There was much tumult within the losing party after the election. What should should conservatives do? What direction should they take? All manner of high-brow discussion was held, some with dizzying charts. Factions arose on the blogosphere between competing groups wanting to “throw the other guys out.” Three months later it all seems fairly irrelevant.

Conservatives have found their focus or the focus has found them: the president’s plans to inflate the size and scope of the federal government beyond anything we have seen in our lifetimes. The CPAC attendees certainly were on red alert in the days after the proposed budget was announced. And the straw poll taken at the event, with over 1700 respondees, reflects the degree to which fiscal conservatism has now absorbed the attention of and unified forces on the Right.  A whopping 74% of the respondees identified their most important goal as shrinking the size of government. The top two policy issues also concerned the size of government.

All of this is a healthy reminder for those pundits who don’t get out much and don’t have much regard for the everyday lives of politicians. More often than not, external events and the opposition party determine the agenda of a movement or party out of power. In a very real sense Obama has been the primary organizer and team builder for the Right. But then it is usually this way. Without Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan might have remained in California. (And without George W. Bush, it is unlikely a one-term senator would have made it to the White House.)

If the pundit class looks up from their screens and gets a peek at the real world, they’ll see where conservatives are headed.