Conservative Student News

Representative Nancy Pelosi

Now that we know who will be our President the next four years, attention turns to a new question: What direction will America be heading in the future? The answer can be summed up in a simple word, right.

Americans have overwhelmingly embraced conservative candidates and their ideas. President Bush ran as a compassionate conservative and won by 3.5 million votes. Senatorial candidates like Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, North Carolina’s Richard Burr, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, Florida’s Mel Martinez and South Dakota’s John Thune all ran on conservative ideas and won. The new Republican members of the House of Representatives have been called, by columnists such as Bob Novak, one of the most conservative freshman classes in history.

All these things tell us that this country is embracing conservative ideas like never before. (Even President Reagan lost seats in Congress when he ran in 1980.) Now is the time to put the throttle to the floor and let conservative ideas make our country even greater than it already is.

Some of the things President Bush and Congress are looking at for the next term are: Partial privatization of Social Security, tort reform, tax reform, a new energy plan (drilling in ANWR, finally!), and making all courts, especially the Supreme Court, more conservative. As Robert Moran of the National Review points out, the first step to advancing the conservative agenda is “ignoring liberal Democrats.”

Moran goes on to eloquently sum up a truth about one of today’s most liberal parties when he says, “The Democrats have chosen to be the pessimists among an optimistic people. The more conservative Republicans govern and speak to America’s can-do spirit, the more pessimistic the Democrats will become.”

Now some readers are surely wondering at this point how conservatives expect to unite the country if they are going to ignore liberal Democrats. The fact is that when the highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, Minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California, says that we are now entering an “era of darkness,” uniting the country becomes nearly impossible. Also, if uniting the country means everyone agrees on everything, then we wouldn’t need politicians or elections anymore. The battle of ideas would cease to exist.

Both sides are united in the belief that politicians should work to make America better than it already is, they just differ on determining the best way to do this. Every new idea conservatives bring to the nation is bound to be defiled by the Democrats in Congress because these ideas are, surprisingly to some, the opposite of what the liberal agenda says the pathway to a better America is.

When liberals start to go off on these “era of darkness” tangents, conservatives must take Moran’s advice and ignore them. There is a reason that conservatives control the leadership positions in government. People voted for them because they like their ideas and want to see them implemented. If liberals want to stand in the way of what voters want, then I say let them.

The voters of this country have rejected the liberals’ vision for America numerous times before this past Nov. 2. In 1972, George McGovern ran as a foreign policy liberal and was creamed by Richard Nixon, managing to win only one state: Massachusetts. In 1984, Walter Mondale ran as a domestic policy liberal, even revealing that liberals want to raise everyone’s taxes. That brilliant strategy managed to win Mondale all of one state, our own Minnesota, against Ronald Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” campaign which carried the other 49.

1988 saw a self-proclaimed “card carrying ACLU member,” Michael Dukakis, badly beaten by Bush 41. (Dukakis did make huge strides for liberal presidential candidates though, winning nine states, compared to McGovern and Mondale’s combined two.)

The Democrats finally took the White House when Bill Clinton won in 1992, which happened for two reasons: First, Bush 41 ran away from the conservative ideas that he ran on in 1988 and, at the persistence of liberals in Congress, raised taxes. This opened the door to Ross Perot’s candidacy, which led many voters away from Bush Senior and his reelection bid. The second reason Clinton won is that he was paying attention to the previous three elections, all Republican landslides. Clinton didn’t want to be known as a liberal and embraced some conservative ideas such as welfare reform. Today, however, the centrist breed of Democrat that will embrace any conservative idea is a dying breed.

If one really wants to see how much most Americans dislike and even sometimes fear liberal ideas, simply look to our courts. The judiciary is the only branch of government left where liberals have even an inkling of control. It’s not a coincidence that the liberal’s only source of power comes from the only branch of government that is completely unelected.

When the Massachusetts Chief Justice decided to allow gay marriage to be recognized, the liberal agenda started to backlash against itself. The result was 11 states proposing amendments to define marriage as between a man and a woman. All these amendments passed as a rebuke to liberal justices who wished to impose their beliefs on us. American’s were obviously concerned that the actions of some state court like Massachusetts’ could someday be the actions of the United States Supreme Court. The current President, alternatively, promises to appoint justices who will not legislate from the bench but rather interpret the law, as justices are supposed to.

Thanks to the majority of Americans who voted on conservative ideas and values in this past election, however, the worry that liberals may rule the country will be put to rest, at least for another four years.