But now, we should admit that we didn’t do a good enough job of holding our elected officials accountable over the past few years when spending got out of control, and we seemed to lose sight of the policies grounded in our first principles. It’s going to be a high price we pay, but we must not lose sight of what we must be doing now: fighting for conservative change we want today—and tomorrow.

We are going to have to use every tool we have—grassroots organizations, think tanks, magazines, talk radio, the Internet—while building new institutions to blunt the efforts of a left-wing establishment that appears willing to use uncertainty to impose an agenda that would never see the light of day in normal times.

The challenge will be to fight the Democratic instinct to let government meet every need and solve every problem and to divide our nation by class and race, while also laying the groundwork for the kind of historic mid-term election we achieved in 1994.

We gained those victories with a focus on innovative, free-market, pro-freedom, policy solutions to issues like welfare reform, promising to cut spending and balance the budget, and recruiting a host of talented, young (and perhaps not-so-young) men and women willing to step into the arena and run for office.

We have the formula—a conservative formula—that has worked before and will surely work again. It is grounded in our first principles. It’s time we moved past the recriminations and seven stages of grief. It’s time to look ahead, to stay united and to defend the values that we know must endure if our nation is to do the same.