Election Day Prognostications

It's Election Day, and hopes are high in the conservative camp. Our Democratic friends seem to think that Republicans and conservatives are badly split.

The line seems to be that conservatives are turning towards extemism and scorning nice unifying moderates in the Republican Party.

Maybe so. But some experts seem to think that Obama won last year because conservatives stayed home to teach the GOP a lesson. They knew they were electing a lefty, but they didn't care.

And it's beginning to seem that independents are warming to the conservative message of smaller government, lower taxes, and less intrusion into private life.

At any rate, I'd say that if conservatives win the trifecta, with McDonnell winning in Virginia, Christie winning in New Jersey, and Hoffman winning in NY-23, then it is really, really big.

If Christie loses in New Jersey, then we can chalk it up to ACORN and the corrupt Democratic vote machine. That would just be a really big result.

If McDonnell wins in Virginia and the others lose, it's pretty discouraging. Look for ObamaCare and bureaucracy coming out the ying-yang.

But I expect encouraging results. Here are two bellwethers. First the young blogger John Hawkins. His schtik is a numbers game. Today it is "Three Reasons the Conservative Movement Should Be Grateful to Rush Limbaugh."

Hawkins tells that he got the liberal line from his college professors about politics, and he wasn't impressed.

It was an eye-opening experience to be told that America needed to abandon its military and use non-violent resistance as a defense strategy.

So what did the conservatives have to say, he wondered? Well, the only conservative he knew about was Rush Limbaugh. (Hello liberals: How come he couldn't check out conservatives at college? What happened to Conservatism 101: From Burke to Palin? Eh?) So he started to listen to America's Doctor of Democracy at the off-campus Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

That's just one of the things that Rush Limbaugh has done. Hawkins:

He helped inspired a whole new generation of conservatives. Personally, I'm a conservative because of Rush Limbaugh.

Then there is Michelle Bernard from the conservative Independent Women's Forum. Quoted in a roundup of pundit opinion at The Hill, she pitches the notion that independents don't like the sharply partisan tone of the Obama administration.

Democrats are losing independents in droves... Independents had believed that the President would govern from the center and truly work with both sides of the aisle. Today, many of them appear to question this.

There's a pretty simple reason why this is happening. Obama campaigned as a post-partisan center-left moderate. He is governing, or seeming to govern as a left-wing partisan. That represents a fundamental betrayal of trust.

If Obama were truly a moderate then his signature health reform proposal would include Republican agenda items so that it could be a bipartisan reform. But it isn't. He has deliberately adopted a divisive strategy to try and shame and bully opponents into submission rather than build a coalition.

My guess is that the Obama first year will go down as a textbook example of How Not to Do It.

But then that makes complete sense. The whole idea of the canonical government administrative bureaucratic Circumlocution Office is: How Not to Do It.