Construction contractors are deeply conservative and Republican and in 2000 members of the Associated Builders & Contractors felt like they had helped put George W. Bush in the White House. At ABC's national convention in New Orleans early in 2002—not long after the terrorist attack in New York—I felt like I had been dropped onto a planet of successful business men and women with an unusually paranoid political fixation. While the national focus was on terrorism, ABC members pledged to stay vigilant against domestic foes. Kirk Pickerel, the association's staff chief and a talented speaker, compared the national fight gearing up against terrorism with ABC's mission of battling unions and liberal elected officials who threatened them with project labor agreements and salting. "We won't be intimidated," said Pickerel.

For all the fervent conservatives in our industry, it's time to re-examine your partisan loyalties if you haven't done it already. The stay-the-course Bush Administration is now shopping for new ideas on Iraq that it would have derided as cut-and-run a few weeks ago. And I want to know if the Bush Administration and Republican Congress' domestic "accomplishments"—a virtual freeze on new regulation, some of it needed, and an oil-dependence-as-usual energy bill, to name two—aren't fueled by the same kind of ideological zealousness that defined their foreign policy.

Conservatives who understand the core role of business as the engine of America's relative prosperity, rather than America's ruin, didn't really lose on Election Day 2006. What lost was spin and demonization of critics. Republican ideology had plucked the nose of reality once too often. Partisanship isn't patriotism when it deteriorates into an abhorred political pollution, and that's what had happened.

And I want to know, does ABC have to mean Always Back Conservatives?