Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Stop listening to them already!

I have never understood the eagerness of some Repubicans to take strategic advice from liberal media pundits.

It happened back in 2008 when they proclaimed that John McCain was the only candidate who could beat Hillary, and enough Republicans bought it to give us one of the worst campaigns in recent history. Sure, John McCain was a war hero, but as a politician he hasn't done anything even remotely inspiring. His main qualification is that he regularly stabs his own party in the back.

It happened again in 2012, when we bypassed a number of solid conservatives to nominate the governor who implemented government healthcare remarkably similar to Obamacare in his home state. Who thought that it was a good idea to nominate a Wall Street insider in the middle of a recession triggered, at least in the public perception, by Wall Street?

Wake up, folks! These people offering us unsolicited advice on which Republicans can win elections don't want us to win! And they certainly don't want a principled conservative to win.

They are not all Democrats, either. There are plenty of "moderate" Republican types who don't want the "crony capitalist" status quo to be disrupted.

Let's take the recent election in Virginia as an example of their flawed thinking.

Reagan won re-election Virginia by a margin of 62% to 37%. So anyone who says that a true conservative can't win there is just wrong.

But Obama beat McCain in Virginia by 6 percent and Romney by 4 percent.

These candidates who were sold to us based on their electability rather than their merit lost in a state which Republicans have usually won.

The recent election of a new governor in Virginia featured a true conservative, Ken Cuccinelli, who successfully led the fight against Obamacare as Virginia's attorney general. The Republican party establishment wrote off Cuccinelli from the start, so his opponent outspent him four to one. Many Republicans in statewide offices actually endorsed the other guy. Democrats backed a fake "libertarian" candidate who had a record of backing taxes on mileage of your car, to steal away votes from Cuccinelli. In the last week of the election, all sorts of liberal starpower was brought in to back the Democrat. In addition to the usual Hollywood crowd, the Clintons and Obama himself stumped for the liberal. The media constantly predicted that Cuccinelli would lose by 14 percent or more. With the Democrats, the media, and most of his own party united against him, he ought to have lost badly.

He didn't win, but he lost by about two percent.

That is, he did better than McCain or Romney.

Now the same people are telling us that Chris Christie is the only candidate who can beat Hillary. This is the guy who was all to eager to implement Obamacare in his state, supports amnesty and gun control, and chums around with Obama. A real, solid, principled, articulate conservative like Ted Cruz can't win, we are told.

As the Obamacare disaster continues to crash and burn, voters in all fifty states will be ready for a real alternative. It's time to stop listening to the people who steer us towards more spineless moderates while their own hard left ideologues win. A real conservative can win. We have plenty of evidence that nominating a squishy moderate does not help us to win, and even if it did, it means we get a squishy moderate President.