2014, Expectation or Disappointment?

The culture of the country is markedly different from 2004.

The Republican brand was badly burdened in 2008. Badly.

President Obama stepped in as an anti-Bush vote.

He won 53% of the vote that year, and John McCain waited until too little, too late to announce: "I am not George W. Bush."

Barack Obama was a media personality, created by handlers and liberals who wanted to put a black man inthe White House.

Perhaps this comment is a little too blunt. But what else did he bring to his campaign for office?

He was a junior senator from Illinois, and before that a state senator whom no one had heard about.

He was an academic with little political experience.

His skills as a community organizer, however, paid off, and his never-ending campaigning has continued to pay off, even until today.

How this President was able to sustain bearable approval ratings in the face of Obamacare failures, foreign policy blunders, and his media-hype failure over the sequester should concern voters, the Republican Party operatives, and political scientists.

Ben Shapiro of Breitbart submitted that the Democratic Party has advanced on an agenda of "We give you free stuff!" Still, so few are signing up for Obamacare across the country, and most young voters either don't know or don't care about signing up for healthcare. They will receive an unpleasant surprise in their 2014 tax returns, that's for sure.

The media have propped up this President, as well. How many gaffes has he gotten away with in the past five years? Far more than Bush, whom the media would pounce on every time he failed or fell short. Obama once stated that there are fifty-seven states. He also spelled O-H-I-O wrong in a human-body spelling presentation. Yes, these are small errors, but we should certainly compare them with the small-time laughable gaffes of Dan Quayle, who misspelled potato, for example, and President Bush's "Is your children learnin'?"

The Republican Party divided between pro-business and pro-limited government started to manifest during the 2006-2007 amnesty discussions. Bush reached out much better to Hispanics than Romney, and Obama used Bush's tactics, too. The TEA Party backed Congressman have come to Washington not to do business as ususal, any more. They have not yet learned, however, that business as usual takes an unusually long time to change.

Will 2014 turn into the six-year repudiation that pundits have seen and predicted before? It all depends on how well the national party can ally its policies and strategies while entering into the next year. Can they exploit Democratic differences without exposing their own? Will they reconcile their drive to limit government with the need for limited government?

Time will tell.