If that happens it portends a period of uncertainty and conflict in the Republican Party.

Some suggest we’re likely to become a party of the DLC. I don’t see that happening unless Obama is a total success and Republicans have to become a “me too” party to survive. That would take a long……. time (How long was it from John Major to David Cameron?) to happen.

If Obama is a complete failure (politically) we may see a temporary revival of the Republican Party of the 1990’s.

More likely Obama will be a disappointing President but the media will cover for him. The media has invested a lot of money and credibility in Obama. If he fails it looks bad for all the reporters and journalists who managed to get him elected.

In that case I think the Republican Party will have strong inner urges.

The elites in the Party, mostly urbanites who share in Obama’s culture and outlook will want to move immediately to the place where they think they can win. ‘What good is owning a party if it’s not winning?’

The grassroots and conservatives in our party will have a strong urge to be angry and bitter towards Obama, the media and the elites in their own party.

Whichever direction the Republican Party moves it will have diverse factions pushing and pulling.

We could be unified as a party if Obama kills too many of our sacred cows and we pick a nominee that finds a better equilibrium between the parts of our coalition.

Right now I’m betting if McCain loses that our party will be more focused on angry recriminations and finger pointing than in finding a way to keep the party together and shift its message. I still hope that McCain doesn’t waste his last debate appearance.

Obama might not have heard of Ayers and Dohrn’s brutality from the ’60s through the ’80s had they merely tossed a rock or two in anger. But these two went much, much farther.

In 1970, Ayers encapsulated the Weathermen’s worldview: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.” In his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” Ayers brags that he helped blast NYPD headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Dohrn was an equally stalwart subversive. In July 1969, while John McCain languished in the Hanoi Hilton, Dohrn and five other Weathermen flew to Cuba to conspire with the National Liberation Front, America’s North Vietnamese enemies. Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

Throughout the 1970s, under Ayers and Dohrn’s leadership, the Weathermen blasted the State Department, Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters, and New York’s Queens Courthouse, among at least 16 targets.

Thankfully, one particular bomb detonated early. Three Weathermen fatally blew themselves up in March 1970 while building it in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The Weathermen wanted the nail-filled device to explode at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army base during a non-commissioned officers’ dance. Soldiers, their spouses, and dates would have been maimed and likely killed. As Ayers said, the bomb would have ripped “through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

No wonder Obama has been so evasive about his ties to Ayers and Dohrn. His relationship with these extreme Leftists goes far beyond waving at some folks who live nearby. It defies belief that Obama never learned that Ayers and Dohrn hated the USA and loved TNT.

Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers inaugurated. They jointly attended at least seven of that charity’s top-level oversight meetings between March 1995 and September 1997. They jointly met a dozen times as board members of Chicago’s Woods Fund between December 1999 and December 2002. They appeared together on two academic panels in 1997 and 2002. Obama concisely reviewed one of Ayers’ books in the Chicago Tribune.

Ayers and Dohrn invited Windy City liberals into their living room to meet Obama when he began his 1995 State Senate run. Ayers donated $200 to re-elect Obama in 2001.

*Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s re-election campaign on April 2, 2001, and Obama accepted Ayers’ contribution. According to four federal, state, and private “watchdog” websites, this is the only recorded political contribution for either Ayers or Dohrn. (She has no donations on these public-disclosures webpages.)

These considerable ties might be irrelevant if Ayers and Dohrn regretted their actions. But they are far from remorseful.

“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,” Ayers said in an interview published September 11, 2001 — while Obama knew Ayers. That August, Ayers posed for a Chicago Magazine photo in which he stomped on an American flag crumpled in the dirt. Headline: “No regrets.”

“We’d do it again,” Dohrn told ABC in 1998. “I wish that we had done more. I wish we had been more militant.”

If these facts are news to Obama, he must be the most oblivious man on Chicago’s South Side. But if he knew about Ayers and Dohrn’s background, he is being untruthful about it. At the very least, Obama showed dreadful judgment by closely and repeatedly associating with these violent traitors.

Obama today calls Ayers’ behavior “detestable acts.” But what did Ayers and Dohrn see in Obama? What inspired these unrepentant, hard-Left bomb throwers to hand the chairmanship of Ayers’ foundation and then share their home, friends, and Ayers’ only evident campaign contribution with the charismatic then-35-year-old whose current 95.5 percent Left-wing vote record made him The National Journal’s “Most Liberal Senator In 2007?”
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New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

…

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And here’s Chris Buckley, the late Bill Buckley’s son, endorsing — that’s right, endorsing — Obama for president:

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best.

…

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Conservative pundits are fond of saying that a McCain loss will be like 1976 all over again, and that 2012 will be 1980, with another Reagan riding in from the West to unite the Right and bring in the Center. But where is this Reagan? Brooks and Buckley both make clear that Sarah Palin is at least as unacceptable to them as John McCain, if not more so. Conservatives will be quick to point out that Palin Derangement Syndrome is confined to liberals and conservative eggheads, but Peggy Noonan showed us in 2005, when she bashed Bush as early as his second inauguration and was called a traitor for doing so, that sometimes the eggheads are right.

But this is less about Palin and more about the fact that conservatives don’t want to get along. They’re not looking for a leader who makes everybody happy because everyone on the Right is pissed off at everyone else on the Right. Opponents of our efforts in Iraq often said that the U.S. military presence was simply delaying the fact that the various factions wanted to get on with killing each other. I think the Bush presidency and the McCain campaign may now be delaying the fact that each of America’s conservative factions wants to get on with strangling one another. Like American liberals in the 1980s and British conservatives over the past decade, American conservatives will probably need a few years to fight it out so that the old, obsolete, clunky Republican Party that is about to head into the wilderness can make way for something that makes sense for the 21st Century.

“This new information about Barack Obama’s relationships with ACORN and William Ayers raises a lot of questions.” - (insert TV political talking head’s name here)

Wrong.

The information coming out now, during the “attentive voter season” before Election Day, answers all the questions voters have before they vote every four years.

Does this candidate share the Judeo-Christian values that have defined our Nation and have served us so well for so long? Does he have the character worthy of occupying the most powerful position on Earth? And would enemies of the United States fear that he would aggressively defend us?

To listen to TV talking heads, even those named Hannity and Gingrich, from whose Thursday night discussion I culled the above paraphrase, no questions are ever answered. Rather, what are, in deed, revelations, only reveal to a brain dead media another line of questioning that Obama could theoretically trump with some glib retort, on their television shows. For you see, if questions are ever definitively answered, there would no reason to tune in and listen to them any more!

Moreover, even our conservative pundits, like ourselves if we don’t be careful, can be just as guilty of elitist tunnel vision as liberals. Add to that, the all too common, “the world was just invented this election cycle”, of so many of the poll-obsessed yutes in the blogosphere, egged on by a media that sells the idea that past election losses by, leading in the polls until the end, Democrats were decided by debate moments or clever ads late in the campaign, and you witness the rampant defeatism of so many conservatives for whom McCain can never attack aggressively enough.

I heard all this from 1980-1988 and 2000-2008. Absent a known leftist and a Perot, we win.

The only slightly credible argument advanced by the defeatists is that Obama is not a “known” leftist. But even on this, a certain kind of elitism blinds the defeatist.

The defeatist knows Obama is a far left appeasing, Marxist that is unfit for the office of President of the United States. He sees it oh so clearly and, due to historical ignorance, allows his emotions to be manipulated by polls. Moreover, and more importantly, he thinks that the average, mostly inattentive for the past four years, mostly non-political potential voter, does not see Obama for what he is, and that he won’t see Obama for the extremist he is unless John McCain and Charlie Gibson say exactly what the defeatist thinks ought be said in just the way our defeatist hero wants.

I say, get over yourselves.

One mistake the defeatists make is that they watch the news in a different way than the average voter. We political junkies watch news reports about the Obama revelations to see how the media spins the revelations. The average voter, on the other hand, sees and hears the revelations. They are new to the average voter. And they are about the business, NOW, of getting attentive to make their choice on Election Day. They know that they get to vote on that day. They have lived through other election days and remember that they made the right choice then. They will this time.

The now attentive voters were already jolted into noticing Obama by the God-damned America sermons Obama sat thru for 20 years. Their common sense prevents any glib excuses to drown out the din of his pew-parked butt on that matter, nor on the fact of the new video of Farrakhan dubbing him the Messiah. They understand that it would not be appropriate for any candidate to hang with a less competent Timothy McVeigh that got off on a legal technicality and serve on boards to craft an “education reform” on radicalism short of bombing government buildings in Oklahoma, just because they were wetting diapers in the 90s. Same with Ayers.

The public sees and hears, just like us. Yes, we saw and heard months ago. It’s our life. These “swing” voters have real lives. They had real lives in the past as well, and looked up just in time to see what we knew and elect Reagan twice, Bush 41, and Bush 43 twice.

Why? Because they saw that Mondale would raise taxes; abandon the conservative economic policies that were working; and not be feared by the USSR. They saw that Dukakis would do the same and that he didn’t share our values with respect to crime, criminals and the appropriateness of the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by school children. That Gore lacked character as revealed by his three characters and would abandon Bill Clinton’s Reaganite economic policies and that Kerry would turn over US sovereignty to Kofi Annan.

They saw the liberal and rejected the liberal, just in time.

This past week these people, wracked by economic crisis, saw a slick lawyer that claimed he never represented the far left ACORN vote fraud community organizers as a lawyer.

Gamecock asked the question months ago if it were too much to ask Obama to name one client and one member of a community he organized. We already knew that he tried to hide the hopelessly audacious racist pastor/mentor praying in a church basement as he announced his candidacy. We, and even the usually inattentive American, have seen the wife he can’t hide preach her un-proud of America cynicisms.

And this week we found out why Obama has never volunteered a satisfied client because his clients are vile. But more than that, this is not a case of a lawyer defending a criminal as part of his duty to the bar in our justice system. No. This is a case of his representation of his ideological brethren.

He was caught in a flat out lie could not possibly have been un-covered because of the “whole truth” compilations of appellate case reporting going back to US Reporter Volume One from 1790!

Obama is listed in federal reports as a lawyer for ACORN. For the non-legal, do you recall seeing those endless rows of identically bound thick volumes in courtrooms and law libraries? Those are books of ALL of the opinions of appellate cases in all courts of the United States and the states. They cannot be refuted.

Obama is caught in a brazen lie. And the beauty of it is that the lie ties him to not only ACORN, but also to Ayers “education” minutes on Annenberg, Obama’s book review of Ayers book, and all the lies about their supposedly neighbor waving a neighbor thru a stop sign in the morning relationship. An ad of Obama and the nervous crowd laughter when he said teaching sex ed in grammar school and kindergarten is “the right thing to do” is on the air.

Palin has been attacking Obama for all this and for what it says about Obama in explicit terms. McCain has ads up doing the same, one of which has Bill Clinton blaming the dems in congress for the Fannie Mae caused economic crisis. Palin is all over the Obama votes against saving babies that survive abortions.

And, for all you ostriches, Rush, Levin and others played numerous clips this week of McCain himself calling out dems by name, including Obama for the crisis.

In short, the questions are being answered before our eyes and yet so many politically correct TV talking heads continue with the refrain that Obama needs to answer questions. One wonders if these people asked that question after the confession in To Kill a Mockingbird as the credits rolled after The End!

Obama’s actions of the past 20 years are the answers, not any non sequiturs he might belch out during a “debate.’

No amount of psychoanalysis will change what he DID. No words from his mouth will make it all ok for him to hold the nukes for four seconds, much less four years.

Defeatist poll obsessors, lend me your ears!

The American people can connect the dots, and are, in fact doing so now. They can see through the voice-overs by a liberal in the tank media they viscerally distrust.

There is nothing new under the sun. The conversations on conservative websites I frequent are the same as I had with nervous nellies in quadrennial Leap Year Octobers past while a Republican, and the flip-side of too confident libs when I was democrat and knew that the gray-haired old lady in the second row of the Baptist choir was a better predictor of the aftermath of Election Day than the latest hurling from Gallup.

And hey, Newt and Hannity, don’t let answers to questions pass you by. And hey, fellow members of the conservative chattering class: Lower your snobbish noses a bit and you will see the knowing looks in the eyes of the non-chatterers, as Obama’s 20-year mask is removed just in time for Halloween.

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Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

“One man with courage makes a majority.” - Andrew Jackson

University of Cincinnati Ohio General Election

• John McCain 48% (48%)
• Barack Obama 46% (42%)

Which presidential candidate will do the best job of improving our economy?

• Obama 47%
• McCain 44%

Survey of 876 likely voters was conducted October 4-8. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points. Results from the poll conducted September 12-16 are in parentheses.

WSOC-TV North Carolina General Election

• John McCain 47.8%
• Barack Obama 46.0%

Survey of 500 likely voters was conducted October 6-7. The margin of error is +/- 4.5 percentage points.

Sun-Sentinel/Research 2000 Florida General Election

• Barack Obama/Joe Biden 49% (45%)
• John McCain/Sarah Palin 44% (46%)

Among Men

• McCain 50% (51%)
• Obama 44% (42%)

Among Women

• Obama 54% (48%)
• McCain 38% (41%)

Which candidate do you trust more on the the economy?

• Obama 52% (46%)
• McCain 33% (38%)

Survey of 600 likely voters was conducted October 6-8. The margin of error is +/- 4 percentage points. Party ID breakdown: 45% (D); 38% (R); 17% (I). Results from the poll conducted September 15-18 are in parentheses.

Diageo/Hotline Daily Tracker Poll

• Barack Obama/Joe Biden 50%
• John McCain/Sarah Palin 40%

Survey of 808 likely voters was conducted October 8-10. The margin of error is +/- 3.4 percentage points. Party ID Breakdown for the sample is 41% (D), 37% (R), 18% (I).

Inside the numbers:

- Burgeoning Record. In the first Diageo/Hotline poll taken fully after the 2nd WH debate, Obama leads McCain by 10%, his largest margin thus far. Previously, Obama’s record advantage had been 7%.

- Prepare & Contrast. McCain now has his smallest lead ever on who LVs feel is more prepared to lead the nation. 46% say McCain is more prepared, while 43% say Obama. A week ago, in the survey completed 10/3, McCain led 49-41%.

- Hail To The Victor. LVs overwhelmingly feel Obama won the 2nd debate. Among the 71% who watched, 53% say the Dem nominee prevailed, while just 14% say McCain. In a similarly timed sample of RVs after the 1st debate, 42% said Obama won and 25% said McCain.

- Made The Grades. Obama scored considerably higher among debate watchers than McCain. 71% say Obama did an “excellent” or “good” job in the debate, while only 38% say the same of McCain. 27% say Obama did an “only fair” or “poor” job, while 59% say the same of McCain.

Rasmussen Daily General Election Tracking (10/11)

• Barack Obama 52%
• John McCain 45%

Favorable / Unfavorable (Net)

• Barack Obama 56% / 43% (+13%)
• John McCain 52% / 47% (+5%)

Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 1,000 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The margin of sampling error—for the full sample of 3,000 Likely Voters–is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. For polling data released during the week of October 5-11, 2008, the partisan weighting targets used by Rasmussen Reports will be 39.3% Democratic, 33.3% Republican, and 27.4% unaffiliated.

Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Daily Tracking Poll

• Barack Obama 47.6%
• John McCain 43.8%

Survey of 1,208 likely voters was conducted October 7-10. The margin of error is +/- 2.9 percentage points.