The election of Republican Scott Brown last week in Massachusetts last week to the U.S. Senate seat vacated last summer when Sen. Ted Kennedy died of cancer has GOP leaders crowing.

Brown’s victory over Democrat Martha Coakley came a few weeks after Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota announced that he would not seek re-election, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, said he also wasn’t going to run, along with the Democrats’ top candidate for governor in Michigan – in addition to similar upsets in other blue states such as New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. ­

It’s not hard to see the reasons for sudden optimism for a party that appeared doomed, as one observer put it, “to wander in the wilderness of the minority for at least a decade, if not longer.”

“This is a historic win and is the beginning of a remarkable year for the Republican Party,” said Oregon Republican Party Chairman Bob Tiernan in a statement released to state media after the Massachusetts election.

“If I were Sen. Ron Wyden tonight, I would be extremely nervous to examine the results in Massachusetts. President Obama won Massachusetts by 26 percent over Sen. McCain, while he won Oregon by only 16 percent. We will have a strong candidate against Sen. Wyden and if a Republican can win in Massachusetts, they can win in Oregon.”

Yes, it’s certainly possible they could. But our question is whether the Oregon GOP, as well as the national party, will do any better than the Democrats if the next election goes the Republicans’ way.

Thus far, at the risk of sounding uncharitable, President Obama and many Democrats have done everything they can to expand the scope, control and influence of government in our lives, to the point that even those who have been sympathetic to the idea of government-controlled automobile manufacturers and health care are beginning to have doubts about how far we want to take socialistic government.

The economy isn’t noticeably better than when the current administration took office and got that stimulus package passed, and it looks like voters are having second thoughts.

A large percentage of Americans – and Oregonians – are not paying taxes, yet they’ve been voting for politicians who promise economic and welfare bailouts that take more and more money from hard-working, responsible people who do pay taxes.
Either that system will continue to expand until it collapses under its own weight, or the citizenry will wake up and realize it’s destined for failure.

It looks like the latter may be happening.

After their sweeping victories in 2008, a lot of us thought the Republicans would be in for a long stint in the back seat. But it looks like the GOP might be back in the driver’s seat before long.

But are they ready?

Widespread dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush was one of the main reasons why Obama and friends were swept into office on a wave of optimism and good will. But Bush wasn’t the only reason.

The Republicans had a chance to lead in the last Congress and they didn’t.

To be blunt, one of the GOP’s biggest problems was that it was looking more and more like the other party – except without the optimism.

In his last term in office, Bush increased discretionary spending – spending that has nothing to do with national defense – by almost half. The party that has always flown the flag of fiscal conservativism spent more than the Clinton Administration – across the board.

We noticed. We noticed that our representatives were talking out of both sides of their mouths when they justified all that spending. We noticed that they were demonstrating what, at best, was simply weak-minded rationalization and certainly wasn’t leadership.

The question now is whether the Republicans – or anyone else who is electable – can or will lead our nation in the hard choices necessary to turn things around.

Instead of focusing on forcing us to pay trillions of dollars so government can take over health care; instead of being preoccupied with global warming, cap-and-trade schemes that will significantly jack up our energy costs, and various forms of environmental extremism; instead of taking away our freedoms of speech and worship and promoting agendas in public schools that reflect aberrant lifestyles and thinking; instead of cutting secret deals behind closed doors and recklessly spending us into increasing deficits; our congressional and legislative representatives must address the most basic needs of our country and state that are within their scope of influence: cutting spending to levels we can afford, providing national and domestic security, and dealing with everything else at a lesser level.

We’re not saying preserving endangered species isn’t important. We’re certainly not justifying true hate speech and discrimination against innocent, law-abiding people groups. We certainly believe our health care system is badly in need of a fix. We know there are many issues on the foreign and domestic front that impact people negatively.

But ensuring our security and solvency are the primary responsibility of our elected officials and they’ve been failing.

The Republicans have been disorganized and, led by Michael Steele, a publicity hound who can’t seem to open his mouth without sticking his foot in it, they’ve had no clear agenda on the issues that would appeal to voters – fixing the economic mess, cutting taxes, getting America’s focus centered on the most critical issues and not on creating a socialistic contraption that would remove the incentives that have made our nation great over the years.

If they can fix those problems, they might be worth our votes in the fall.