George H.W. Bush’s Second Loss
I have never met any of the presidential candidates, personally. There’s no sense in putting hope in a single officeholder when mulling your vote for president.
As a constitutional conservative, what amazes me the most about our founding charter is the myriad of ways it intentionally prevents the three branches of government from absolutism.
You can have a genuine, articulate conservative in the White House, a horde of them on Capitol Hill, and a judiciary stocked with them – and government can still achieve very little.
Normally, we’d be mistaken to view government gridlock as a deficiency. It is a blessing.
Likewise, we have been warned of the dangers associated with political parties, by none other than George Washington himself. We have longed for leaders with character, courage and wisdom, and the two-party system has proved scarcely sufficient.
Yet, we could always assume to a reasonable degree that both parties would remain opposed to each other, squabbling over power, money and image, with brief flashes of cooperation on matters of vital national interest.
Needless to say, now is not the time for cooperation. But it’s also not the time for gridlock. Permit me to explain.
Gridlock is good until January 20, 2013. That’s the day we get our executive branch back. Government shutdowns, budget cuts and standstills on unconstitutional programs are just fine with me until then; people need to see how well they can function without the federal government.
But on January 21, 2013, cooperation is critical, and that means cooperation from the GOP-controlled House, and another electoral sweep that we cannot afford to lose – a GOP-controlled Senate.
And what are we to do with those two legislative bodies, where the leadership is still made up of establishment Republicans, assuming we keep the one and recapture the other? It is already clear that Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are no pair of crusading, constitutional right-wingers.
The House is more clear-cut; the Tea Party Caucus is of a formidable size that it can steer the debate. Assuming even more Tea Party-backed conservatives win seats in 2012, the House and a conservative president could bracket an establishment Senate into passing a lot of good legislation.
The Senate’s Tea Party contingent is small, consisting of old patriots like Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and James Inhofe, along with new blood like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Mike Lee. On the whole, however, the upper chamber is still loaded with RINO turncoats.
With President Hussein dethroned and the left back squarely in the minority, I can’t see much to look forward to, particularly if the Republican in the White House is Willard Mitt Romney.
Now for all of you Consensitive Mod Squad types out there, fear not: this is not a personal attack on Romney.
It’s a professional one.
To know the stock from which Romney comes is to understand why I describe a Romney nomination as George H.W. Bush’s second re-election loss.
Long before he enacted the first statewide socialist health care law in the union, Romney worked on his father’s failed 1964 primary campaign for the White House.
Then as now, the Romney moderate Republican brand battled against its conservative nemesis, represented by Barry Goldwater. John McCain-style party-bucking is a Romney family tradition.
Romney also has a little-known, but fully exploitable, history of having avoided the Vietnam War with student deferments. Although an honest media would not permit President Hussein – who never came close to signing up for duty in Grenada, Panama or Desert Storm – to criticize this shortage of military service, I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House tried to level the charge:
“He enacted universal health care and dodged Vietnam … why vote for a phony Bill Clinton when you can get the real deal in Barack Obama?”
With this background, it’s no surprise that Romney ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and for the governorship of Massachusetts in 2002 as a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and when elected, governed as a Democrat-lite.
To hear some tell it, Romney only served from 2003 to 2005; he spent nearly two-thirds of his final year in office traveling around the nation, fundraising and glad-handing. He’s an expert at getting people to part with their money – but to the end of electing him, so he can require them to part with even more of it through the force of law.
Mitt Romney would make a fine fundraising partner with Sarah Palin, who has also ducked the 2012 election. He could sweet-talk the Republican Party’s Consensitives, while Palin could court its conservatives.
But for the hour and the day, with the exceptions of Ron Paul, Gary Johnson and the laughable Jon Huntsman, Romney is the last person we should choose to defeat Hussein.
You see, we are approaching the end of Jimmy Carter’s second term. Carter was defeated for a host of reasons, but primary among them were prolonged recession, stagflation, inept foreign policy, weakness before our enemies, a bruising primary challenge from Kennedy and a third party candidate who peeled away Carter votes when everyone thought they’d be peeled from Ronald Reagan.
The Carter Years are back, and they are as unpalatable as ever. But nobody in the 1980 election thought that Bush, who lost to Reagan in the primary, had much to offer in the way of alternatives. It was not the time for a moderate Republican who would agree with half or more of what Carter said, and treat many of his asinine criticisms as valid.
I might argue that no stage of history really beckons a Bush 41 presidency, but especially not this one. So it is with Mitt Romney.
We need to be reminded that since 1960, the Republican Party has fielded only two genuine conservative candidates for the White House – Goldwater once, and Reagan twice. All of the others have been varying degrees of moderate – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bush 41, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and McCain.
Of those moderates, the only winners were Nixon and Bush 43, whose ardent national security stances during times of war made up for some terrible domestic and economic decisions.
Nixon squeaked into the presidency in 1968 by a vote split between the Southern Dixiecrats and the rest of the Democrat Party, while Bush lost the 2000 popular vote but won the electoral college.
It is, as Reagan famously said, a time for choosing.
If this opinion counts, let’s remind the GOP establishment – the ones who did survive the tidal wave of 2010 – that they were not spared because of how marvelously they get along with Democrats.
And please, for goodness’ sake, let’s nominate someone other than Willard Mitt Romney.
© 2011 Ed’s Voices LLC
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