BUILDING A CONSERVATIVE CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Before Nov. 6, I thought only governments could spend so much money to such little effect. Republicans spent about $1 billion on Election  2012.  For bupkes.

If fewer than half a million votes in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado hadn’t been stolen, Mitt Romney would be taking the oath of office Jan. 20.  When you lose so narrowly within the Democrat margin of fraud, defeat can be blamed on many things.  Mr. Romney might have won if:

* Project ORCA, his campaign’s new, high tech get out the vote (GOTV) operation hadn’t blown up (or hacked) on election day.  Votes will trickle in for weeks, maybe months more, but at present, Mr. Romney has about 2.1 million fewer than John McCain got.  If Mr. Romney had gotten as many votes as Sen. McCain, he might now be president-elect.

*He’d responded sooner and more forcefully to the hundreds of millions of dollars of ads Democrats ran early attacking him for his work at Bain Capital.  The ads were slimy and false, but they "defined" Mr. Romney for millions of voters.

*Mr. Romney had attacked Barack Hussein Obama for his broken promises, half-truths and outright lies (especially about Benghazi), his cronyism and his poor work habits.  Instead, Mr. Romney pulled his punches.

*Republicans had done more to appease, less to offend, Hispanics.  In 2004, President George W. Bush got 44 percent of the votes of Hispanics, who were then 8 percent of the electorate.  Hispanics now account for 10 percent of the electorate.  Mr. Romney got just 27 percent of their votes.  They were the difference in Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

Yet the bigger takeaway for me from Election 2012 is how shrewd leftists were to concentrate on gaining control of our most important cultural institutions.  It took time, but the payoff has been huge.  Liberals and those further left dominate our public schools, colleges and universities, Hollywood, and the news media.  The deck was stacked against Republicans. 

The formula UCLA Prof. Tim Groseclose developed for measuring it indicates media bias gives Democrats about an 8 percentage point advantage in most elections.  Media bias sunk to new depths this year as "mainstream" journalists went beyond spin and double standards to suppress news that reflected poorly on the president.

If the votes of only those aged 30 and older counted, Mr. Romney would be president.  Young people will suffer most from the massive debt run up by the Obama administration.  But Americans aged 18-29 voted for the president, 60–37, because incessant indoctrination by their teachers and professors in college outweighed rational self interest.

Few young people today perceive what’s in their interest, because they are so massively ignorant of history, civics, economics, geography, physics and basic math.  They’ve been told what to think, but they haven’t been taught how to think logically.

If Republicans keep trying to get their message across chiefly through campaign advertising, they can’t hope to compete with the constant messaging from the dominant institutions of our culture. 

Campaigns are ephemeral, and people are naturally skeptical of campaign ads, because a candidate is asking them for something — their vote.  Liberal authority figures pretend to be giving them something.

Leftist control of education, the news media and Hollywood seems so near absolute many conservatives despair.  But the culture war isn’t over.

The Achilles Heel of the left is their nostrums don’t work.  If Marxists seized control of the Sahara, soon there’d be a shortage of sand . 

Mr. Obama’s policies make economic crisis inevitable.  Always, "the gods of the copybook headings, with terror and slaughter return."  When they do, conservatives can break the liberal stranglehold on our culture.

But only if we wise up.  If, a few years ago, conservatives had invested just one percent of what was blown this year on campaign advertising on building conservative cultural infrastructure, Mitt Romney might now be president-elect.

Conservatives must be patient, as the left was, and prepare for the long haul.  Reclaiming a culture takes time.

Or maybe not. Newspapers are technologically obsolescent.  So are colleges and universities.  Both will be shaken in the hard times coming.  Some will perish.  Crisis could be imminent.  If we’re to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, conservatives must start now to prepare.  In future columns, I’ll suggest some ways in which we may. 

Building a conservative cultural infrastructure is a project that TTPers and all conservatives will hopefully join in.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.