Coiffed and polished on the stump is one thing. Bug-eyed and Bugs-Bunnified as Secretary of State is another. What’s SHE like at 3 am? (The ghosts of Benghazi think they know. Cold, heartless, selfish, lying hare.) Hopefully, a marionette of the husband she love/hates. Madam Prez.

All right. This is complicated, but I’ll try to be clear and straightforward.

We have two issues that demonstrate the opportunity and the danger before us. Both lend themselves to Mother Nature metaphors, as befits life changing challenges. One is a hurricane. The other is an iceberg.

The hurricane is ObamaCare, still building at sea. So far, it has done the equivalent of knocking down houses in the Bahamas, a bad thing but still far from where most of us live. Some hope it will spend its fury before making landfall in the Continental U.S., but the smart money is on a slow, inevitable course toward devastating ruin — of health insurance, health care, and ultimately the economy as a whole and a considerable number of human lives.

The iceberg seems paltry in comparison, but it isn’t. The chief feature of an iceberg is that it is ever so much larger under the surface of the water than the part you can see above the water. The iceberg is immigration reform. It seems small compared to ObamaCare, but it isn’t.

Its importance is that it enables us to see the true nature of the leadership conservatives are presently being asked to trust in defeating the statist progressive regime of which ObamaCare is the catastrophic apotheosis.

What is plain to see is that Republican congressional and other leaders, including some governors and many pundits, are planning to do a deal on amnesty, confident that the slow unfolding of the ObamaCare Armageddon will provide political cover for defying the long expressed political will of their base, which is NOT to give amnesty to illegal aliens. John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Eric Kantor, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and who knows how many other so-called conservatives are perfectly willing to subvert the rule of law and ratify an effective invasion of the United States by a low-skilled underclass of non-English speaking immigrants well populated by felons, parasites on government largesse, and a demonstrated uninterest in assimilation.

Why? They think they can get away with it, despite the plummeting in the polls experienced by Marco Rubio when he pursued immigration reform in the belief that charisma could overcome the convictions formed by people’s personal experience. They think they can get away with it because ObamaCare will, by 2014 and 2016, so dominate the political landscape that lesser betrayals will no longer matter. That’s the visible part of the iceberg.

But there’s another why that speaks to the massive concealed body of ice under the surface. Why so blatantly and recklessly ignore the will of their own constituents? Because their most important loyalty is to the lobbyists who finance their political careers, not to the mere voters whom they count on to believe in their devotion to principle.

There are a lot of big businesses who want cheap immigrant labor. They are the contributors to the PACs and SuperPACs the ambitious need to go the next step in their political careers. Which means the Republican establishment is as hooked on crony capitalism as Obama and Company are. Only we’re not supposed to notice the difference because we need them to oppose — eventually, partially, slightly at least — the killer storm called ObamaCare.

Don’t be fooled. They’re card carrying members of America’s new political class too. If we can’t trust them on immigration legislation, we can’t trust them on anything. They can be bought and probably already have been. Current rumors are that union funds are financing PACs supporting Republican incumbents against tea party challengers.

Which means the Republican Party is already dead.

I remind you of the title: The Long Game. We need a new party, built from the grassroots of the tea parties. There is precedent:

The Whig Party was a political party active in the early 19th century in the United States. Four Presidents of the United States were members of the Whig Party. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from the early 1830s to the mid-1850s,[1] the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism. This name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776, who fought for independence, and because “Whig” was then a widely recognized label of choice for people who identified as opposing tyranny.[2] The Whig Party counted among its members such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster, William Henry Harrison, and their preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky. In addition to Harrison, the Whig Party also nominated war hero generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott.

In its two decades of existence, the Whig Party had two of its candidates, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, elected President. Both died in office. John Tyler succeeded to the Presidency after Harrison’s death but was expelled from the party. Millard Fillmore, who became President after Taylor’s death, was the last Whig to hold the nation’s highest office.

The party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction prevented the re-nomination of its own incumbent President Fillmore in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott. Most Whig party leaders thereupon quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The northern voter base mostly joined the new Republican Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the party was virtually defunct…

As it happens, the transition from Whigs to Republicans in terms of electing a president cost only two presidential elections. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected in 1860. The rest, as they say, is history.

So the question becomes what trade are we willing to make for our children and grandchildren? Drive the moneychangers from the temple, or keep making loansharking deals with the moneychangers who salute the flag and kiss our particular babies?

I know. It comes down to how you feel about losing to Hillary in 2016. A hard, hard realization. Multiple questions to think about. Could we survive a Hillary presidency? Maybe. Her husband is still Bill, who knew how to compromise with the opposition because he valued success over ideology. You know Bill would be the ghost in the machine because Hillary herself is a cipher. If ObamaCare gets as bad as it inevitably will, maybe a Democrat IS the best bet to accomplish a bipartisan repeal and replace.

On the other hand, Bill could die at any time. Which would leave us with a know-it-all schoolmarm who doesn’t like or feel for most anyone, including and even especially the woman in the mirror.

Don’t know how I feel either. Talk to me. How long and patiently can you play the political game to save your children, your grandchildren and the Constitution from a humiliating, impoverishing fate?

Can you wait for 2024 to save your nation? Think about it.