Today the nation has finally harvested what it has sown and I suspect shortly it will prove itself to have a heavy content of ragweed and thistles.
It's one thing to promise everything to everyone and it is quite another to deliver that promise.
Republicans over the last two years can attest to the difficulties of trying to get in a game of upping the ante on giveaways and promises to try and buy votes. The conservative base really doesn't like it and eventually the recipients understand it's not working, so they punish the messenger.
Oddly enough the business prognosticators believe that an Obama presidency may be good for the natural gas industry which is good for Western Colorado. The reasoning being that at some level the Democrats seem intent on crushing the coal industry and taxing the profitability of the oil. Natural gas producers see this as an opening for them since their product is much more "carbon neutral" than the other two alternatives in energy generation.
The fact that global warming seems to be slipping quickly into the ashcan of scientific theory as well as empirical evidence will not dissuade Democrats from whacking away at oil producers for at least the next year or so.
On a statewide level it appears that there is a need for a sea change in approach in the Republican hierarchy. I knew there was going to be a problem when Karl Rove was discussing Colorado and its lack of state party initiative in recruiting new voters, especially Republican voters that moved here recently from other states.
The days of running state party politics entirely out of Denver should be something out of the past. The process of selecting statewide candidates which seems to involve people taking their "turn" needs to come to an end and candidate recruitment of articulate and reflexively grounded candidates has to take place; and it doesn't look like it's going to take place in some boardroom near the Tech Center.
Mesa County has established a working and highly successful model for recouping conservative/republican principles and candidates: the use of the small "r" is intentional.
The candidates I personally am most interested in are those interested in the Republic first and other stuff later.
The growing power of the Western slope in state politics is apparent and can be harnessed with the right set of principles to encompass our unique experience and needs.
In the face of the House District 55 change the virtually invisible Kathleen Curry of Gunnison has sprung forth from her cone of silence as the butterfly of possible House leadership.
Let me make a point of something I've said for a long time -- since the Clinton administration: Opportunism Is Not a Political Philosophy.
Outside pressure from a left wing Congress and executive branch will probably do much to unify conservative voices across the state and in our own area.
Whether the triumvirate of Reid, Pelosi and Obama will make the same mistakes that Clinton did in '92 that gave the country Newt Gingrich in '94 remains to be seen, but is highly likely.
Not so much change is likely in the Senate as the next round of open seats or contested ones are still more tilted towards Republicans. Conservatives should always remember during an Obama presidency that were it not for Carter we would have had no Reagan and if the Democrats had not had a Perot -- there would have been no Clinton.
