Two items from Gary Bauer’s End of Day Report — My take on the first may not be where Bauer is going, but so it goes. My commentary follows Bauer’s call for GOP introspection. The second item requires no additional comment, only a warning to brace for another confirmation of the Obamanation.
The Missing Invitation (Gary Bauer)
The first thing I did this morning after getting into the office was to check the weekend mail and scan through my Inbox. Nope, still not there.
I’m waiting for an invitation that could be sent by any number of people. It could be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or House Speaker Paul Ryan. It could be from the Bush family, whose members have served as president and played a major role in shaping the Republican Party.
Mitt Romney looks like he wants to be involved in politics again. I would eagerly attend a meeting he called. Another possibility would be a conservative gathering hosted by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
The invitation would read something like this: “Please join a select group of conservative and Republican leaders to discuss how our party completely missed the mood and concerns of our voters regarding what has been happening to America.”
How is it that with all the consultants and advisors it never occurred to the party elites to launch a campaign with the theme of making America great again? Why didn’t anyone else catch on to the idea that trade deals sending manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China really aren’t all that popular in the American heartland?
How did GOP leaders not understand that Americans really do expect our borders to be secure? And finally, how did the party of Ronald Reagan miss that average folks won’t tolerate going to war if we force our soldiers to fight under politically correct rules of engagement or with one hand tied behind their backs?
My observations are not about changing Trump, he is what he is. His primary supporters are more than satisfied with that and, for lack of a current viable third party alternative, and the likes of Hillary, others (including me) will feel compelled to vote for him. That is not unlike what has happened as regards other GOP nominees of late, unsatisfactory nominee but dangerous and destructive alternative. Bauer’s rhetorical idea of a confab is what I am responding to.
While not referring to Bauer, I am not sure another autopsy with the same hacks that produced the 2012 Growth and Opportunity Project would be insightful or a prelude to revivication of the GOP as a political party. It is not necessary because so much seems obvious to this conservative. Here are four political lessons I learned from the last nine months or so.
Lesson #1: The cause of the death throws for the GOP that we may be witnessing is pretty simple: it is that GOP legislative leadership did not do what was promised. That is the fundamental reason that overwhelms all else. Regrettably, the person who has been selected to set things right was not selected by conservatives or even active Republicans for the most part. His selection was the result of the number of candidates, open voting, ridiculous “plurality takes all” rules, the later two rules made to order for Trump, and media that was either manipulated or manipulating.
Trump got the most press by bombastically pointing out the core failures of the GOP (which includes not fighting the good fight). It does not matter that pointing out such failures was a major theme of all but a few of the candidates seeking the Republican nomination. Some will say he delivered the message better. I am not sure that is the best term. The association of the message with him got through better but others did not have his advantages, such as not being constrained by having a plan, internal consistency or coherency. Such is not necessary, only the willingness to attack and have that be your persona. The compelling questions now include: Will the general election “rules” be in Trump’s favor? Will the real or excessive media scrutiny Republicans usually get be as absent? How does Hillary stack-up in comparison, will the Demo machine be able to produce the electoral votes necessary in spite of her negatives?
Lesson #2. People listen to sensational news programing reports about political attacks longer (so-called earned media), and drink it in deeper, than attack campaign ads which are ignored or switched off. Coherent policy positions “details” were not explored in basic news reports. Talkiong head shows did to some extent but Trumps primary voters and Hillary voters do not listen to them. Peoples attention spans are too short but attack ads are seen as untrustworthy and mere din. The network that many Republicans had become accustomed to relying on, Fox, was mostly in the tank for Trump.
Lesson #3. You still do not need to be authentic to win, and bombast, if not lies, works. People complain about politicians not doing what they say, but those who do are not rewarded, but instead are castigated for doing so. Cruz rightly calling Mitch McConnell a liar was not authentic enough for Trump supporters who by all appearances do not now authenticity when they see it. They will believe anything from Trump, he said as much himself. In their view all politicians lie but Trump, who is by some stretch of their imagination not a politician, or part of the establishment. When a, ahem, stretch of the truth is shown to them, it is said to be good, or Donald being Donald, or dismissed as “they all do it.” And anyway it is OK to lie about and to infidels. For voters with such acceptances, there is no need to know what they are getting, only what they are not getting (in this case Hillary, we hope).
Lesson #4. A lot of people fall will for someone who has developed a tough-guy persona in order to wreck / heal the system they detest when clearly (by “virtue of flip-flops) he or she has no idea what to do. Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota, was an example. Professional wrestling hoopla has been validated as a workable campaign approach, perhaps now a reliable one.
The truth is that more of the detested status quo will be continued under Trump than by some of his other primary opponents (altered perhaps but not significantly abated) — welfare, progressive taxation, government run health care, immigration amnesty, executive order governance, and more that constitutionalists would not tolerate. Deficits will continue, printing money will continue to be relied on to get through the day, and there is the possibility of trade wars and resultant economic malaise.
Social issues, the driving force of welfare costs, may not see pro-family attention from Trump or only to the extent that states are not punished for doing the people’s will ( a serious improvement). Liberal judges will work aggressively to protect liberal advances made under Obama during Trump’s term. He will have no strategy to overcome them. Of such likelihood we have to be sober along with the sobriety that Hillary will accelerate the decline of constitutional government and subvert the culture.
We need a true “Washington wrecker” and that was going to be Cruz, it is not Trump. So while the short view is Trump is the superior choice, always a relative term, the big question is what is the long view as regards a political party home for conservatives. More on that over time.
Left Preaches Open Borders (Gary Bauer)
One of the progressives who runs America gave the commencement address to the 2016 graduating class of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, Friday.
Just in case the students weren’t made stupid enough by four years of left-wing indoctrination, the speaker finished the job when he said, in response to proposals to build a border wall, “There are no walls big enough to stop people from anywhere, tens of thousands of miles away, who are determined to take their own lives while they target others.”
With that remark, Secretary of State John Kerry officially announced that nations are a figment of our imagination. Or even worse, that he and the other leftists who run the country intend to make America a figment of our imagination.
Borders — secured by walls, fences, checkpoints, border guards, and in some cases, the military — are the reality and defining characteristics of nation-states. What John Kerry described, large numbers of people willing to die in order to breach a nation’s borders, has throughout history been called an “invasion.” Nations either stop hostile invasions or they are conquered.
We are living under an administration that believes it is impossible, perhaps even undesirable, to secure our borders. (By the way, a new surge of illegal immigration is hitting the southern border and may exceed what we experienced in 2014.) The only explanation is that they are prepared for us to be conquered. (Perhaps that explains why when we are at war against radical Islam that the Army has been cut to pre-World War II levels.)
If I were Vladimir Putin, I’d work out a deal to send 200,000 Russian troops to Mexico who would take off their uniforms and promptly walk across the border to test Kerry’s theory.
Kerry’s comments should have been the controversy everyone was talking about over the weekend. That is what Donald Trump should have run to a microphone to talk about. That is what Speaker Paul Ryan should have been speaking out against. This left-wing idiocy is what every conservative should be battling, instead of throwing bombs at each other.
R Mall
