The Cost of the American 2012 Election - And Was It Worth It?

Submitted by M. Tovey (United States), Jan 3, 2013 at 12:50

Question within a question: what is the final tally of monetary resources spent in trying the consciences of the American electorate on this very question; (w)hat is the future of Conservatism in the Wake of the 2012 Election? More pointedly, after all the favorable assessments of conservatism reviewing all of the anti-conservatism messages and questioning the antics of an American Executive Administration running amok the pillars of the founders' achievements and knocking them all over the place, the conservative message was still left trampled in the muck of political confusion as the obviously charismatic charms of a constitutional reformist who has promised in no uncertain terms that he will remake America in his own image knocked the stuffing out of conservatism and is not looking back. In other words, no one is looking for the license plate number of the bulletproof limo that ran down Republican style politics and the conservatism that claimed to be its motivation.

Not everyone who followed a conservative bent went sleepless agonizing over the loss, which can be characterized as somewhat of a repudiation of the Tea Party gains of a mere two years ago. Those of the persuasion that the institutionalist republican agenda was missing the point and challenge of social parity in America already knew the message of the Tea Party 'revolt' was almost immediately obfuscated by the Republican power elites' efforts to absorb the shallow shouts of victory and manipulate the newfound political energy into their own stagnated ideas of political insolvency. Those of the conservative persuasion that saw a better chance of a Newt Gingrich presidency that challenged the Republican institutionalist agenda as well as the agenda of Candidate Obama understood that the loss of the conservatism message was coming.

Look at it this way: who won the election for Candidate Obama? He won the voices of those who stood to lose the most if conservatism were to have won the day. His politics won the simple majority of those whom government promised the most and in their minds, why would they reject the hand that feeds them? The statement 'he (Romney) could not connect with the masses' is resoundingly the point to be made. But how did the Republican Party loose that sense of being representatives of the American population that they at one time could have counted upon for votes? Because, the engine that has driven the American economy for so many decades, the American middle class, has been battered as much by Republican-driven politics as any other kind of politics that the economic energy once counted upon by the Republicans has been drained away in compromise after compromise of conservative values and the economic energy reserves that was the basis of middle class stability is all but gone. And politically driven institutionalist republican conservatives are as much responsible as the secularist socialism with whom they compromised.

Indeed, 'what is the future of conservatism in the wake of the 2012 election?' Unless they can restore that which has been lost by the middle class and quit the betrayal of the middle class, there's not a snowball's chance on a mid-summer's day that they will ever recover in time to retrieve that which they are partly culpable of losing, an America that once cherished freedom and liberty but which it lost because they did not remember what made America great. As was noticed in the article, there is a sense that conservatism still has some resources to counter the liberal secularists' march against those freedoms and liberties; but the caution is that being an exact mirror of their mechanism to win the hearts of the people counts on a principle it has been shown they have already lost. A people that serve the self (politicians as well as the population) more than others will never have enough resources (i.e. money), ever, to be fully free; thus the question again: what is the final tally of monetary resources spent for the 2012 election in trying the consciences of the American electorate? And to follow up: was it worth it?

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