Posted by
Pete Chase on Friday, November 28, 2008 2:00:00 PM
With the President-Elect faithfully executing the duties of his (completely fictitious) office, most of the goings on in Washington, frankly, hold little interest for me. Right now the most engaging debate is happening within the GOP, as the party tries to decipher the meaning of November 4 and what it bodes for the future of the Republican Party. In the next few posts I’ll be exploring this, and I’ll start with a couple items of interest that have come up since the election.
The first is a complaint frequently voiced by disenchanted Republicans since the election. The Republican Party lost, it’s said, because it chose a poor candidate. McCain is a moderate who had too many issues with the base. He co-authored McCain-Feingold. He is pro-amnesty. The last straw came when he blamed the mortgage meltdown on “Wall Street greed.” It seems like he simply refused to stand up for core conservative principles, and the Republican party should never have put up such a weak and compromised candidate.
The trouble is, the Republican Party didn’t choose McCain – the delegates to the convention did. And who chose the delegates? Republican voters did. The same voters now moaning about what a terrible candidate he was. There’s only one question: if voters thought that McCain was such a disaster, then why did they vote for him in the primaries?
The second item relates to an article the other day by Morton Kondracke, who wrote that the first step on the road to the GOP’s recovery should be to fire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham as its spokesmen. He frets that the influence of right wing talk radio, especially on social issues like immigration and same-sex marriage has “branded the party as troglodyte,” and suggests that Limbaugh and others should be “ignored more frequently.”
Here’s the problem: no one hired Rush. His influence extends only so far as he convinces through argument. As a nationally known columnist and pundit, Kondracke has the same opportunity as Limbaugh to sway people one way or another. If Rush is wrong, get out there and convince folks. That’s how it works in this country.
Conservative voters, unlike their liberal counterparts, tend to be pretty passive about most of what goes on in Washington. So when an issue particularly inflames their passions, you can bet that it has touched a nerve, and that politicians would do well to take note. Are we to believe that those who oppose same-sex marriage do so purely from emotionalism, or is there a sense that an important boundary is being breached? Is opposition to illegal immigration racist, or mightn’t there be legitimate concern about the loss of national sovereignty and the dilution of American values?
Kondracke’s an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, but really: to suggest that our representatives ought simply ignore the wishes of their constituents smacks of the same elitism that is so detestable coming from liberals.