This will cause some readers to think I'm either delirious or that I'm joking, but actually I'm neither. Well, at least I'm not joking. If the highly improbable, virtually impossible, happens and the Democrats nominate a fairly conservative candidate for the presidency in 2008 I will probably vote for him (her) even if the Republican candidate is equally as conservative. Here's why:
No matter how conservative a Republican president is, the left in this country, in the media and in the Democrat party, make it almost impossible for him to accomplish much good. Of the most important issues facing us today - the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the economy, immigration, social security reform and federal judgeships - Democrats are in a position to block every initiative a Republican president advances. And they will, just as they have in the past.
So why vote for a Democrat candidate? Because if a conservative (don't ask me who that could possibly be) were nominated by the Democrat party, both the media and congress would be much less hostile to his initiatives because they wouldn't see battling them as a partisan duty, and Republicans would, for the good of the country, be cooperative. In other words, a Democrat conservative in the White House could advance the same policies as a George Bush on social security reform, employ the same measures on the war on terror, wage the same war on the insurgents in Iraq, nominate a John Roberts to the Supreme Court, and keep the Bush tax cuts, and he would doubtless meet with little serious opposition from the establishment left (The Michael Moore left is a different matter, but without the MSM and congress they wouldn't be much of a factor).
Just as no one but a hardline anti-communist like Richard Nixon could achieve a rapprochement with communist China, so, too, it will probably take a Democrat president to achieve social security and immigration reform since congressional Democrats will not allow a Republican to solve these problems. Moreover, no Republican conservative would be likely to do much on another issue important to me personally - land use, conservation and preservation - but a Democrat might.
It may be, then, that our best hope to get anything worth doing accomplished in the next ten years is for the Democrats to pull a conservative rabbit out of the hat for '08. Unfortunately, however, that's about as likely as George Bush winning the Most Admired Man in Blue State America award. Since Zell Miller retired there just aren't any conservatives of prominence left in that party.