Chris Adamo
Risky election post mortem
By Chris Adamo
The delight of leftists over winning Tuesday's election and granting Barack Obama four more years in which to wreak his havoc on the nation will only be rivaled by their glee in the upcoming weeks as they offer yet more "advice" to our side on how to achieve victory in the future. The short answer is, of course, that the GOP must promise to govern like liberals. This is the core of their "wisdom" on every occasion, and whenever aspiring Republican candidates accept it, electoral disaster is all but guaranteed.
Worse yet, this transparent effort is almost invariably aided and abetted by the entrenched "moderates" of the GOP establishment, many of whom abhor conservative principle, and are themselves devoted to gaining acceptance from the opposition. This, we are told, is the essence of "compromise" and "bipartisanship," the net result of which is that regardless of which party holds the reins of power at the highest levels of government, liberals somehow still remain in control of the agenda.
Not surprisingly, it is also these establishment Republicans who do their best to sift real conservatives from the field of candidates by flatly announcing who is "electable" and who is not. Interestingly, since 1996, three of their four chosen candidates did not prove to be at all "electable." Yet it is absolutely predictable that the GOP "experts" will again be on hand in upcoming elections to make their defining pronouncements of who should get to play, and who should drop out.
In the 1976 presidential race, the Republican Party machinery was fervently opposed to the nomination of Ronald Reagan, and rallied around quasi incumbent Gerald Ford, on the basis that Ford was more electable, which inexorably led to the disaster of Jimmy Carter. Fortunately for America and the world, four years later grassroots Republicans rejected their party leaders' advice and put Reagan into the White House, whereupon he turned the economy around, revamped an inexcusably flawed tax system, rebuilt the military, and restored America's languishing standing on the world stage.
Admittedly, the America of 2012 is a very different place from what it was in 1980. However, this fact can easily be misconstrued (or perhaps purposefully misrepresented by the enemies of conservatism) in order to reach conclusions that might propel the Republican Party further onto a self-defeating course. The only sure defense against such a prospect is to recognize the basis on which conservative principle has been established, namely the promotion of a wholesome and healthy society for the betterment of the nation and its citizens, and commit to remaining on that course regardless of how it is mischaracterized by liberal propagandists. The alternative is to pander, by sporadically upholding or abandoning the principles of conservatism, based not on their inherent worthiness, but on their perceived attractiveness or disfavor among the popular culture.
Furthermore, the nature of liberalism is such that it can gather a following from philosophically disparate constituencies, as long as each is bestowed its portion from the public trough. In contrast, conservatism is founded on a well-defined and ideologically consistent set of precepts. Any attempts by party pragmatists to selectively jettison its standards are rightly perceived by the voting base as ideological compromise. And in a contest to garner votes by promising "benefits" to the electorate, liberals will invariably win since they are always more willing to rob from one citizen in order to purchase the devotion of another.
So what significance does this discussion hold in regards to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's failed run for the White House, and the pertinent lessons that future candidates might glean from it? Overwhelmingly, the real issue at hand has been completely overlooked, which makes it increasingly likely that philosophically rudderless Republican insiders will once again be looking in all the wrong directions for useful information.
Since Tuesday evening, Mitt Romney has been criticized and second-guessed for virtually every decision he made as a candidate, from his choice of Paul Ryan as VP (on the basis that Ryan was too conservative), to his deliberate avoidance of the Benghazi situation in the final debate. Worst of all is that this profound hindsight is coming mostly from the right. Yet when the real picture of the 2012 race and this nation's current condition are considered, these negative appraisals of the Romney campaign ultimately prove irrelevant.
For a disturbing but enlightening glimpse of the America that reelected Barack Obama, one need only go onto YouTube and revisit that abhorrent visage known as the "Obama Phone" lady. In less than a minute, objective viewers can clearly witness the mindset of an individual who has no interest in the future of the nation, no notion of the need for America to produce and advance economically, no concern over the threats to its security from hostile forces abroad, and no intention of embracing opportunity to make a better life for herself.
Rather, she lauds the ostensible generosity of the Obama Administration for its willingness to hand out free cell phones to a list of special interests which she readily recites. This is the full extent and manner on which she bases her choice of who should be leader of the free world. Among the vaunted "young people," the picture is much the same. With no care or understanding of the repercussions of profligate government spending on themselves and their children, college age voters are encouraged throughout their years in the classrooms to support candidates who promise them access to the national treasury in order to pay mushrooming tuition costs. Here again, in a toe-to-toe contest of fiscal recklessness, Democrats will always win. Thus any principled Republican candidate has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by attempting to compete against them in that manner.
If America has truly crossed the threshold into moral bankruptcy and socialism, Republicans will do little to aid it, or their party's political fortunes, by seeking to jump on the bandwagon while claiming to travel at a slower pace. However, the results of this election, though delivering the extremely unfortunate consequence of four more years of Barack Obama in the White House, do not represent an irreversible denunciation of the flag-waving Americanism that was so dominant just two years ago in the 2010 mid-terms. On that occasion, it was the unambiguous presentation of a pro-family, pro-American, pro-Constitution platform that carried the day.
The nation's present track promises dire consequences on the fiscal, social, and economic fronts. But eventually a sufficient portion of the populace will awaken from its stupor and commit to restoring the societal and governing sanity that blessed and prospered it in the past. Republicans can stay the course and be ready to lead at that point or, if they have opted to follow the advice of morally rudderless party insiders, will be scrambling to disavow their desertion of the American ideal.
© Chris Adamo
November 9, 2012
The delight of leftists over winning Tuesday's election and granting Barack Obama four more years in which to wreak his havoc on the nation will only be rivaled by their glee in the upcoming weeks as they offer yet more "advice" to our side on how to achieve victory in the future. The short answer is, of course, that the GOP must promise to govern like liberals. This is the core of their "wisdom" on every occasion, and whenever aspiring Republican candidates accept it, electoral disaster is all but guaranteed.
Worse yet, this transparent effort is almost invariably aided and abetted by the entrenched "moderates" of the GOP establishment, many of whom abhor conservative principle, and are themselves devoted to gaining acceptance from the opposition. This, we are told, is the essence of "compromise" and "bipartisanship," the net result of which is that regardless of which party holds the reins of power at the highest levels of government, liberals somehow still remain in control of the agenda.
Not surprisingly, it is also these establishment Republicans who do their best to sift real conservatives from the field of candidates by flatly announcing who is "electable" and who is not. Interestingly, since 1996, three of their four chosen candidates did not prove to be at all "electable." Yet it is absolutely predictable that the GOP "experts" will again be on hand in upcoming elections to make their defining pronouncements of who should get to play, and who should drop out.
In the 1976 presidential race, the Republican Party machinery was fervently opposed to the nomination of Ronald Reagan, and rallied around quasi incumbent Gerald Ford, on the basis that Ford was more electable, which inexorably led to the disaster of Jimmy Carter. Fortunately for America and the world, four years later grassroots Republicans rejected their party leaders' advice and put Reagan into the White House, whereupon he turned the economy around, revamped an inexcusably flawed tax system, rebuilt the military, and restored America's languishing standing on the world stage.
Admittedly, the America of 2012 is a very different place from what it was in 1980. However, this fact can easily be misconstrued (or perhaps purposefully misrepresented by the enemies of conservatism) in order to reach conclusions that might propel the Republican Party further onto a self-defeating course. The only sure defense against such a prospect is to recognize the basis on which conservative principle has been established, namely the promotion of a wholesome and healthy society for the betterment of the nation and its citizens, and commit to remaining on that course regardless of how it is mischaracterized by liberal propagandists. The alternative is to pander, by sporadically upholding or abandoning the principles of conservatism, based not on their inherent worthiness, but on their perceived attractiveness or disfavor among the popular culture.
Furthermore, the nature of liberalism is such that it can gather a following from philosophically disparate constituencies, as long as each is bestowed its portion from the public trough. In contrast, conservatism is founded on a well-defined and ideologically consistent set of precepts. Any attempts by party pragmatists to selectively jettison its standards are rightly perceived by the voting base as ideological compromise. And in a contest to garner votes by promising "benefits" to the electorate, liberals will invariably win since they are always more willing to rob from one citizen in order to purchase the devotion of another.
So what significance does this discussion hold in regards to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's failed run for the White House, and the pertinent lessons that future candidates might glean from it? Overwhelmingly, the real issue at hand has been completely overlooked, which makes it increasingly likely that philosophically rudderless Republican insiders will once again be looking in all the wrong directions for useful information.
Since Tuesday evening, Mitt Romney has been criticized and second-guessed for virtually every decision he made as a candidate, from his choice of Paul Ryan as VP (on the basis that Ryan was too conservative), to his deliberate avoidance of the Benghazi situation in the final debate. Worst of all is that this profound hindsight is coming mostly from the right. Yet when the real picture of the 2012 race and this nation's current condition are considered, these negative appraisals of the Romney campaign ultimately prove irrelevant.
For a disturbing but enlightening glimpse of the America that reelected Barack Obama, one need only go onto YouTube and revisit that abhorrent visage known as the "Obama Phone" lady. In less than a minute, objective viewers can clearly witness the mindset of an individual who has no interest in the future of the nation, no notion of the need for America to produce and advance economically, no concern over the threats to its security from hostile forces abroad, and no intention of embracing opportunity to make a better life for herself.
Rather, she lauds the ostensible generosity of the Obama Administration for its willingness to hand out free cell phones to a list of special interests which she readily recites. This is the full extent and manner on which she bases her choice of who should be leader of the free world. Among the vaunted "young people," the picture is much the same. With no care or understanding of the repercussions of profligate government spending on themselves and their children, college age voters are encouraged throughout their years in the classrooms to support candidates who promise them access to the national treasury in order to pay mushrooming tuition costs. Here again, in a toe-to-toe contest of fiscal recklessness, Democrats will always win. Thus any principled Republican candidate has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by attempting to compete against them in that manner.
If America has truly crossed the threshold into moral bankruptcy and socialism, Republicans will do little to aid it, or their party's political fortunes, by seeking to jump on the bandwagon while claiming to travel at a slower pace. However, the results of this election, though delivering the extremely unfortunate consequence of four more years of Barack Obama in the White House, do not represent an irreversible denunciation of the flag-waving Americanism that was so dominant just two years ago in the 2010 mid-terms. On that occasion, it was the unambiguous presentation of a pro-family, pro-American, pro-Constitution platform that carried the day.
The nation's present track promises dire consequences on the fiscal, social, and economic fronts. But eventually a sufficient portion of the populace will awaken from its stupor and commit to restoring the societal and governing sanity that blessed and prospered it in the past. Republicans can stay the course and be ready to lead at that point or, if they have opted to follow the advice of morally rudderless party insiders, will be scrambling to disavow their desertion of the American ideal.
© Chris Adamo
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