An interesting observation

I was watching Bill O'Reilly earlier today as a means to catch up on what's being talked about with less than 2 weeks to go till the election.  Among other things (Simon's salary news from American Idol, Michael Moore being a pinhead, etc.), he had Mike Huckabee on the show and was talking about Joe the Plumber and this whole "spread the wealth around" thing... and the fact that Barak Obama still leads John McCain by at least 4 points in most of the polling that's going out.  

Didn't know this, but apparently Huck now has a show of his own and was the first to break the whole Joe the Plumber thing... will have to check on that.  So, O'Reilly and Huckabee are talking on the show, and Huck makes a comment that if John McCain wins this election, he will have Joe the Plumber to thank.  I think 96% of everyone that follows politics would agree with that statement, because it brought Obama's wealth redistribution objectives to light and is making Americans at least take a look at and evaluate those...

The interesting observation, posed by O'Reilly, was that based on what he's seeing and the polls that are coming out... this is NOT likely to hurt Barak Obama as much as most people who listen to the Rush Limbaugh show regularly may be led to believe.  He observed, and I think that he may be right, that America is moving towards the Left in this election season and that "wealth redistribution" (or socialism if you're more of an academic here) is not as dirty of a word anymore.  Remember during the Reagan years how "Liberal" was a four-letter word that damned a candidate to political Hades... times have changed.  Left seems to be "in" now, and perhaps conservatives need to wake up and ask themselves why.  

The country has made these shifts to the left before... remember we did elect Jimmy Carter and FDR in times of crisis where conservative leaders failed miserably (notably Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon... whom Gerald Ford had the misfortune of having as an albatross).  I believe that if Barak Obama wins this election, that he is riding one of these liberal shifts to victory.  The environment is set for it...  

But... if you are a conservative or a moderate like myself and believe in limited government, low taxes, and free markets... if history proves itself out the country will eventually come back to its roots...  If this is true, then I would expect that our gravitation towards more liberal candidates is just for a season (how long, I'm not sure) - it didn't take long for the country to look right after 4 years of Carter... or two years of Clinton and a Democratically controlled Congress.... it brought the rise of conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to the national stage.  In fact, you can argue that Bill Clinton's success was due to the fact that he was the one Democrat to campaign and (for the most part) lead from the center since JFK in 1960.  There's something in our fiber that dislikes Big Brother, even during times like this where the climate of the country is looking to him for help.