Why? Because it will soon be here. I beg your forgiveness for the tacky (yet pertinent) Fleetwood Mac reference.

In the wake of Obama’s triumphant elevation to the Presidency last Tuesday at the hands of millions of starry-eyed voters, many of my conservative friends determined to head for the hills. “I’m going into hibernation for a few weeks,” a Senate staffer told me, “You may not hear from me for awhile.”

This is precisely the wrong approach for activist conservatives. For those of us that spent the last few months contributing in various ways to the effort to stem the tide of Obamamania, there is no rest-only a slight change in focus. Faced with a federal government dominated by a socialist-leaning Democratic party on a power trip, it will be crucial for us to continue the fight. Starting now, it will be not about individual candidates but about issues, something that got little attention during the recent campaign. Issues took a back seat as the media and pundits focused largely on the shallow but glitzy rhetoric of the candidates, especially that from Barack Obama. Problem is, while Obama’s “Change” and “Hope” rhetoric is rather nebulous when it comes to specifics, the ideas that gave rise to rhetoric are products of the influence of 1960s-vintage New Left thought; and these ideas will be the guiding light for Obama as he at determines how to bring “Change” to fruition as policy.

To combat this, we as conservatives must become a very vocal minority. But first, we must become educated. In order to spread the word, we must be able to articulate clearly why Obama and Pelosi and Reid are wrong. We have to be literate in the language of conservatism. This does not mean mastery of the GOP talking points of recent years. It does not mean strident partisanship. It does not mean tasteless jokes about watermelon patches at the White House. What it means is understanding why we as conservatives believe what we believe about the government’s role. It means recognizing that the GOP has in recent years been guilty of straying from the brand of limited-government conservatism most us signed up for. Once we get back to the basics of the conservatism of Reagan and Goldwater, we must be clear in communicating our opinions to our elected representatives in Washington, be they Republicans or Democrats. We must also talk to friends and neighbors and get them on board. We must win the battle on the ground for all those minds that think they are Democrats until a conservative friend explains to the them how our redistributive tax code works.

The groundwork must be laid for picking up seats in Congress in 2010-a mere two years from now. We cannot sit by idly and hope that the Democrats fall on their face and thereby hand seats on Capitol Hill back to us. We must point out there faults and show how conservatism would remedy them. We must do this actively and constantly.

Now is not the time to let up or give up. Now more than ever we must be on our game. If we are, then the era of Democratic domination will be short-lived.