Soft Money Suit

So, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Republican Party has filed a law suit to finally destroy what's left of the McCain-Feingold laws governing soft-money contributions to political campaign

"Mr. Duncan, the RNC chairman, said the soft-money rules are too broad and prevent the party from participating in state-level races in which no federal politicians are running for office. The rules as written would also prevent the party from directly participating in state redistricting, which will begin following the 2010 census, and from lobbying on state issues."

Didn't the 50-state ground game waged by Mr. Obama and Howard Dean just disprove that thesis? Big donations weren't the key to the Obama electoral college landslide... it was the ground organization that put them over. I'm not saying the man got to the Whitehouse without big donors, but it was the small donors, millions and millions of them making small donations made one at a time, again and again by normal people who put him in Washington atop a wave of populism.

I'm the first to admit that - for better or worse - Barack Obama's fundraising juggernaut changed the face of American politics, especially presidential elections. This still seems like the GOP is fighting the last war rather than learning from the thrashing they just took and applying those lessons in the new arena.

Isn't the Republican party missing the lesson of this election? Do they think that "This Candidate Brought To You By AT&T" is going to trump "This Message Made Possible By 100 Million People Just Like You"?

Or am I the one who is missing something here? What's the angle?

Conservative

"The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils, and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We like to pretend that the cultural war raging around us is a new phenomenon... or at least the press does. And while I (and many others) would argue that recent American political history reached the tipping point in 1968 when the peace movement sold its soul for spectacle at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, some might disagree. Nevertheless, so much of the conservative movement that has dominated politics since that time was borne of the backlash from those events as the electorate recoiled from that horrible spectacle and voted for the guys they saw as promoting "stability" for another thirty years while their more liberal counterparts retreated into a mantra of 'My vote doesn't count anyway' which held until a presidential election was decided by a little over 450 votes, which signaled a shift in the tide as young people (and certain candidates) suddenly woke up to the power of the franchise.

This was recent history, but is not the entire history of the struggle between those forces known as liberal, and conservative. Emerson wrote the essay I quoted above in 1841. The same forces were at work in the English Civil War and earlier.

Every few generations, the battle is renewed, and in the course of the ensuing conflict, out terms are redefined. So-called 'Liberals' so often allow themselves to be defined by their opponents. "Socialist" was a word bandied about a great deal by the McCain campaign in the wake of "Joe the Plumber's" entrance onto the world stage. But nothing they did seemed to stick. Maybe because of the bailout plan and the nation's $700bn experiment with state banking, everyone looked like a socialist this year. Maybe Barack was just the teflon candidate. Maybe he defined himself strongly enough to defy his opponents' efforts. Maybe he defies description.

I think some temporal distance will be required before we can really get a good read on that. As Denny and I recently noted with regard to W, true historical perspective requires a certain amount of distance to really grasp.

But I digress...

In the wake of election day, I posted a series of questions that can be summed up as: "What now for conservatives?" But as I read the press coverage of the Republican's 2008 denoument (which sounds so much better than "Sniping and finger-pointing") the central theme seems to have shifted from "What now" to "What is conservative?"

Perhaps that conversation was inevitable, especially in the wake of a campaign that seemed tailor-made to shatter what remained of the Reagan coalition. A candidate that first ran away from the social-conservative base and then ran back to reluctantly embrace it and then didn't seem to know what to do with them once they started showing up.

Here on HOCF, I've heard any number of views on conservatism, but nothing that approaches a definition. So I'm curious: What is conservative to you?

Not "What is the fantasy conservative candidate", but what really makes a candidate a "Conservative"... or a political party for that matter. What is it?

And does it matter at all? Do the labels mean anything anymore? Does Emerson's bald description of the conflict as being between the party seeking a status quo and a party seeking to advance into something new still hold?