Sorrow and Determination

My five-year-old son had the same reaction I felt when he asked this morning 'who won' and we told him 'Obama' (I had to confirm it to him as he didn't believe it just from mom).  Although I wasn't fast enough with the camera to catch his reaction, he looked absolutely heartbroken and hid his face in the pillow.

It will take some time to analyze and figure out how to interpret the results of election day 2012, but it does bring to me both great sorrow, and even fears of what we have become as a nation and what we have ahead of us.

It also causes me to reflect and reinforce my commitment to my family and my faith.  Whatever lies ahead of us, if we stick together we will face it together.

I think we are in for some real and depressing changes ahead of us.  Obama has not shown to me any willingness to do what it takes to reign in the death spiral of our deficit, and what little he seems inclined to do will tend to further slow our economy and weaken our national defense, while increasing the iron grip of Big Government on our economy and our lives.

And yet, we will live to fight another day, fight for our freedoms and our country.  It will be on different terrain, and we will need to spread the word and gain more adherents to our cause.  But that's exactly what we will do.  We're down but not out, and thank heavens the House is still in the hands of the Republicans.  We will work from that base and move forward.

Yes, today is a terribly sad day, but it is also a day to find again our determination to fight for our future. Let's begin to prepare now for the elections in 2014 and 2016.

E-DAY

It's E-Day - Election Day - my friends.  A really, really big deal.  I consider my "political life" - when I became politically aware of what was going on in the country - to have started with the first election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Since that election - and its follow up in 1984 - I don't believe we have had as important an election as this one.

You can argue that the last election presented us with the same basic choice as we have today, and in some ways that's right if Obama was properly understood in 2008.  But for very many he wasn't - he was an unknown, untested quantity who argued for vague "hope and change."  Now, however, we know who he is.  We know what he has and has not done in the past 4 years.

In 2012, we know that we have a very clear choice between Obama, who divides us by class and race and beliefs, a dictatorial president who finds ways to run over or undermine the constitutional system and the Congress, a president who believes the government should pick winners and losers and choose what we citizens are allowed to get and not get and that government should micromanage and control our economic lives, our health lives, our educational lives, even our religious lives - and an alternative, in Mitt Romney, who believes in freedom - free markets and free people, more freely living our lives; who believes in limited, Constitutional government, and a society in which we are not hyphenated or divided by class, race, or believes, but a civil society in which we respect one another as Americans first.

To be honest, we need Romney to win today; we need Republicans to win the House and the Senate.  Not because Republicans are perfect - they are not - but because we know that Obama and the Democrats will push Obamacare to completion and expansion and foist on us other big government control policies that will further cripple our economy and change the expectations of American citizens with regard to the government in a dangerous way.

This is the time to stand up.  Reach out to family and friends, reach out across your neighborhood and community and across the nation.  Get everyone out there to support and vote for Romney and the Republicans, no matter what it takes.  No matter how many minutes or hours you need to stand in line - no matter what.  Today is the day, and now is the time!

Tomorrow is THE DAY

We're at the doorstep now and ready to walk through.  It will take all of us to the last.  Vote for Romney tomorrow if you haven't voted already, and let nothing stop you!  Talk to family and friends all day long and get them out the to vote for Romney, no matter where you live and vote.  Reach across the country and get all you know to do the same.

I found a lot of my current thoughts on the state of the race in Peggy Noonan's article in the Wall Street Journal today.  Read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

“We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like a thief with good tools,” in Walker Percy’s old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. He’s quietly rising, and he’s been rising for a while.

Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

Something old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him. A former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning something is moving with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and religious Catholics. He said what’s happening with them is quiet, unreported and spreading: They really want Romney now, they’ll go out and vote, the election has taken on a new importance to them.

There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.

Maybe that’s what the coming Romney moment is about: independents, conservatives, Republicans, even some Democrats, thinking: We can turn it around, we can work together, we can right this thing, and he can help."

And watch this interview of the Speaker of the House, Mr. John Boehner of Ohio.  Great stuff.

The Closing Argument

President Obama today - I kid you not - asked his supporters to vote "for revenge" in voting for him. Romney shook his head at that, and asked the American people to vote "for love of country."  That's the contrast we see here at the end of the campaign.

Here's Governor Romney on the campaign train in Wisconsin today, making a closing argument to the American people and asking for our support.  This man needs to be our next President.  Let's work through the weekend and to the last minute and get out there to vote!

And if you have any doubt about how badly Obama has done with his 2008 campaign promises, this should remind you:

On Halloween, I ran into another father out trick or treating with his kids who was planning to drive out the next day to Ohio with 50 others to help work door-to-door, turning out the vote and helping at the polls. There's a movement out there - we need everyone to help.  "4 more days" and we can vote Obama out...and Romney in.