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What the election means

November 7, 2008 | By Nathaniel Ward

On Tuesday, American voters elected Senator Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States. His Democratic Party allies also realized substantial gains in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

In a column circulated nationwide, Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner explains what this election means for conservatives.

An abiding belief in our country's greatness, tinged with optimism, has long been a cornerstone of conservatism. And Obama's been tacitly leaning toward conservative ideas since he became the Democratic nominee. Even though his record indicated he was the most liberal candidate in (at least) a generation, he ran as a conservative on major issues like taxes (promising to cut them), the military (vowing to add some 92,000 new troops) and energy (saying he'd at least consider offshore drilling).

"The problem," he continues,

is that both political parties have failed Americans

In recent years the Republican Party, which in Reagan's hands carried the conservative standard to new heights, lost its way. Federal spending now tops $25,000 per household annually, and the coming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs of 77 million retiring baby boomers threaten to add another $12,000 per household to the taxpayers' annual tab. Yet neither party offers a solution to the entitlement crisis or a real plan to cut spending.

And while "Republicans who have lost touch with their conservative roots are in trouble," Feulner argues, "conservatives are thriving," dominating the talk radio airwaves and expanding their online presence on sites like Townhall.com.

Still a center-right nation

Heritage Vice President Mike Franc made two key observations about the election results in a National Review Online symposium.

First, with the defeat of Republican moderates, "returning House Republicans will be more uniformly conservative. To the extent congressional Republicans plan to rediscover their inner conservative selves, this enhanced ideological uniformity will serve them well."

Secondly, and more importantly, Franc notes that "the exit polls, to the extent they can be believed, remind us once again that America remains a decisively right-of-center nation."

Liberal remains a dirty word. In fact, many more Americans continue to self-identify as conservative (34 percent) than as liberal (only 22 percent). Knowing this, successful Democratic candidates across the country used conservative rhetoric and themes to score points against their Republican opponents and win the hearts of voters. The Democrats' repeated refrain on behalf of middle class tax relief was but one of several such examples.

No permanent victories, no permanent defeats

Heritage President Ed Feulner likes to say that in Washington, there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats. A New York Times report on the election makes that clear.

After the liberal victory, the article explains, "Republicans face the hard, brutal struggle of deciding who they are, resolving the tensions between moderates, conservatives, evangelical Christians, country-clubbers, supply-siders, suburbanites -- all the disparate elements held together by Ronald Reagan that collapsed under President Bush."

This is a now-familiar refrain — but this article is not from this week but from 1992. Conservatives, in other words, have been in similar situations before.

Yet while this report may give conservatives hope, we should not be overconfident. Though we have a considerable struggle ahead of us, there is no reason to despair. Instead, we must redouble our efforts.

In other news

  • Voters in California, Arizona and Florida approved measures defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The California measure, a constitutional amendment, was particularly notable since an activist court ruled earlier this year that the state law upholding traditional marriage was unconstitutional. Heritage's Thomas Messner recently explained why preserving traditional marriage is critical to ensuring religious liberty.
  • "The U.S. government arrested and deported record numbers of illegal immigrants — nearly 350,000 — in the past year," the AP reports. "It has also naturalized a record number of new Americans during the same time period, more than 1 million."

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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. David Talbot contributed to this report.