Since the election numbers came rolling in and everyone either rejoiced, cried, or shrugged at the results, there’s been a lot of chitter-chatter about why John McCain lost and Barack Obama won.

The Republicans ran on a platform of fear and hatred. Of things that are different from their ideals, of people who aren’t like the “rest of us,” and of changes that were to come. When it came down to it – the Republican party tried to divide the nation into ‘us and them.’ And Barack Obama told us all we could come together, unite and be one country.

That made all the difference in the world.

Fight a Rockstar…with a Rockstar!

Sarah Palin is very much the Conservative-Right’s version of Barack Obama.

She’s attractive, she’s young, she’s fresh, she’s got a way with words, and she seems to draw in tens of thousands of people to hang on her every sentence. If Barack Obama was a modern-day Messiah-wannabe, then Sarah Palin was the quintessential demagogue.

Palin is a rabble-rouser of the highest form. She should be commended for that, to some degree, because it’s not the easiest thing to do. Especially when you’re entering a stage far larger than anything you’ve encountered in Wasilla or any part of Alaska. She wasn’t just able to get people fired up and excited to hear her speak or to get out and vote, but she raised eyebrows through her at-times vitriolic rhetoric.

If Barack Obama is a Hope-Mongerer, then Sarah Palin is a Fear-Mongerer.

You may want to write me off because of that statement, it all depends on how willing you are to open your eyes and actually look back at the last few months. Yes, I am calling you close-minded if you try and write off my comments, because frankly, the Republican party has a lot of work to do, and it’s not going to get anything accomplished by listening to the Glen Becks, the Sean Hannitys, and the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

One of us! One of us!

My politics, to anyone whose read this blog, are pretty clear. I’m an Obama supporter. But here’s something you may not know:

I voted for Bob Dole over Bill Clinton. I voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore. I voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry.

Anyone that’s worked for me or worked with me knows that I’m an the espouser-supreme of hard-work gets you far. About making your own way for yourself. About beating down the odds, and doing what you can to get ahead. This is why I voted for Dole. This is why I voted for Bush. Because, like so many Republicans, I believed that the Republican party was the group to get across the message of individual responsibility being the saving grace of the world.

The Republican party, at least, that magical Republican party in all of our heads, is the party of individual freedoms. Of less governmental intrusion in the lives of its people. About spending appropriately when necessary, and cutting things that don’t work. This is how Bush got me, because though our memory of the man is peppered with the last 8 years of the actuality of his administration, we have to try and remember the campaigner. The “Uniter, not a Divider,” the guy who had plan after plan for what he was going to do, ways he was going to fix the problems of Washington, how he was going to be an outside guy shaking up the system and re-defining what it meant to have a government that wasn’t bloated or huge.

Bush had a surplus and the thought of a Republican with good ideas inheriting a surplus was a magical concept that swept many of us away.

The reality of the GWB Regime, however, is much different. After 9/11, everything changed. Bush used his political capital to start wars, bloat government, and whittle down civil liberties across the board. Things that are as un-American as un-American can get – torture, spying on civilians, imprisonment without cause or recourse – were the name of the game. And this was not the Republican party I knew.

Emotion outweighs logic

And all that’s well and good. All that’s a reason on the surface to vote in a different party, just to try and get things right again. But, even though they shouldn’t be, for many Americans who aren’t political junkies, who don’t read news page after news page, blog after blog, watch program after program, some of this stuff is too nuanced to base a decision on.

Emotion outweighs logic.

Think about your life, think about your decisions, and how many times you’ve gone with the gut-instinct rather than what your brain told you to do. Or how often you’ve done something you shouldn’t have done, because your emotions got in the way. Maybe it was helping someone who wronged you over and over, because you have that thread connecting you, or going back to a significant other even though it’s clear they aren’t the right person for you. There are a thousand scenarios here and you can fill in your own, but as a rule, for humans, emotion overrules logic.

So in this political campaign we had two emotions running rampant: Hope and Fear.

After the pick of Sarah Palin, the Republican campaign made a big switch. There was no longer any discussion about the issues. There was no longer any discussion about how this plan of John McCain’s was better than that plan of Obama’s, or how McCain and Palin as a team were better suited to fix a specific problem with a specific answer than the team of Obama and Biden.

Time after time, when out on the stump, John McCain and Sarah Palin pushed the politics of fear.

Fear of Obama because of his potential association with William Ayers. Fear of Obama because he was a socialist. Fear of Americans who didn’t have a job and would steal the money of hard-working Americans. Fear of people who had babies out of wedlock. Fear of homosexuals destroying marriage.

This fear created a divisiveness amongst Americans and turned people away from the Republican ticket.

Think about it like this: If you were gay, a single-parent, a muslim, a liberal, a couple that wasn’t married but had children, a foreigner or a host of other specific ‘groups’ in America, would you have voted for the party that continually did everything they could to say you were wrong? To breed fear against you? To say that you were the problem with this country?

Or were you going to vote for the guy who kept talking about all of us coming together? All of us working together. All of us doing what we could, to put the politics of hate and fear and separation aside so that we could confront the problems this country is facing.

You can’t get the majority of Americans to vote for you when you tell them they’re bad.

Two very different parts of a whole

Ronald Reagan took the religious and brought them into the fold of the Republican party. When he got the vast majority of Americans to support him, one of his biggest bases was the Religious “right,” who at one time was the Religious left.

When this happened, two parts of the Republican party slowly began to fight against each other, and as each became more vehement, the differences became more startling. All of this culminated in GWB. Bush II was very clear that he was a Christian, that he felt he was on a mandate from God, and that the Christian faith would lead America to the right place.

How can you be the party of less government when you want to morally mandate what happens in citizen’s bedrooms and what they do with their bodies?

The Christian Right is a dichotomy that doesn’t work with the tenets of the Republican party. Republicans wants the government to be smaller. To let the individual reign supreme, and the government be there to keep the very basic promises of the Constitution alive and well.

Yet, when you couple those ideals with the concept of refusing certain kinds of people from adopting children, you’re working against yourself. When you mix those ideals with refusing a certain sexual orientation the right to marry, you’re stripping them of their civil liberties. When you continually make aspersions that someone may be a “Muslim” and use that as an attack, you’re diluting the power our constitutional right of Freedom of Religion.

I understand that Christians have their beliefs and I’m not against that. I’m all for it, because that’s part of the beauty of America – you can believe what you want to believe. That’s freedom.

But trying to impose that Christian morality upon a populace that does not want it, does not feel they need it, and is opposed to it fundamentally strips away their rights as Americans and goes against not only their constitutionally laid-down freedoms, but also goes against the foundations of the Republican party.

So what’s a party to do?

Judging from my own family and friends, as well as many of the people I saw during interviews at rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin, the Religious Right isn’t going anywhere. They feel they are the correct solution for America, and while their judgements and their vitriol may be directly against some of the teachings of Christ, they feel it is their duty to impose their Christian morality on the rest of America. For the sake of America.

But did you notice not a single bit of this really has to do with less taxes? Less government? Capitalism? Keeping your money?

Because they don’t go together. They don’t make sense.

The Democrats, through the simple inability for these two concepts to exist within the same party, have become the home for civil liberties and individual freedoms. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be that way, but that’s where America has gone.

So the Republican party needs to take a long-hard look at itself and see if it can survive.

Personally, I believe that the days of one group of people dictating their morality and their religious values upon the rest of a nation who may not agree are nearing to an end. This is how it should be, because Christian morality isn’t the same as Wiccan morality is not the same as Hindu, Islam, Zen-Buddhist or any other religious morality.

For the Republican party to continue this fight is a losing battle. There may be an occasional flare up again that would help that particular iteration of the party get another candidate into office. But as America changes and becomes more diverse, as it should, as it will, then one religious set of rules will be shrugged off. And that’s how it should be, because that’s how our founding fathers meant for it to be.

You can say they were Christians, and some of them were, but they weren’t ignorant or living in a bubble. They travelled the world. They knew of other religions and they knew of other ideas and when they sat down to pen the constitution they knew what they were doing when they wrote in the concept of Freedom of Religion. They knew that would mean Religions they don’t agree with or Religions they had never heard of would have to be respected, and that’s the way they wanted it.

So what does the Republican party do now? Either find a way to quiet and move past the Religious Right, which seems completely against the Religious Right’s own desires, or to just split the party.

Split the party? What?

Yes. I think that’s exactly what needs to happen. From the ashes of the Republican party, two parties need to be formed, because these two facets cannot continue to live together, and won’t be able to continue getting the majority of Americans to support them, especially as this country moves forward.

Republican ideals are sound. Similar to the Libertarian, but without the hard-lined separation of everything and the destruction of regulation, the Republican party’s true ideals realize that the individual is important, that the states are important, and that the government doesn’t have to be massive and huge and bloated and doesn’t have the right to get involved with the personal day to day personal decisions of its people.

Make government efficient. Cut taxes. Support individual freedoms. Cut the deficit.

These are the ways you’ll defeat a socialist movement in America – if you think that’s necessary. If you think that the programs being sponsored by the Obama administration are too far-reaching. I for one don’t, but that’s not the point of this.

And what happens to the Christian Conservative Right folks? I don’t know. They make their own party, their own party that outwardly espouses the desires they have – to stop gay marriage, to stop abortion, to get God back into the public schools, to get God back into the government, to outlaw divorce to protect marriage, to keep most substances illegal, etc. Because these are their desires, and these desires are vastly different from a party whose goals continue to be the freedom of the American people and the protection of its rights afforded by the constitution.

What about the Democrats?

Barack Obama, though labeled as a super-liberal and a socialist, couldn’t be anything further. His policies, at least the policies he’s continued to espouse and write about over the years, have been consistent and while they lean more toward socialism than the hard-core right, they are far from being socialist in their execution.

America already has a progressive tax-system. America already redistributes wealth, except now the majority of breaks go to corporations, business and wealthy Americans.

America needs to take care of its own, like it does with Social Security or Medicare. We need a few more programs like this, not to control our lives, but to help augment them if we think they’re necessary. Just like a person can save up and eschew Social Security money, likewise can someone choose to disregard any sort of National Healthcare Initiative. Or any public works programs. Or any of the other things you’re worried about Obama enacting.

But for some of us, we see a problem in this country – and Obama (and not the Democratic party itself) has solutions. Ways to rebuild the manufacturing base in this country, to help put people back to work and build our economy, as well as shifting the balance of our trade deficit with foreign nations back into our favor. Ways to get car manufacturers and energy companies to move into the future, and by doing so, by embracing greener technologies, creating even more jobs. And ways to immediately help this country stay strong and sound and competitive by public works projects that rebuild our crumbling highways, roads, bridges, by fixing problems with dams, powerlines, by getting municipalities online to help themselves and American citizens, and by helping to lay down broadband access lines throughout the country.

These things do cost money. And Obama’s going to have to go into the budget and cut programs that aren’t working. None of the things he proposes will work if he can’t cut costs in other ways. But Barack Obama’s a smart guy, and he’s been saying these things for years.

In his books. In his speeches. In his policies. He continues to have the same ideas and the same solutions to fix our problems in America. Maybe these aren’t what you want, maybe you don’t see the value of it and that’s fine. That’s the joy of America.

But, if you’re a Republican, you do yourself a disservice by not realizing the problems with your party. How the pieces aren’t working together anymore, and how the detriment is beginning to outweigh the benefit.

I would actually look forward to a truly Republican party again, because that’s a party I could very much give my vote to if the candidate was right. Afterall, I would have voted for Ron Paul over Hillary Clinton any day