Don’t let the establishment pick GOP nominee.

Don’t let the establishment pick GOP nominee.

You know the deal. Every four years we have the smart people on television (and usually living in either New York or D.C.) telling us who would be the ideal person for the Republican Party to run as their presidential candidate. And, who do we usually end up with? A John McCain or a Bob Dole, in other words: losers. This time do your own research. Don’t listen to the talking heads. Read as much as you can about all of the potential candidates so you can fight the pessimism and the negativity before it hits. This is good advice from David Limbaugh.

Conservatives are worried that an ideal Reagan conservative has yet to emerge and lead the 2012 GOP presidential field. But are we allowing the liberal media (and establishment Republicans) to manipulate the narrative to prevent such a result?

Obviously, the liberal media do not have the best interests of Reagan conservatives in mind when they do their “reporting.” So when they tell us certain GOP candidates are unelectable or electable, common sense would counsel us to take their advice with mounds of salt. But do we?

Surely Ronald Reagan isn’t the only qualified, electable Reagan conservative in our lifetimes. Nonetheless, the virtually unchallenged assumption is that Reagan conservatism is extreme and its purveyors intrinsically divisive.

The demonization always follows the same pattern. A promising mainstream conservative candidate appears and begins to gain traction and is then relentlessly attacked and marginalized into apparent unelectablility. Snip –

Limbaugh uses the demonization of Sarah Palin and her so-called “lack of experience” running on the bottom of the ticket  in 2008 as an example of the media’s vicious attacks. Why didn’t the media and the “establishment” Republicans tar Obama with that same brush, especially since he was running on the top of the ticket? Now, you know they’ll use the same “lack of experience” against Herman Cain. Why? They’re afraid of Herman Cain, and because he doesn’t have “political” experience. Like that’s the most important reason to elect a president. But he sure has a lot of other experience, and it’s much, much more than just as CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. Did you know he was an adviser to Jack Kemp? Well, take it from me, there’s a lot more that you don’t know about Herman Cain. His resume is impressive. And, you can read that here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/267029/introducing-herman-cain-robert-costa

Limbaugh continues:

The media portrayed Obama as a uniter, despite his having had the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2007. And they haven’t properly acknowledged the extent of his divisiveness yet, though he’s the most polarizing president of the modern era — including George W. Bush.

This year, the establishment had been propping up Mitch Daniels, probably because it didn’t view him as being as conservative as Palin, Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain or Tim Pawlenty. Now that Daniels is out, we hear that those in the establishment will start talking up John Huntsman — doubtlessly because they see him as less conservative and thus less threatening.

So, not only do we have to fight the liberal media, but we also have to fight “establishment” Republicans who don’t always have the vision or the wherewithal to fight the left when it needs a good beating (for example, see John McCain, 2008 loser).

Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator says that the rumblings in the Republican Party are as old as Goldwater and as sticky as Ford versus Reagan. Lord says, “Gerald Ford didn’t get it.” He never understood that Reagan was part of a revolution against an ever-expanding government and that Ford was on the wrong side. But, that revolution started long before Reagan.

In fact, it began in fits and starts roughly with the emergence of the British philosopher John Locke and picking up intellectual grounding and authority as it made its way through the centuries developed by a group that includes everybody from the English-Irish statesman philosopher Edmund Burke to the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln and on to the 20th century. With the advent of the American Progressive movement and the presidencies of both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson and (yes) Herbert Hoover (a Progressive Republican), by the time a young William F. Buckley arrived on the scene in the early 1950s with his famous line of standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” the idea of an ever-expanding state was not only mainstream it was the mainstream. In both political parties, the media, academia and religion as well.

…Sooner or later progressivism/liberalism was destined to find itself perched at the very edge of the cliff where Americans find themselves and their country today. Out of cash and out of credibility. But in the day, all manner of people thought this was a big no-never-mind. And if the Goldwater — Rockefeller fight for the 1964 GOP nomination was in retrospect an enormous political warning flare, the Ford-Reagan fight was, in retrospect, the tipping point when the balance began to shift.  Snip –

Ford simply did not understand what he was in the middle of — while Reagan understood with a well-spoken and out-spoken clarity. A clarity that Ford, holding fast to the stance of moderation, dismissed as Reagan’s “penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems.”  Snip —

Fast-forward to today and the Tea Party and people like Paul Ryan in the House of Representatives and Rand Paul in the Senate. These two are in the vein of continuing this revolution. (Even though Paul didn’t vote for Ryan’s budget in the Senate today because he says it didn’t go far enough.)

Yet the war between the Gerald Ford’s of America — those within the Republican Party, the media, and the larger world policy establishments — is still being waged every single day.  Snip –

It never dawned on Ford — who amazingly thought Reagan should have stepped aside for him in 1980 — that his insistence on what might be called the extremism of moderation was what resulted in his loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Indeed, all that Ford-speak that filled the Bush campaigns of 1992 (kinder and gentler conservatism) and 2000 and 2004 (compassionate conservatism) never even came close to producing a Reagan-style landslide like 1980 or 1984. (Indeed, only when Bush 41 ran as Reagan’s heir in 1988 did a Reagan-style win manifest itself.) Ford himself wrote off Reagan’s electoral success — which beforehand he was certain could not be had — to Reagan’s “flair.”   Snip –

Remember the “era of Reagan” is over – that from the smart guys in the GOP in 2008 who are from the Gerald Ford wing of the Republican Party? The Tea Party proves they’re idiots. We must remember that when we run a conservative, we win big.

Whether the topic is Israel or the GOP 2012 nomination fight or McCain on enhanced interrogation or the (laughable) depiction of conservative talk radio as a dying breed or the hit job on (Roger) Ailes — the goal is exactly the same as it was in 1976. Ignore the reality of politics, principle, economics, or evil in favor of tinkering at the edges. Or risk being described as a “zealot” or a “wing nut” a simpleton — or worse.

Read all of Jeffrey Lord here: http://spectator.org/archives/2011/05/24/ford-versus-reagan-the-sequel

Here’s Limbaugh to wrap it up:

But in the end, it’s not the liberal bias, double standards, selective demonization and unfairness that troubles me most. It is what I fear to be our side’s passive acquiescence to the media’s predictable narrative. Why do we keep allowing our political enemies to pick and disqualify our candidates?

Professional politicians have steered our ship of state into the Titanic iceberg. It’s hardly facetious to suggest that there’s an inverse relationship between the collective experience of those in the political class and their ability and willingness to extricate us from the mess they’ve created.

We need fresh blood and a fresh approach to the nation-threatening problems we face, so perhaps we should liberate ourselves from the template preventing us from stepping outside the box.

I haven’t decided whom I will support for the GOP nomination this early in the field. I like Palin, Cain, Ryan, Rick Perry, Santorum, Pawlenty, John Bolton and Bachmann, among others. But I sure won’t let the liberal media or establishment types color my thinking about it.

Let’s try to resist the debilitating contagion of pessimism out there. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are plenty of good candidates, and all of them are infinitely superior to Obama. If the nation is to be saved, one of them, on this list or not, has to prevail.

Yes, it seems conservatives have to battle not just the liberals, but also those in their own party who just can’t seem to digest what conservatism really is — it’s about freedom. Freedom from coercive government. Freedom from excessive taxes and control. Freedom to start a business without some form of government putting up roadblocks. Those in politics for only one thing — their own pursuit of their own power — don’t give a fig about conservative values. That’s why we are all sick to death of professional politicians — from both sides of the aisle. Let’s hope Reagan’s spirit shines on our candidates and the American people so we can return our country from the brink. So, please, do your homework. Don’t listen to the talking heads. Get the truth and let’s get ourselves a winning, and a conservative, candidate. Read it all here:

http://www.davidlimbaugh.com/mt/archives/2011/05/new_columndont.html

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