I had the distinct displeasure of spending last night in a room of 10 liberals in a Manhattan apartment.  Don’t get me wrong, these were friends, mostly, but it was anything but enjoyable.  There’s no way around it, last night was terrible.  Yes, it could have been worse, the Dems could have gotten to 60 in the Senate and losses in the House could have been much worse.  But what matters most is that Barack Obama has won the Presidency.  In my eyes this spells disaster.  I can acknowledge the historical significance of the moment and the monumental achievement of a country in which just 40 years ago black people were treated as second-class citizens.  I would, however, have been much happier had the achievement been bestowed upon a better man.

Looking back, I believe he was able to win for the following reasons:

1.  The biggest factor in Obama’s victory was the financial crisis, pure and simple.  The panic led to voters who would normally never vote for a politician of Obama’s stripe to see him as a viable alternative.  I see this as a case of prescribing an amputation for a broken hand, but it is what it is.  Whatever bounce in the polls McCain had coming out of the Palin pick and the convention was swiftly obliterated by the crisis.

2.  The media’s unbelievably bias coverage, most importantly of said financial crisis.  This not only paved the way for Obama to get away with lie after lie after lie (see here), but even more importantly allowed the public to believe the Republicans were to blame for the financial crisis, a shameful deception.  See Orson Scott Card’s Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? I am a firm believer that journalism died in 2008, but I also believe that not everyone witnessed its death alongside me.

3.  Barack Obama ran a spectacular campaign.  We can try to deny it, but the guy knows what he’s doing.  He first knocked off Hillary Clinton, then built a machine capable of turning out the vote.

4.  Obama’s gigantic money advantage was the final nail in the coffin.  He was able to amass such an advantage only because he lied about taking public funds and willfully encouraging campaign donor fraud through his website.

5.  As for McCain’s role, he could not articulate and was not sufficiently committed to Conservative solutions to this nation’s problems.  In the end, he was trying to out-Democrat a Democrat, not a good position to be in.  What Conservatism needs now is leadership that is capable of formulating and articulating Conservative solutions to the American public.  It’s not easy to defeat the guy who says he’ll give you everything, but it can be done because at heart the American people are a self-sufficient people and I do not believe that has changed.

6.  Lastly, I’ve heard a lot about how Sarah Palin is to blame for McCain’s defeat.  What nonsense.  The people saying this are doing so for one of two reasons; 1. they are liberals trying to damage Palin as much as possible in fear of her strength in the future or 2. they are republicans in search of a scapegoat.

As we are all witnessing, even beginning with last night’s victory speech, Barack Obama has already begun to lower expectations of what can be accomplished.  We’ve already heard “the road will be difficult and the climb steep” and “we may not be able to accomplish everything in the first year or even the first term.” It will not be long before we hear the cliched, “having seen how terrible of shape George W. Bush has left us in, I will not be able to hold up many of my campaign promises, but I assure the American people that change is coming, yes we can.”

Well, America, you took the bait, now comes the switch.