I have to admit that I never was very excited about my choice of McCain, because I felt my choice of more conservative, electable men had been eliminated during the primaries by the liberal media. McCain is a great patriot, I just could never wrap my mind around him being a great conservative republican. Conservative Democrat maybe. At any rate, is it better to have a effective pragmatist in office, who may or may not govern from the center, or an ineffective Republican that would excel at National Security but have many social and fiscal policies not so very much different than Obama, or the repudiated Bush spend, spend, spend years? Bush has signed over one Trillion dollars in bailout bills that would never had been necessary had a fiscal conservative that understood money markets and the housing bubble been in office! Bush was a lot better than Gore or Kerry would have been, but to say he was competent and conservative is pushing it. So, the question remains, is effective pragmatism better than clueless RINO semi-conservatism? That is why McCain lost, too many voters asked themselves that question and chose pragmatism. Only the loony left like Moveon.org and DailyKos actually expect Obama to govern on the platform  he campaigned on in the Democratic primaries: After all, 56 million Americans did not vote for him and he said he wants to be their President too. I do not like his radical ties and background, but Obama has shown himself to be a very quick study on what works, because no rational observer would have given him odds of winning the Presidency two years ago, but he did. Despite the complicity of the liberal media, I have to assume that our electorate knew enough of his negatives to disqualify him, but chose not to, and instead elected him with enough of a margin that there is no doubt he won. Acorn and all the rest of the shenanigans Chicago politics come up with do not produce a spread of almost eight million votes. But a great majority of his general election supporters are a far different breed than Ayers, Resko, Wright and co.;  even Pelosi, Reid and Murtha are not mainstream Democrats. He will have to decide which group he gives his allegiance to, and I am willing to bet it is the centrist middle. Why? Because he wants to be a two term President who accomplishes great things, not a one term lame duck whose over-reaching Left  lost him his congressional majorities in the midterm elections, as happened to Bill Clinton in his first term. Clinton got a second term because Bush the elder sold out on taxes, and did not finish the first gulf war.Almost forget, wasn't there someone named Perot who got 18% of the popular vote that year? That could have contributed to a Bush loss too, don't you think...  Bush was, however,an incompetent semi-RINO, and shot himself in the foot, electorally speaking. Obama will not have that gift in 2012, as he will face not just a Romney or Huckabee, but possibly the likes of Sarah Palin and  Bobby Jindal, who are very popular with the conservative base and have broader demographic appeal than Obama started out with. He will have to perform very well just to effectively govern, and with the government hamstrung by fiscal crisis, he does not have enough money available for another New Deal, so he can veto the more outrageous Congressional bills without popular backlash by wearing a conservative fiscal mantle. The prospect of a  Democratic President vetoing a spending bill in the name of fiscal responsibility has a delicious irony to it, doesn't it? After all, the nation does not have enough change in her pockets left, to pay for the type of Change the radical Left wants. In fact, I expect considerably less change than wished for all around, for both voters and Democrats. We will end up a little more broke, and they will learn the meaning of a frustrated majority.