Mark Steyn: Live Free or Die

National Review OnlineAs disappointing for me as Mitt losing New Hampshire has been the down-ticket races in the Granite State. In 2010, Republicans won both House seats, the Senate seat, three-quarters of State Reps, 80 percent of State Senate seats, and 100 percent of the Executive Council. Two years later, Democrats have taken the governorship and may well take both House seats, and the vote tallies they’re racking up in hardcore plaid-clad North Country towns far from the Massachusetts border are remarkable.A lot of the telly chatter is about how Republicans don’t get the shifting demographics: America is becoming more of a “brown country,” as Kirsten Powers put it on Fox. But New Hampshire is overwhelmingly white — and the GOP still blew it. The fact is a lot of pasty, Caucasian, non-immigrant Americans have also “shifted,” and are very comfortable with Big Government, entitlements, micro-regulation, Obamacare and all the rest — and not much concerned with how or if it’s paid for.If this is the way America wants to go off the cliff, so be it. But I wish we’d at least had a Big Picture election. The motto of the British SAS is “Who dares wins.” The Republicans chose a different path. A play-it-safe don’t-frighten-the-horses strategy may have had a certain logic, but it’s unworthy of the times.