re: #945 Irving

When conservatism finds the right level of ideology to make the majority of Americans comfortable, it’ll come back into power- that, and the Democrats will go too far for the majority of people to feel comfortable with them. It’s way too early for that to happen. Obama’s policies literally have not had enough time to fail. Hysterics at this point are, at best, useless. I know it’s hard to get it in an eight-hour news cycle world, but if the conservatives want to get back into power they need to sit down, shut up, and give Obama enough time and rope to hang himself. And bluntly, that might be eight years of time. Patience. Everything moves in cycles.

That’s not how politics works. You can’t calibrate a movement to “the right level of ideology” — you can build a movement that has the ability to build a coalition of differing but not incompatible ideologies.

As for Obama getting enough time and rope to hang himself (gee! I hope that wasn’t a racist allusion to lynching a Black man!), two things. First, America can suffer a lot of damage while Obama is destroying his own political reputation. Second, as David Frum implied in your quote, the response to Obama’s failure might well be, “Well, he just wasn’t GOOD at implementing a statist agenda. The next guy we elect, we’ll pick someone MUCH better at it.”

Patience is wise counsel — but not static patience, where we simply wait for the Left to implode. We have to give a majority of Americans from the center to the Right (excluding the actual lunatic fringe) a slate and a program to vote for, not just an alternative for voting against the Left.