Hoping for the best

Congratulations are truly in order for President-elect Barack Obama.

Congratulations must also be given to his committed, hard-working volunteers who surely played as important a role in last week’s victory as the candidate himself. One might rightly wonder whether our economy would be suffering if these tireless Obamaniacs would show the same effort working at real jobs as they did in campaigning, but I’m trying to be magnanimous, so I’ll just leave that there.

I wish the best for our future president and hope he’ll be a great one. The letter behind his name is irrelevant, and when he proposes measures that increase liberty, prosperity and security, I’ll support him. But he cannot be successful if he continues to embrace the liberal ideology that he’s advocated in the past. I greatly fear that Obama will abandon the centrism of his campaign rhetoric, limiting individual freedom and causing greater suffering than we’ve so far known in this country. I sincerely hope I’m wrong. But as you know, I rarely am.

Conservatives, we must be respectful but bold in advancing our ideas. We can’t resort to the irrational, knee-jerk hatred that liberals displayed toward President Bush, but neither can we sit quietly while our way of life is threatened in the name of “bipartisanship” (which is merely an Orwellian “Newspeak” word for giving Democrats everything they want).

We must show people why American conservatism is the proven recipe for the greatest liberty and prosperity for the most people. Too many people, especially young Americans, mistakenly believe conservatism is nothing more than the desire to hoard cash and gain wealth at the expense of the lower class. We’ve let liberals – whose perverse policies actually create poverty and misery worldwide – set themselves up as champions of the poor.

This is the moral equivalent of breaking someone’s legs, then bragging about your compassionate concern for injured persons. It’s true – I love to see the rich getting richer, but I’m equally excited about the poor getting richer. These aren’t mutually exclusive, and there’s nothing to be gained from punishing society’s most successful producers and job providers.

Ronald Reagan proposed an effective strategy for equal-opportunity growth. When prosperous individuals and corporations are freed from cumbersome tax burdens, they’ll invest or spend their money, creating opportunity for the rest of us. This was labeled “trickle-down economics” by critics, but the opposite system – in which society’s most productive members are penalized with oppressive taxes and regulation – has been called “trickle-up poverty.” Or as Winston Churchill observed, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” In which system would you rather live?

Those of us who didn’t vote for Obama need to embrace him as our president and honor him for the office he’ll soon hold. But we’ve also got to work hard now, winning over minds and hearts long before the next election and reforming the GOP so that conservative principles can once again be presented to American voters.