No doubt about it – it is a frustrating time to be a conservative activist.

Conservative voters in the U.S. have endured a series of betrayals from party leadership, and now they've retaliated by handing Republican pols a well-deserved round of rejection at the ballot box.

I've been reading all the articles that talk about how "stunned" Republican insiders are to see Democrats winning congressional seats that should have been easy victories for the Grand Old Party. But the party's been over for a while for the Republicans, and it seems the Republican Party leaders, paid staffers and talking heads were the last to find out.

But the party elders shouldn't be surprised – they are the ones who stirred up the witch's brew of betrayal, corruption and deception that has led to the Republican Party's plummeting approval ratings.

Or, put another way, the GOP establishment has penned a strategy that could be summarized as "How to Lose Votes and Destroy America."

That's not the role I want to see the Republican Party take, and would like to offer a course correction for the party of Lincoln and Reagan.

Now, if the class is ready, please open your textbooks and pay attention.

Let's begin with you, Mr. Schwarzenegger. Sitting in the back row, yukking it up and chortling with your Hollywood and liberal friends, you've earned yourself a long bout in detention. Some might even say you deserve expulsion from the GOP.

Consumed primarily with your own vanity and egotism, you campaigned for office as a mainstream Republican, carrying around a broom to sweep out the corrupt, big-spending insiders who were destroying California. In your State of the State addresses, you pledged to "blow up the boxes" and end the stigma of tax-and-spend tyranny by liberals who over the course of many years have run the once proud Golden State into the ground.

But your talk was cheap, and conservative voters who took you at your word found themselves kicked to the curb in no time.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported this week, you've called for a "re-branding" of the GOP into a liberal party:

"The Republican idea is a great idea, but we can't go and get stuck with just the right wing."

That's the wrong answer, Governor. Go back to the books and study harder.

Check out the chapter involving the record deficit spending that has taken place on your watch. It has exceeded the despised and deposed Gov. Gray Davis, whom you replaced in the historic recall election that we conservatives engineered.

You've since attacked us for advocating secure American borders; you've called for big-government regulations and environmental extremism that makes Al Gore's global warming hoax look tepid; you've taken on social conservatives and told them to get lost from the Republican Party; you've publicly declared your opposition to the war on terror; and you've hired liberal Democrats to fill your Cabinet and liberal judges to fill the courts.

Now you have announced your plans to raise taxes.

Is this the prescription for electoral success for the Republican Party? If we act more like the Democrats, then we can get the votes of more liberals?

But that's a mirage, Governor. It's the game of electoral subtraction, not addition. You are abandoning principle for the sake of self-preservation, and you are dooming the rest of the party with your insatiable ego and lust for power. Conservatives see through the Hollywood flash, and they will not support Republicans who do not support our principles.

This is why so many conservatives are worried about Sen. John McCain. The McCain-Feingold Act was one of the thousand cuts to bleed GOP support – and who can forget the global warming junkets with Hillary Clinton, the rejection of the Bush tax cuts, and the repeated and condescending decrees that amnesty must be given to illegal aliens?

Even when standing strong on some national security issues, McCain worries pro-defense conservatives when he starts touting the ACLU's line on special legal rights and protections for terrorists and enemy combatants.

Social conservatives are hesitant to embrace a man whose 2000 campaign for president became a liberal "maverick's" jihad against the religious right.

If the Republican Party's leadership ranks are going to offend the sensibilities of fiscal conservatives, social and cultural conservatives, as well as national security conservatives, what kind of a base is left?

Some of my TV talking head friends are making a serious mistake. They are blaming the falling poll numbers for President Bush and the declining GOP registration problems on the War on Terror.

The noise machine is missing the mark.

The next time President Bush steps into the conservative confessional, he'd better be prepared to atone for his binge of big-government spending, his push for amnesty for illegal aliens, his enactment of mammoth expansions in the power of the federal government on issues such as education and health care, and most recently his decision to become a lemming in the cult of global warming con men.

And while we are being painfully honest, President Bush has been an abysmal communicator, preventing him from exercising the greatest power a president has – the power of the bully pulpit.

In a society where the media, public schools and Hollywood stars whack us with incessant arguments for liberalism, it's essential that Republican presidents push back effectively.

Not too long ago there was a man who did this rather brilliantly.