The Reverend Jesse Jackson ran for president two times, in 1984 against Gary Hart and Walter Mondale and against in 1988 when the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis. The primary impediments to Jackson’s nomination were not his race or ethnicity but his extremist views on the issues and his complete lack of experience in elected public office. Jackson hadn’t been as much as mayor of a city or a state legislator, or a member of Congress, and was seeking the highest office in the land. Therefore, his candidacy was viewed by many as a joke, including comedian Eddie Murphy who had a comedy routine around the notion of voters electing Jackson as president while under the influence of intoxicating liquors. Some of us still wonder what 53 percent of the voters were drinking, or smoking, when they elected Barack Obama in 2008.

But for conservatives, the notion of Jesse Jackson as the Democrat nominee for president was not a joke it all, it was a DREAM. Many of us thought, with his extreme views on the issues and his lack of experience, that if the Democrats nominated Jackson, we would win such a huge landslide as the public rejected the Democrats from top to bottom, we’d control Congress and most of the state legislatures. But when the Democrats nominated Obama two years ago, I suspect most of us realized this was not like the Democrats putting up Jesse Jackson. Obama was different, the media seemed to build up his credibility in a way that made him appears to have a lot more “gravitas” as a candidate than Jesse Jackson in 1984. Who could believe that a mere 4 years as an Illinois State Senator and just a couple years in the United States Senate could buy Obama so much “gravitas,” but it did?

Barack Obama also had something far in excess of Jesse Jackson: his views were FAR more radically to the hard left than those of the Reverend Jackson, and Obama had connections to extremists like Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and Van Jones to prove it. But it was largely only conservatives like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh that would highlight those connections while the mainstream media was all but actively campaigning for Obama presenting him as the “moderate” but electable African-American candidate for president. Remember Joe Biden called him “clean” and Harry Reid said he was electable because he was a “lighter” skinned African-American who didn’t have an ethnic accent. But I think Biden and Reid were wrong about their racially tinged comments. If Barack Obama was as dark skinned as Justice Clarence Thomas he still would have been elected president. Riding a wave of unhappiness with President Bush and desire for undefined “change,” Obama was swept into office also in part due to the buzz of making history by electing the first African-American president.

For those who us who knew how RACIDAL Obama’s views were, and believed that he would govern by those views rather than follow the second term Clinton model and govern moderately, we knew precisely what would happen under the Obama presidency. I told people the night of the election, Obama would govern from the hard left and the public would reject that agenda and 2010 would shape up a larger Republican sweep than 1994. My prediction was correct only in the direction I saw Obama pursuing but way off on the degree of his pursuit of that direction.

President Obama’s agenda proved to be orders of magnitude more radical than I had predicted, or that his background, associations, and voting record as senator in Springfield, Illinois and Washington, DC indicated. Only Alan Keyes, who ran against Obama for Senate in 2004, got it right when he described Obama as “a radical communist.” While a more experienced politician of either party would pursue change incrementally, inexperience and politically radical Obama sought to fundamentally transform the United States into European-style socialism overnight.

The same Obama who criticized the last deficit (that he voted for as Senator) of more than $400 billion enacted by the Democrat Congress that he blamed on President Bush. Then Obama helped the Democrat Congress under his leadership as president rack up a deficit of more than $1.6 trillion or $1600 billion the next year. Next the Obama team in Congress, under the leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, passed takeover after takeover. First the takeover of health care via ObamaCare was passed by buying just enough votes to get it through the senate and then the ugly spectacle of abusing the “reconciliation” process designed for passing tax and budget bills to ultimately make it happen. Bank bailouts, takeover of GM and Chrysler, and the rest of the Obamanomics agenda was passed or promoted. Pelosi pushed cap and trade through the house but it has yet to see passage in the Senate. Obama appointed dozens of extremely radical, and publicly unaccountable, “czars” to run a variety of areas of public policy free of much scrutiny from Congress. The Obama team attacked every area of public policy, leaving nothing unaffected by his drive for radical transformation of the country as soon as possible. He nominated a slate of candidate for federal judgeships that were more radical than any nominated before. His choices of Sonya Sodormayor and Elena Kagan proved to be the most extremist progressive nominees ever put on the Supreme Court.

Despite doing all of that, he had opportunities to, seeming almost deliberate in doing so, offend the American people at every turn. Recently he stuck his nose into the ground zero mosque controversy in New York City to support it then flip flop after seeing he was on the unpopular side of the issue. Then he got involved in a local issue when he said the Cambridge, Mass. Police had “acted stupidly” in arresting a Harvard professor for being rude to the cops. Never mind the fact that any of us would have been arrested, and rightly so, for doing what the professor did. Then this was followed by the absurd “beer summit” at the White House with the professor, the Cambridge city cop, Joe Biden, and President Obama himself. Obama would also make several foreign trips and major speeches, and would apologize for the United States and make anti-American comments at each stop. The public could clearly see the one who “acted stupidly” is President Obama himself.

Joe Biden was right, this is a “big bleeping deal.” Obama has clearly tried to change the country in every way to radical socialism and a hard majority of about 60 percent of the public has made it clear in all the major polls they absolutely refuse to tolerate this sudden shift to radical socialism. The U.S. truly is a right of center country and the polls show it. ObamaCare, cap and trade, the bailouts, the takeover of the domestic auto industry, and the gigantic “stimulus” spending bills only have about 30 percent support as opposed to 55-65 percent that oppose them and want them repealed or replaced with more conservative, fiscally responsible, and/or free market oriented legislation.

High unemployment figures, weekly new unemployment claims, and sluggish economic growth show the economy is tanking. There is no real recovery, despite what Barack Obama claims. A massive tax increase would surly plunge the economy deeper in recession. But that is surely what we are likely to get, because Obama and the Congressional leadership are pledging to let the Bush-era tax cut expire in early 2011. That inaction would raise taxes for almost all of us, across the board, and destroy more jobs. I think the public easily understands who will have “acted stupidly” if the politicians in Washington allow those tax cuts to expire.

The public remains unhappy with what the last Republican majority did in Congress but complete outraged and opposed to what President Obama and this Democrat majority in Congress has done. This year’s election will have a profound affect on the country for decades to come, possibly submitting the Democrat Party to long-term minority status if the voters have some memory and punish, long term, the party for this pursuit of radical socialism. It won’t even be close. Republicans will gain more than 50 seats in the Congress and 10 seats in the Senate. If the Republicans smart, they might be the majority part for a generation of beyond after this election. Otherwise, Republican failure after this chance the voters will give them, combined with voter dissatisfaction with both parties, could lead to one of the parties going the way of the Whigs.