Rudov’s other points are well known: McCain could have gone after Obama on the economy but he wasn’t much better. He signed off on the pork-barrel bailout. He was going to pay people’s mortgages. That’s not just non-fiscal conservativism, it’s BAD business sense!

The few things that McCain did well he didn’t trumpet: Trying to get people choice in their cable bills (buy the channels we like, don’t pay for the ones we don’t), his medical choice plan that Obama unfairly maligned, and this may stun you: The Iraq War and the success of our troops there. The left has written a narrative of the Iraq war that makes it out to be the civil war. Wars are ugly things, but this war is run far far far better than most others including the Korean war or WWII.

Finally, I disagree with Rudov about Sarah Palin. Granted, she probably wasn’t the smartest egg in the carton but her flubs weren’t worse than Biden’s or Obama’s 57 states. As usual, the “maverick” allowed the left to write the rules and he walked by them. Palin should have said that she wasn’t going to take a test and allow her critics to go on a fishing expedition. Ronald Reagan said it best: No apologies, no regrets.

Ok, one more thing: Men are the untapped republican electorate. We’ve put most presidents over the top but are ignored because we’re so reliable but there’s still room for growth. If women can produce a 75/25 margin, so can men. Men are generally conservatives in that we work, we produce rather than consume, and we don’t rely upon government to protect us as much. We are the crossover/gateway for republicans to get into minority, working class votes.

It was those under thirty (66/32), and women (56/43) who strongly broke for Obama. Except for blacks, the most polarized group was single women, who voted 75/25 for Obama.

The McCain campaign early on settled on trying to beat Obama by largely using Hillary’s playbook, figuring that if it almost worked with the D’s that it would work even better in a general election. They tried to augment it with McCain’s heroism and service-to-country (and maverick) themes, but I don’t think they factored in that Obama would be even better in the second half from already having seen most all the plays in the first half against Hillary.

It was really a series of missed opportunities for McCain, as they could have, for example, gone after Biden not only on VAWA but even more strongly on the economic populism front for his having been the main Democrat proponent for the re-write of the bankruptcy laws, which on the fourth try went through in 2005. They made no issue of the fact that Biden started down that road shortly after having sold his million dollar home to a credit card company executive, in 1998-9.

And I’ll never figure out why they didn’t hammer home the narrative that the 35% meltdown in the markets which started shortly after the conventions was due to widespread fear among investors as to what an Obama presidency would do to business, employment and consumer spending, and the economy, which was a plausible explanation given Obama’s frontrunner status. Instead they just seemed to go along with the dominant media narrative that it was all Bush’s and the Republican’s fault.

There were quite a few such puzzlements concerning things they didn’t do. We’ll likely never know why, whether they were aware of some of these things and found they didn’t focus group test or poll well, or whether they were just oblivious. Overall, I think the evidence shows Palin helped McCain, especially among women, and married white women in particular, though I certainly think they could have used her even better than they did.

McCain did 11 pts worse overall with men than Bush did in 2004, so I need add little on that topic except to say that if the D’s are going to openly pander to women to attract them, the R’s are almost forced, if they have any brains at all, to directly and openly do everything they can to appeal to and attract men.

The only conservatives who have anything to do with it are the ones who are afraid of feminists (the ones who confuse being a man with being a doormat). Aka “RINO’s”.

To get rid of feminsim means to get rid of leftists, and to kick the cowards out of the Republican party.

You leftists are stuck with being who you are. Hopefully you can regain your manhood (it would so help the mrm), but I doubt you can. You actually believe you still have testicles.

The great advantage about holding generally left-leaning feminist governments accountable however, is they can be held accountable, to the gold standard of equality, where as, when confronting a conservative woman, man or administration about women’s disproportionate power and rights, conservative antifeminists will coldly shrug it off, because they think female power is the natural way, and never believed in, initiated or aspoused gender equality anyway. So the great news is, we now have at least four years to lobby for broadening the remit of VAWA and IVAWA to fully include men for instance, equalize paternity rights, rape anonymity, sentencing, the draft, wage earner burden, and so on. The average lay feminist inclined woman does not seem so bad, however misinformed she might be, and however misplaced her anger and rhetoric towards men might correspondingly be, compared to a lipstick and heels house whore conservative, who is more likely through an expensive education to have digested the facts about men and women’s true power/rights/relations, but then chosen to remain gracefully silent, whilst actively doing men down with adherence to the tried and tested rules of traditional gender role management.

The modern social democratic governments of Scandinavia are the ones bringing men’s rights at last, as they have an ethical responsibility to deliver on gender equality.

American MRAs now have a chance to get something done. Don’t be surprised if, in preserving the facade of victim feminism, the new U.S. administration affects changes helping men’s issues (like health) largely under the radar, and without fanfare. Norway, the number one country on the Gender Development Index, only recently felt able to go up front with men’s issues by announcing a ‘men’s panel’, to discuss ‘men’s lack of rights’, and even there, the phrases can be read as a continuation of governmental considerations of men’s rights in the negative – but still, they are getting things done, and so can America.

But I really don’t ):