The question I ask coming out of this election is how will the GOP read it? The election was spun by the left as a referendum on healthcare and that is exactly what won it for Brown. The people of Massachusetts came out in droves to vote against Obama’s plans to extend control over 1/7th of the US economy in the guise of healthcare reform. GOP leadership is of course ecstatic over the victory and they should be (heaven knows it’s been a while since good news involved the GOP). The danger to those of us who value freedom is a misread of Brown’s victory by party elites.

If party leadership reads this victory to mean people are so fed up with the Democrats they will vote for anyone wearing the Republican moniker the potential for big wins in 2010 will be lost. The Republican Party lost big in the last round, not because the country had shifted left, but because the Republican Party had shifted left. Under Bush it was hard to tell a Republican voting record from a Democratic one. Keynesian deficit spending alongside rampant Congressional corruption and moral turpitude produced a perfect storm for the left. The left won because the right stayed home.

It may be possible for the GOP to go one cycle or perhaps two with the old practice of running RINOs and Rockefeller Republicans. It is possible the electorate, shocked by the abuses of a strong Democratic majority, will vote for any elephant walking down the street, but this will not last long. Unless the party of Reagan returns to its base it will find itself exiled from power again and again. If this happens it is not the Republican leaders who will suffer but the American people who are forced to watch more and more of their freedoms wheedled away by misguided apparatchiks.