Politics and Government in America

Faced with a future of increasing patient loads, decreasing resources, and burdensome regulation that opens up a whole new realm for lawsuits, may doctors are considering early retirement if President Obama’s health care plan comes into being. More importantly, groups like the AMA are concerned that there may not be enough new doctors entering the system to fill the vacancies. If this happens, the country could be headed for a real health care crisis warns several experts.

“There is real fear right now,” remarked one doctor on condition of anonymity, “no one  knows what Obama is going to do, because nobody asked him before the election. We already spend 90% of our time doing paperwork and just 10% working with patients. The last thing we need is another layer of bureaucracy to deal with.” Another doctor added “everyone knows the system could work better and needs fixing, but getting the government involved is the last thing anyone should be talking about. There are already government programs that help most of the uninsured in this country. We don’t need another one.”

So Obama has not even taken the oath of office and already fear of what his policies maybe are driving people away from critical fields. Even more frightening is the fact that two weeks ago, everyone was so caught up in Obamapalooza that they didn’t even bother to talk about these things. America has started to experience buyer’s remorse and there is no return policy for this.

So it’s two weeks since the election and I have spent a great deal of time thinking about where we went wrong and how we should proceed. I have identified three areas where I think conservatives were lacking. If we are going to bring the country back to where it belongs, these areas are where we need to focus our efforts.

1) We failed to articulate a conservative message. John McCain is not a conservative, as evidenced by how quickly he jumped across the aisle to offer his aid to President Obama. If conservatives are going to get our message across, we need a clear conservative candidate to articulate our message. Furthermore, we need to encourage conservative candidates to run for office, and close Republican primaries so that conservatives stand a better chance of winning. We also need to find conservatives like Mitt Romney and Bobby Jindel that can be held up as examples of conservatives.

2) We lacked a positive message. One of the biggest draws of the Obama campaign was the positive message that he presented. He never said what he would do, but he made people think that better things were ahead and that energized a lot of people. He created an environment where people wanted to vote for him, rather than just against the other guy. Meanwhile the Republicans spent a lot of time giving people reasons not to vote for Obama.

3) We spent to much time focusing on Obama’s negatives, rather than McCain’s positives. Obama was very cool under pressure and did not allow himself be visibly ruffled by the attacks. This had the effect of making his critics look like raving lunitics. Rather than spending time attacking our opponents, we need to spend time getting our message out and making sure that people understand what conservatives stand for.

Using these three things as a guideline, we need to spend the next two years retooling the Republican party and making it a truely conservative party. It’s time that we stopped worrying about power and start working on plans. The Republicans need to become the party of progress and the party that deals with problems. Let the Democrats be the party of issues, we need to become the party of solutions.