I am a Conservative who voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 in my 4th grade mock election ;-) in North Carolina, no less, where a yellow dog could get elected if he was a Democrat. Even in my youth I knew Barry was right! Now that I've actually seen Ronald Reagan's "Time for Choosing" speech, I know WHY I believed that. If you haven't seen this, you need to--you owe it to yourself-- to get over to millercenter.org to watch it. THIS is the message McCain should have been speaking every single day. It WAS what I heard from Sarah. Smaller government, less governmental intrusion in our lives, lower taxes, less regulation, less control from Washington, strong military, muscular foreign policy. Most importantly, character in our candidates.

However, just telling people about a 44-year-old speech will not be enough in the face of the overwhelming societal change that the Liberal Left has in store for us. But what DO we need to do? I recently heard a talking head say that we (the GOP) needed to stop leaning on the evangelical movement and welcome African-American and Hispanics into the party. It took me a second to wrap my head around that. Like African-Americans and Hispanics aren't...what? It was obvious to me that the talking head did not know that the evangelical movement is VERY strong among African-Americans and Hispanics. Politically speaking, this means they are pro-life, pro-traditional marriage (see results in CA, FL, and everywhere else where they voted overwhelmingly for pro-marriage initiatives), and generally conservative in outlook. Yet, many vote Democratic-Liberal (at the national level at least) most of the time, so the statistics tell us.

Why? Maybe, because they, like lots of people, vote the way their parents did. Maybe because they only hear one story: Democrats (liberals) love the little guy, Republicans (conservatives) only love the rich guy. Toss in the lack of real reportage from the MSM, and it's not surprising that they vote the way they do.

Rather than turn away from the evangelical right, we need to work hard to convince our brothers and sisters that they, too, are conservative, whatever their party affiliation. Convince them that they need to vote for their own principles. If we could do that, we would be able to take back not only the Republican (stupid) party from the limp-wristed RINOs, but also the Democratic from the left. If we could help conservative-thinking folks to demand conservative principles, we would again have two parties which would do what was RIGHT for the country. These folks know what makes a person successful: love of God, love of country, hard work, helping one another, taking care of yourself and you family. They also know that the government has to get out of your business for that to happen. They know, deep down, that liberal policies have gotten us where we are: a world-wide financial crisis, a skyrocketing illegitimacy rate, and frankly worsening race relations.

Where do we go now? For starters, talk to people, engage them, get to know them. Find out where their hearts are. Are they really Liberal or Conservative? I'll bet you'll find most of them are the latter. If that's true, then we can truly begin to build a base that will steer America back where she belongs.