This Year's Conservative Insurgency

We hear so much about the counterinsurgency strategy Gen. David Petraeus has pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have lost track of another insurgency that's being fought here between conservatives and the Republican establishment. Conservatives will win this battle. The only question is whether we will win it in time to reform the Republican Party and defeat Obama two years from now. In some ways it's like 1976, when conservatives fell short of nominating Ronald Reagan. Then, as my friend and editor Wlady Pleszczynski reminds me, conservatives were less organized and most Americans were still thinking in the terms of 1972, when the "Silent Majority" had to choose between the counter-cultural McGoverniks and Richard Nixon, who to the media was -- if not the devil himself --at least the devil's first cousin. But it is like 1976 in the fact that Barack Obama is as much a counter-cultural force as were Obama's pal Bill Ayers, Jane Fonda, and the others who were the faces of angry liberalism in their day. As a new Rasmussen poll shows, "conservative" is still the most positive political label, "liberal" the least popular and "Tea Party candidate" the most influential...more