There’s been much soul-searching and analysis since the election as conservatives try to identify the reason(s) we lost. Inarguably, the cards were stacked against any Republican candidate for president. There were historical dynamics that simply did not bode well for the GOP in 2008. The economic meltdown that began to manifest a month before the election certainly didn’t help the situation. Widespread and systemic voter fraud and irregularities didn’t help McCain’s chances either. While no one really knows the full extent of this corruption of the electoral process, it’s doubtful that its absence would have made up the vote deficit in the end. (On the other hand, voter fraud may very well be a significant factor to the extent it impacted the razor-close Senate race in Minnesota.)

In a complex world it’s probably impossible to indicate a single cause for the recent debacle; but if I had to pick one principle reason for McCain’s loss, I’d have to point to the embarrassment known as the establishment media and its shameless dereliction of duty to its own orthodoxy. I realize that constantly conjuring up the “mainstream media” as the bogey man, after awhile, runs the risk of sounding whiny. It runs close to becoming a conservative “mantra” as tiresome as those from the Left. Nevertheless, the culpability of America’s powerful media in colluding with the Obama campaign from the very start is just too stark to ignore.

I would submit that the American people did not elect a gifted black politician to be their president. Instead, they elected a Symbol. They elected an Archetype that embodied such aphorisms as Hope and Change. They embraced and certified a Platonic Ideal. More cynically, they elected a Cartoon.

It says something about the vacuous state of America’s secularized Soul that so many would abandon reason and common sense only to embrace the young charismatic Obama as their exemplar. But who fashioned this gestalt that would have millions worshipping an enigma like a kennel of Pavlov’s dogs?

We’re back to the media. Instead of probing and poking holes in this bizarre inflation of personality known as the Obama Phenomenon, these so-called journalists saw the Light, converted and became acolytes of The One. One commentator, Chris Mathews, had a near-Pentecostal experience; and others, based on some of the gobbledygook they were spewing, may well have been speaking in tongues. They, like the mad scientist Doctor Frankenstein, actually created this freak of nature. Like the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, the obscene creation which at first seemed to promise hope for Mankind began to take on a life and momentum of His own. However, unlike the locals, sensing something dark and ominous afoot, who came with torches and pitch forks to put an end to Frankenstein’s creation, the reporters and pundits nurtured this product of their well-intentioned but ultimately misguided enterprise. They deliberately sustained the life of this peculiar candidacy in spite of its disturbing opacity. The populace, forever being transfused with a liturgy of messianic religion, came to embrace The One everybody (apparently) had been waiting for. By osmosis, half the electorate absorbed the numinous and swallowed (along with media-provided Kool Aid) the New Idea.

Had these journalists and reporters been doing their job with professional integrity from the start, had they gone after this shady character with the same tenacity they showed in eviscerating Sarah Palin, Barack Hussein Obama would never have won his party’s nomination. Polls show that, had she run as the Democratic nominee, Hillary would have beaten McCain by an even wider margin than Obama did. Maybe so. She would have been a preferable choice. Despite her faults, or perhaps because of those faults, Hillary Clinton would be a real, flesh-and-blood president. We’d at least know what we were dealing with. Instead, we’re stuck with not so much a person as an artificial personality that will soon occupy the Oval Office.