Convention Impressions

Monday, May 12, 2008
George Teegarden

Friday afternoon a news report on KFYI mentioned that John McCain would not appear at the Arizona State Republican Convention the next day and (implied?) that a "small but vocal group" of conservatives was the reason.

I was concerned that perhaps something was wrong with his hearing and that he could no longer appreciate music. I attended the convention but there was no small vocal group there. There was no band either. The only music was the score from the video presentation of the 2004 Convention.

And then I realized that the news people got it wrong again. Figures.

The "small BUT vocal group" must have referred to the featured speakers at the Convention. They were very vocal. I heard the word "unity" one hundred and seventy six times by actual count. (I made that up. I didn't count. There were probably not more than a hundred utterances of “unity” at the convention. Michael Reagan uttered the other seventy-six the night before.) I'm sure that John McCain felt that by showing up he might have been "in the way" so to speak.

Those of us who are not particularly fond of our home state Senator held our tongues. We may not like him, but we aren't stupid. Yeah, that's despite what you RINOs out there think. Yep, McCain's our guy now. The thought of "President Obama" let alone another "President Clinton" is enough to make even a maggot “spew chunks”.

So conservatives are left to abide by Ronald Reagan's advice: "Trust but verify". Reagan said that about the Soviet Union, a country with a long history of disappointing those who believed what she said. John McCain has a similar history with conservatives. Every speaker at the Convention acknowledged that fact. It was implied by what they said and how they said it. “You can’t expect the ‘perfect’ candidate.” “No one can fill Reagan’s shadow.” It was an almost somber occasion.

John McCain is the Republican nominee. He says he’s a conservative without defining what the meaning of conservative is. What does that mean for the Party? “Trust but verify.” He will want to make some changes to the GOP party platform. Will he attempt to pull it leftward? He (and/or his team?) will select a Veep. Will it be a reasonably young and stalwart conservative? That would at least provide a light at the end of the tunnel for conservatives.

We were assured that he will pursue the War Against Terror and not waste the sacrifice of those who have already made so much progress. But when he's elected, as he must be, will he act on his words that we should close Guantanamo? That we should provide the detainees there with trials, here?

He'll get a chance to nominate a justice or two to SCOTUS not to mention a bunch of appellate judges. Will those decisions be of the Sandra Day O'Connor type or the Justice Alito kind? Has he figured out yet that his idea of federal election reform might be in conflict with the concept of free speech? Does he think the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms or that it’s just a symbolic right that can be voided by making impossible the ability to obtain firearms?

He appears to be mounting the Global Warming bandwagon just as this recent return to a witch-burning level of hysteria is reaching its peak. Will he act to help these fanatics return civilization to the dark ages or will he seek genuine knowledge on the subject and respond prudently.

We are being given a boatload of promises to assuage a boatload of misgivings and conflicting experiences with John McCain. Conservative Republicans are being ordered to put aside principle for the greater good and expediency of seeing a Republican Party victory. It will be a hollow victory if we see the Grand Old Party brand continue to devolve into the Liberal Lite version our spend thrift Republican congress left to us.

Reagan was once a Democrat. He said that he never left the party, the party left him. He put forward a clear conservative vision for America, not Liberal Lite and when his time finally came despite the trepidations of the Republican Party of the time, he won in a landslide twice. He demonstrated courage and the American people respected that. A lot of Republicans are again afraid of the "C" word but America doesn't like to elect people without testicles. When it does, it usually elects Democrats, or Republicans who support Democrats.

A third party is not an option for conservatives. The freedom haters, the former communists, socialists and collectivists realized this long ago when they began their takeover of the Democrat party. They realized their “purist" parties would always be small and could never win any meaningful victories. They had to wrest control of one of the two major parties and try to keep the people who weren’t paying attention on board long enough to achieve real power. Along the way they indoctrinated a generation of the young that has since grown up and is now in charge of education and the media. They have used these assets to inspire timidity and outright fear in many Republican office holders. The last 6 years of out-of-control spending and the resulting take-over of Congress by the democrats are the fruits of timidity and fear.

The conservative advantage is liberal arrogance, which has made them stupid with their power. The last time they openly talked about advancing socialism, raising taxes, etc. was the McGovern campaign. We have to hope that history will repeat itself.

Recovering the Republican Party is the only possible path to keeping our freedom and that is only possible under a long-term vision and continuous effort. If you look at a graph of the Dow Jones index from 1929 to the present it shows you that in the long term, the direction is up. But if you look at a chart from 2000 to 2003 it demonstrates the potential for setbacks along the way.

Similarly, if you could look at a chart of conservative accomplishments of the Republican Party from 1964 to 2000 it would look similar to the long term Dow chart. Barry Goldwater and The Conscience of a Conservative began applying the brakes to liberalism but you don’t stop something as big as America on a dime. And so we coasted a long way further into socialism under Johnson’s “Great Society” programs. The socialist influence is still so strong that even today otherwise clear thinking conservatives complain that the biggest cost of the illegal alien problem is the burden on “our” welfare system when the real problem is a socialist welfare system that attracts people from outside the country at least as much as the prospect of paying jobs they can’t find at home.

Setbacks are an inevitable part of progress. But progress too is inevitable as long as we keep fighting. It’s “Gawd awful slow” as my folks used to say but impatience and quick fixes only lead to more setbacks. John McCain may be a minor setback to the Conservative movement. Barack Obama would be a setback of another kind, combining the worst of Johnson, Carter and Clinton together. But that’s where we are today. We have to hope John McCain wins. We should help where we can, principle allowing. At worst we shouldn’t get in his way. Meanwhile we must gear up to recruit and educate many more conservatives and continue to annoy RINOs.

In the event that he wins, however, conservatives will be far more alert and far more vocal about any lurches leftward than they were during Dubbya's years. After all we were never as skeptical of George Bush's conservative credentials as we rightfully are of John McCain’s.