There are a lot of meetings going on among some Republicans trying to figure out what went wrong on Election Day and how the party needs to respond. None of them involve what the media like to call the base, the folks at the grass roots whose votes, after all, determine the outcome of elections.

The gatherings get a lot of media attention because the media mistakenly believe that the people attending them represent the grass roots of the GOP.

They don't. What they represent is the coterie who led the party into eight years of ignoring the traditions and principles of the party pursued so avidly by the Reagan administration, with which they have the effrontery to identify themselves.

They represent the big-government, big-spending Republican Party that turned its back on the grass roots, and to listen to many of them what the GOP needs to do is to do more of the same things that put us where we are.

I have news for them. They are not the Republican Party. They remain wedded to the idea that the party is a party of moderation -- the party that can't make up its mind about what is right to do and what is wrong to do. So they try to come down in the middle.

They forget that Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, warned us not to believe there "is some middle ground" between what is right and what is wrong.

The grass roots haven't forgotten that and the election results prove it. The "values voters" are alive and well, and they spoke loud and clear where values were at stake.

As Brad O'Leary has noted, a majority of Americans still support traditional American values. He cited initiatives to uphold traditional marriage that were on the ballots in two states carried by President-elect Obama, California and Florida.

Says O'Leary: "In both states, voters passed measures to ban gay marriage. In California, where Obama beat McCain 61 percent to 37 percent, 'values voters' beat special interest voters 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent on the issue of same-sex marriage." Continued...