Election Day Wrapup

Republicans have taken it on the chin. The national telephone system has apparently had trouble overnight accommodating all of the Republican candidates who have had to make concession telephone calls. Insider reports from Washington suggest that President Bush has not yet called to offer his congratulations to Osama bin Laden.

Do you know when I first held grave concerns about the outcome of this year's elections? When Bobby Welch announced the results of the 2006 SBC presidential election. It is my thesis that the Southern Baptist Convention is a powerful indicator of the national mood. The Conservative Resurgence began in 1979, at the same time as the Reagan Revolution was emerging in the US. My dissertation regards the same phenomenon in the age of William Jennings Bryan and Arkansas Governor Jeff Davis (not to be confused with Confederate President Jefferson Davis).

The Southern Baptist Convention elected as president a man with a previous public track record of sympathies with liberal views and personalities juxtaposed against a recent retraction of those views and the cultivation of a more conservative public persona. The election of a spate of conservative (for Democrats) Democrats seems to evince a similar thought process. It is almost as though people are yearning for conservatism without conservatives.

I think that such a yearning is doomed for failure. For example, the election of a couple of pro-life Democrats has, by tipping the balance of power to the Democratic Party, done more to set back the pro-life cause in one day than Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other radical pro-abortionists could accomplish in a decade. What does conservatism without conservatives look like? Liberalism.

Back to my SBC-national politics thesis: The huge, gaping hole, of course, is Bill Clinton. Did anything in SBC life foreshadow the dominance of Bill Clinton?