conservativism

Updated - One of the tangible benefits to readers of this site who want to move the party forward is that Peggy Noonan's article provides examples of the following GOP Core Values:  Optimism, Liberty, Equal Opportunity, Reform, Respect for our Opposing Party and Love for American Democracy to name a few.  If you'd like to participate in creating the GOP that represents you in addition to a GOP voter turnout machine (which we seem to agree cannot be our only tool in the toolbox), please read, and then respond with the Core Values of your GOP.  

Ever since I read Jon's post congratulating Barack Obama for his historic and remarkable victory, I've been at a loss as to how to process this development. I knew the Democratic primary had to end at some point, but a part of me wished it would just go on and on so that we wouldn't have to face the relentless Battle of the Titans this summer. 

But then, today, Peggy Noonan put it all into perspective for me in that moving and generous-spirited way that made her a master wordsmith of the Reagan era.

It was the night Mr. Obama won Alabama. My friend was watching on TV, in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, looked, saw "Obama Wins" and "Alabama." She said, "Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school." She said, "That's where they used the hoses." Suddenly my friend saw it new. That's the place they used the water hoses on the civil rights marchers crossing the bridge. And now look. The black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

What kind of place makes a change like this? Only a great nation. We should love it tenderly every day of our lives.

Peggy provides more illumination to this event:

Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.

I'd never have thought of it this way, not on my own.  I'm too caught up in my disdain for Obama's liberal policies to see the absolute greatness of the country that spawned his opportunity.  There's a wonderful optimism combined with a deeply spiritual center behind someone who writes with this kind of appreciation and gratitude over an event that, frankly, just left me feeling queasy.  And yet deep down, I know that Peggy gets it.  Her gift to conservatives is to show us what this whole fragile American experiment is really about,  much greater it is than most of us probably imagine.