Revenge On The Sith

The exit polls make a dime-store prophet of Your's Truly (via Newsmax Insider):

Democrat Barack Obama garnered a surprising 20% of the vote from conservatives who cast ballots on Election Day, top-ranked radio-talker Rush Limbaugh told listeners.

Citing exit polls, Limbaugh also said on Wednesday that Republican John McCain lost independents and moderates by a margin of 60%-39%.

“McCain only got 89% of the Republican vote,” Limbaugh said. “He only got 80% of the conservative vote.

“And therein lies the tale, the recipe offered up by the wizards of smart in the Republican Party and on our side — for whatever reason we have to abandon our base, and we’ve gotta broaden our base . . . 

“I have nothing against going out and getting Democrats and independents to vote for you. But not by behaving like a Democrat or independent.”

Fox News commissioned extensive exit polling on Election Day. Some highlights:

• 75% of voters said the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, and these voters went solidly for Obama — 62% to McCain’s 36%.
• 63% of voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the nation, and they backed Obama, 53%-44%.
• 48% said they are “very worried” that the economic crisis will hurt their family’s finances in the coming year, and they voted for Obama, 60%-38%.
• Voters who said they wanted a president who can bring about change overwhelmingly went for Obama, 89%-9%.
• Despite predictions that the 2008 election would bring a sharp increase in the number of young voters, people under age thirty comprised just 18% of all voters, up from 17% in the past three presidential elections and down from 21% in 1992. These voters went for Obama, 66%-32%.
• Among the 11% of voters who were casting ballots in a presidential election for the first time, 68% voted for Obama and 31% chose McCain.
• 18% of voters who supported President Bush in 2004 defected from the GOP and supported Obama this year.
• Women chose Obama over the McCain-Palin ticket by a margin of 56%-43%.
• 52% of white Catholics voted for McCain, compared to 47% for Obama.
• Black voters comprised 13% of the electorate and 95% of them backed Obama. White voters favored McCain by a 12-point margin.
• Hispanics helped Obama win the battleground state of Florida, voting for the Democrat over the Republican, 57%-42%. In 2004, President Bush garnered 56% of the Hispanic vote.
• In Pennsylvania, 20% of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton over Obama in the primary voted for McCain on Tuesday.

A few off-the-cuff conclusions that can be drawn from the aforequoted:

***No Republican has any excuse for EVER backing another shamnesty bill EVER again.

***I'm dubious of there being THAT many "conservative" "Obamicans".  Why would they not simply have abstained instead?  Though I do have to admit that my normally right-wing boss voted for Red Barry, ostensibly because he didn't like Sarah Palin.  Which, in my mind, raises the question of just how right-wing he really is.

***The American public does...not...elect RINOs, and particularly RINO senators.  They rejected Bob Dole in 1996, they rejected John Sith McCain, who was Bob Dole redux, in 2008.  Learn the f'ing lesson, GOP.

***I said nine months ago that there was no way in the ever lovin' world that Maverick could win in November because there's no way he'd hold, much less energize, the base.

However, his successful casting of the election as a referendum on Red Barry's fitness for the presidency over the summer and his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate both threatened to prove me wrong, as on September 15th - the day the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb detonated - Lord Queeg was slightly ahead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Maybe it would have lasted, maybe it wouldn't.  But when Wall Street collapsed, all of McCain's worst RINO instincts vomited back to the surface: he aped "Wall Street greed" Donkspeak, failed utterly to get in front of the crisis and truthfully define it as a disaster created by Democrat interventions in the mortgage markets that spread foolhardy risk throughout the financial system like a cancer, and, perhaps worst of all, inserted himself into the negotiations for the hugely unpopular bailout bill thinking he'd be welcomed as a savior and instead got played by the Dems like a ten-cent flute.  Meanwhile, Red Barry prudently kept his distance.

This was one of those "3 AM phone call" moments for Maverick, only it wasn't the "red" phone that was ringing.  It took him three and a half weeks to even BEGIN to start getting it right, and by that time it was "You didn't ask her to the dance, she went with some other guy who married her and now they have six kids and twelve grandchildren" too late.

The lesson of which that reminded the Republican base?  John Sith McCain is not, and has not been for at least a decade, a conservative.  When a crisis arose that revealed his true domestic policy instincts, Maverick did not react as Ronald Reagan would have; he reacted more like Nelson Rockefeller.  He turned against and shafted his own base.  Again.

McCain also botched his best campaign asset and weapon, aka Barracuda, by keeping her under wraps for a month after the GOP convention and then throwing her to the Obamedia jackals in those pre-taped interviews guaranteed that made her look like an idiot.  The veep debate proved Governor Palin could spar with and squash Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and any other Obamunist propagandist any day of the week.  Skills that will come in handy starting a couple of years from now, and might have made a difference this time if the old bastard hadn't been too numbskulled to fully utilize them.

***Apart from all of McCain's mistakes was the reality of presidential elections in the mass media age: we put up a tired, crippled, white-haired, charisma-less old man with a high-pitched nasally voice against a young, handsome, articulate-in-front-of-a-teleprompter (and, oh yes, (half) BLACK) man with Hillary Clinton's left-wing orthodoxy, Bill Clinton's charisma, plus the one thing Sick Willie never managed: a zipped fly.

And yet Red Barry only won by three points, and razor-thin margins in the battleground states. 

After four years of race-baiting, cultural extremism, tax-raising, recession, artificial energy crises, homeland terrorist attacks, and strategic disasters and national humiliations abroad - the inevitable results of his professed policy platform - that will shrink his public stature to microscopic proportions, I daresay the "American Thatcher" will provide an entirely new challenge in a dramatically transformed political climate.

Assuming, of course, that there's much of an America left to be salvaged.

Fred Thompson might have averted this future exercise in forensic politics.  John McCain was never going to.

A base lesson that I can guarantee we're destined to forget in oscillating perpetuity.

UPDATE: Dick Morris echoes another of the themes I pointed out months ago:

If ever there was an election that was not worth winning, it was the contest of 2008. While it was hard-fought on both sides, had McCain won, it might have spelled the end of the Republican Party. As it is, the party is well-situated to come back in 2010 and in 2012, if it learns the lessons of this year.

Simply put, all hell is about to break loose in the markets and the economy.

The mortgage crisis will likely be followed by defaults in credit card debt, student loans and car loans. We will probably be set for two years of zero growth, according to economists with whom I talk. And the federal efforts to protect the nation from the worst of the recession will probably lead to huge budget deficits and resulting inflation. We are in for stagflation that could last for years.

Had McCain won, he would be the latter-day Hoover, blamed for the disaster that unfolded on his watch. Now it is Obama's problem. With the Republicans suffering a wipeout in congressional elections (although not as bad as they feared), the ball is now squarely in the Democratic court. Good luck!

Remember what I said about John Major and the British Conservatives barely winning a fourth consecutive term in 1993.  By 1997 the Tories were so hopelessly unpopular that they'd have lost huge no matter who was leading Labor; that it was Tony Blair (the British Bill Clinton) buried them all the way down to third party status and kept them there to this day.  Had McCain managed to prevail, he'd have entered office exhausted, at the head of an exhausted, shrunken party that would nevertheless have been blamed for the recessionary fallout from the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb as much as from the DFLB itself.  It would have been the grand bull-moose gold medal winner of pyrrhic victories.

Instead, in what I freely admit is the application of the lipstick of optimism to the pig of defeat, the Dems now get to reap the economic whirlwind their own policies sewed, and which their unchecked power will now make unbearably worse.  And unlike the Wall Street bailout fiasco, this time it will be Red Barry and the Donk SuperCongress up to their collectivist armpits in it all, while Republicans (if any of them have a brain cell left between them) stand clear, fingerpoint, and cultivate a bumper harvest of political payback in 2010 and 2012.

I also said, quite recently, that I was perfectly balanced between the short term loss/long-term gain scenario above and the horror of the magnitude of comprehensive damage that an unchecked Donk regime could do to America across the policy board.  I ended up doing the "responsible" thing and making myself connect the arrow for McCain.  Which means that I can gleefully and viciously pursue the political ruin of Lucifer and his animal party with a clear conscious.

I'd have preferred Fred Thompson carry our 2008 banner.  It's appalling that this is really, truly that to which we have been reduced.

But it isn't like this is the first time.  And as we learned in 1993-94, when life hands you a lemon....