At least publicly, all factions in the Republican Party claims to revere President Ronald Reagan. Very heart-warming, but rather inaccurate, at least if you define "reverance" as emulating his leadership techniques and strategies. This is rather galling in the case of the Tea Party, which claims to be the intellectual heirs of the great RR, one of the two great Republican Presidents of history. (The pachyderm party has given us several very good Presidents, as well.) In many ways President Reagan would be appalled at the political ineptitude and arrogance of many in the Tea Party movement.
Being a surviving Young Reaganite (my first presidential vote was for RR, which is a happy reflection), I would like to point out a few instances when our Ron up in Heaven watched we capering clowns here below and shook his head deploringly.
(Before I continue, I wish to note that I will be mentioning Jim Quinn and Rose Tennant frequently in this post. I do not do this because I consider them exceptionally "bad" - I do not - but because they are rather representative of TP opinions and actions, and because I listened to them on our outstanding regional talk show channel, WYSL in Avon NY before they were fired by clear Channel in what appears to be a naked act of partisan retaliation by the new EVP for Clear Channels political involvement, who happens to be former Senator and Democratic leader Tom Daschle's son. I hope they find another gig soon. I often disagree with them, but they host a popular show and deserve to be allowed to pursue their careers with being axed by a commissar.)
For all of their patriotism and enthusiasm, I have noted that TPers of all ages seem to share some less than desirable traits. Since many of them are products of our public school system, many do very slipshod research. They trust "heros" of the movement like Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano far more than they deserve to be trusted. Do your own research, TPers. Check sources based on original documents.
Many libertarians claim that several states reserved the right to secede from the Union when they ratified the Constitution. Many other libertarians parroted these statements, and spread them far and wide. It took the efforts of Claremont Institute Fellow Thomas Krannawitter to blow this theory out of the water. By the simple process of actually reading the records of the various ratification conventions and the ratification declarations they produced, Krannawitter discover that in fact not one of the states had reserved the so-called "right". (His book Vindicating Lincoln is reviewed here.)
I could pursue this further, but that's another essay for another time. I'm concerned with errors the TP is making in the present. After looking like an irresistible wave in 2010, many of their more recent efforts have broken up into a foam of recriminations against others an a total inability to detect, let alone correct their own mistakes.
An ugly premonition of what was to come came early in 2011 when my own idiot New York State Republican congressman, Chris Lee, decided that being a Congressman made him attractive to women (after all, there had been the pudgy Mr. Magoo with a Jimmy Swaggart wig, Bill Clinton), and ignited a scandal that blew him right out of Congress. Having learned their lesson from the DeeDee Scozzafava fiasco, the Republican Committee Chairmen chose Jane Corwin to run for the suddenly vacant seat in a traditionally Republican district. The Democrats chose as their candidate a lockstep liberal from the Buffalo area, Kathy Hochul. The choice should have been clear, since Jane Corwin had compiled the second most conservative voting record in either the State Senate or the Assembly.
At this point, however, a complication arose. Jack Davis, another radical Democrat who had run for this same seat previously, decided to make another run as a third party candidate. this should have split Hochul's vote, but Davis took advantage of a peculiarity in New York election law which allows a party which gathers enough petition signatures to obtain a line on the ballot to name that line anything they want, as long as the name is not being used.
Davis called his line on the ballot the Tea Party.
Here the real Tea Partiers fell into a trap. Enough of them were not alert enough to look beyond the Tea Party name and look at the candidate behind it that they voted for Jack Davis (with whom they disagree on EVERYTHING) instead of Jane Corwin to enable Hochul to win the race. this was despite the fact that the national Tea Party leaders hurried to Rochester when they realized what was happening. They called a press conference to expose the fraud, which of course the local media studiously ignored. Even so, Jack Davis had enough of a record that any conservative/Tea Partier should have been able to discover his real character with a minimum of digging. Sadly, too many TPers did none.
After the election, TPers started calling locally-carried political talks shows to alibi for their laziness and their ignorance of Jack Davis. They claimed that Jane Corwin was another DeeDee Scozzafava, a liberal Republican unworthy of their support. This was quite simply false. They also berated the Republican chairmen for choosing a candidate instead of holding a primary. Ignorance again, this time of the law - New York law does not allow a primary for a special election.
The Democrats learned the lesson of NY26 and the value of running a spoiler candidate under a false flag to split their opponents vote, and they demonstrated this in Virginia's recent governor's race. The TPers and their cousins the Libertarians simultaneously demonstrated they have still not learned their lessons, either from NY26 or from last year's presidential electian, to which I will turn next.
Next up: Mitt Romney, Gary Johnson, and What's in a Name?
No comments:
Post a Comment