to return to their principles of limited government.

Do we really need a whipping boy? Look no further than the RINO next door.

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[1] According to the Denver Post. http://www.denverpost.com/election/ci_4598747