Posted on 01/21/2008 3:50:08 PM PST by Prospero
UNCOMMITTED 2008.
Fred Thompson should not drop out. He should, instead, campaign for an Open Convention, allowing every voter a choice.
America’s Primary System needs to be challenged.
Since Fred Thompson’s address to his supporters early Saturday evening, his campaign has been silent, a silence becoming louder by the hour. Precious time on the ground in Florida is being wasted as Senator Thompson ponders his next step. The pressure and crocodile tears from competitors follows his sharing of a weak third place with Mitt Romney in South Carolina. The networks have already removed him from their lists, though it was Mitt Romney who needed South Carolina’s Conservative Activists every bit as much as Fred Thompson.
Then there are those remarks by former Governor Mike Huckabee that were particularly offensive. “The fact of Fred Thompson’s being in the race took away some votes that we most likely had,” Huckabee told the dying organ of the Liberal Center, Time magazine.
“I believe every analyst has looked at it that way,” he said, demonstrating how little the Governor either understands or will acknowledge the truth about the hard-shell Conservatives who’ve examined Huckabee from top to bottom, and found him suspicious. Conservatives of the Reagan-kind, after all, lined up behind Fred Thompson precisely because he wasn’t Mike Huckabee. Like Senator McCain, he can obfuscate his record to those who begin paying attention to this contest ten days out, along with the Independents and crossover Democrats who’ve been (ridiculously) allowed to participate in choosing the Republican Party’s partisan nominee, but not the activists who’ve been paying close attention and reminding one another of all the candidate’s records for more than a year.
Support for Thompson from these activist Republican Conservatives comes from a conclusion drawn by each individually that Thompson, and before him Congressman Hunter, may now be the only candidate left genuine jealous of the founding principles of the Reagan Revolution.
More than any other factor, Fred Thompson did as well as he did in South Carolina because of his heartfelt statement during the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina debate.
“I feel this is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” he said, aiming his remarks at Huckabee.
The feeling among these activists following the balloting Saturday, January 19, is not unlike a similar experience twelve years ago when Phil Gramm pulled out of the 1996 contest. Bob Dole, they knew, was headed toward “his turn,” a happy warrior too sensitive to being labeled “mean” and too hesitant to qualify, apologetically when attacking President Clinton, as was deserved and necessary for Republicans to beat an incumbent. In short, they correctly saw the Primary System gamed and essentially over long before they were allowed to have a say. Independents and Democrats had decided who their Party would nominate, and the election was over before it began.
This year, with Hunter ignored and Fred already suffering from the same ratings game, they may be allowed to choose from an assortment of Bob Doles. And panic, anger, and bitter disappointment is rampant on the Right. The Party’s nominee, whomever he may eventually be, is already defeated, they are thinking. It’s over before it began, though they may “hold their nose” and vote for the nominee, there’s a deep, appropriate distrust and frustration with the Primary System, especially as it unfolds in 2008.
But both we and Fred Thompson have at least one winning card left to play. Not a Third Party to split coalitions and brands, accelerating a hard Leftwing Democrat into the White House, nor being compelled to “hold our nose” to vote or be tempted to sit the presidential election out.
Fred Thompson can take personalities out of the equation by taking the Republican Party’s Convention with uncommitted delegates.
For a brief, very few more hours, and at this very early and strategic moment, Fred Thompson can accomplish what he set out to do in preventing Reagan’s Republicans from being denied a choice among candidates they can’t swallow.
Within a few hours, the opportunity may be lost. But if, as Fred Thompson said, “this is not about you, this is not about me, this is about the future of the country,” is as heartfelt as he said, he can turn the political world upside down without having to cow-tow to the humiliating, physically exhausting, expensive and, face it, plainly ridiculous Primary System. He could campaign from his front porch or campaign as hard and fast as he wishes. If he’s determined to pull out from the race, he has nothing to lose by this attention grabbing change in strategy that might change the course of history. He could turn a defeat dictated by conventional wisdom into a victory for the American Nation.
It’s a win-win proposition, and the current ridiculous Primary System is badly in need of being shaken up. I can’t think of anyone more qualified, or a better time than right when the experts and consultants believe they have a grasp on this Byzantine maze, turning strategic tables over and “clearing the Temple.”
Clearly, it’s a broken system, a too easily subverted system, and one that flies in the face of fairness. There may be no reason for politics to be fair, of course, but there is nothing traditional or rational about this system, and certainly nothing sacred, either. As it now stands, it is but the latest arbitrary jumble of remnant Democrat “reforms” put into place decades ago, with a calendar finalized only within the past month.
Before he withdrawals precipitously, Fred Thompson must consider a historic opportunity to accomplish the job he set out to do when he entered the race. People like me told him, that some of us ‘didn’t like the field,’ and that no one seemed to be making the preservation of the Reagan Revolution an abiding force to be reckoned with.
It’s a strategy appealing not just to “the base,” but to independents and Republicans who quadrennially complain of having no choice. It does not deny any of the other candidates the opportunity to win a majority of the delegates or the nomination. It does not advocate a choice of “none of the above,” but only allows Republicans a last chance to choose to allow the Convention to decide, if necessary.
Before he leaves, I hope he considers this great opportunity.
No one understands the Conservative base better.
For all of his Nixonian, plainly neurotic charm, Mike Huckabee will never get their support. They have no reason to believe Huckabee would appoint Conservative judges, they point out, precisely because of Huckabee’s demonstrated inability to know who they are, shown by the crass, plain nasty public statements made by he and his campaign after their defeat by John McCain in South Carolina.
McCain, twice catapulted to victories now in New Hampshire and South Carolina by the votes of Independents and crossover Democrats allowed undue influence over the Republican field of candidates, at least has made an appeal to the Conservative base.
Huckabee hopes only to overpower it, in the long run, which he still has the opportunity to accomplish under the Fred Thompson/Uncommitted strategy.
He has, however, provoked that base which otherwise might have slipped away quietly into the night, sitting out the contest as Huckabee apparently hopes we will. But Huckabee’s mouth spoke “out of school,” Saturday night, and by way of an organ of the Democrat Left, Time magazine, insult a base he appears to distain as “bigoted” and “hateful,” speaking of us with less respect than Senator Clinton or Obama would dream of doing.
If his endorsement by the NEA in New Hampshire were not enough, Huckabee doomed his nomination, and the voters he really believes would have voted for him in South Carolina had Fred Thompson not been in the race will do more, now, than just “hold their nose and vote for McCain.”
Then, in a spectacularly strange moment in Florida tonight, Huckabee supporter Chuck Norris claimed John McCain was “too old” to be president. To have this come out of a presidential campaign anywhere, let alone Florida, is mindboggling. Florida is the retirement village of the Universe, and whether appreciate or not, no different that the rest of America on that its most dependable voting block consists of citizens over sixty-five. This kind of move, let along the strange record on spending, illegal immigration, and his thousand pardons show Huckabee will not win the nomination.
It’s obviously in the self-interest of John McCain and in the ruined self-interest of Mike Huckabee to have the activist Conservative base usurped by newer gangs of supporters with less knowledge of history. But the history held dear by the activist Conservatives is American history.
It is revolutionary, and it may be ripe for an unexpected and revolutionary course of action.
Monday morning, January 21, Jeb Babbin, editor of Human Events posted a column delivering a message that needs to be shouted from the rooftops. In “Whose Primaries are They,” Babbin has dared ask why Independents and crossover Democrats are allowed any say in who Republicans nominate for president.
People other than Republicans are creating the First Impression of Republican Sentiment for 2008, deciding the fate of Hunter and Thompson as they participate in the selection of a decisive handful of Republican Delegates. “Jello-head Independents” and, God forbid, Democrats are deciding who our partisan Frontrunners should be and by margins smaller than the voter rolls in the smallest or our rural counties.
It doesn't pass the Smell Test.
With little shortage of free advice moving in Fred Thompson’s direction, bouncing off his firewall, allow me to be presumptuous enough to suggest just exactly what he might do, rather than withdrawal.
It is something befitting the character of the candidate and his reluctant campaign, something that would hit the Responsive Chord of Conservative Republican activists disaffected by the choices made for them so far by Independents and Democrats, who are similarly jealous of Reagan’s legacy as Hunter and Thompson, something appealing, even heroic as well for a large army of Republicans, Democrats and Independents, but perhaps most importantly, audacious enough to demand the attention of the Media and the vast majority of voters who have yet to be given the opportunity to vote, who are having their choices made for them regardless.
Fred Thompson should schedule the inevitable press conference. The Media would gear up expecting, as they are the morbid and dramatic moment of his “inevitable” pullout and the suspension of his campaign.
Speaking words similar to those he used that struck just such a Chord in Myrtle Beach, he could, instead, suggest a new course for his campaign.
“The Primary System,” he might suggest, “and the money chase based on perceptions molded in betting booths in Las Vegas and balloting in tiny states by tiny margins have had a disproportionate influence on the Republican campaign, and is broken.
Our convention is shunned by the Media for good reason, he might say. “Nothing is decided there, and it is past time we re-established the National Convention as precisely the place where Republicans gather to choose their candidate. That is what the Primary System is designed to support, it was designed not necessarily to select our nominee.”
“Today,” he might continue, he is changing the course of his campaign away from me personally.”
As he said Saturday, “this fight is not about you, and it’s not about me, it’s about the future of our country.”
From that point, he could lay out a plan of action championing not a “brokered convention,” which is a redundancy, but a “convention that matters.”
“Everywhere I have gone,” he could honestly observe. “I have run into good people unsatisfied by the choices they’re being offered in this race.
There is a deep dissatisfaction with the process, and I want every Republican to sport a big and loud bumper sticker which shouts”
UNCOMMITTED 2008.
This does not suggest, “none of the above.” If the Convention chooses Fred, or Mitt, or John, or even Mike, so be it. If this campaign for an uncommitted convention fails, so be it. But now, I’m suggesting everyone have a choice, and every delegate the responsibility to choose a president and attend our National Convention to participate, not to Party.”
This Primary System is broken, and this process has been sold to us as inevitable, and this process is being sold to us as old and traditional. It is neither, and comes dangerously close to something just short of an establishment of religion or a taxpayer-funded compromise, allowing bureaucrats and oligarchies to choose those the field from whom we will eventually be allowed to pick a Nominee.
A Little History:
Every presidential election in our history is unique. In November 1975, Ronald Reagan announced he would challenge President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. At the time, this was widely remarked upon as suspiciously early.
Imagine that.
Of course, everything Ronald Reagan did was thought “suspicious” by the Media thirty years ago. If you think the Mainstream Media is biased now, you should examine film of televised campaign coverage in 1975. It wasn’t so much that “the Media” didn’t agree with the other side. They honestly didn’t believe there was any “other side.”
In 1975, Ronald Reagan formally entering a presidential contest “a full year ahead of the election” was strange and unprecedented. It was quirky, like his followers, they said and they believed.
Ronald Reagan lost that 1976 contest, which went all the way to the Convention, but returned to defeat another incumbent in 1980 in the first landslide victory by a Republican challenger ever.
From the emergence of the dubious Primary system for selecting Party Delegates to nominating conventions, every presidential election cycle has been stained by it, and its influence has become more powerful each cycle. This is the reason the confident assessments made by our present day commentators and “experts” regarding “what’s next” at this exceptionally early stage in 2008 amounts to simple fortune telling.
In January 2008, with only a handful of small states having just begun the widely varying stages in the selection of delegates, nine months before the conventions, a desperate search for certainty about the future has instead created only an expectation of certainty, without delivering on the promise. Voters have been told they need, and are entitled to expect such certainty, all of which plays to the wishes not of Republicans but the wishes of self-styled Moderates.
The influence, expectations and, ironically, the natural end product delivered in decisions made by Independents in the early voting in 2008 is making Republicans look uncertain and weak. Independents and indecisive Republicans elsewhere are, in turn, having their worst prejudices about Republicans fed and strengthened, reinforcing this uncertainty yet again.
Meanwhile, Republicans are not even one step closer to picking a nominee, nor should there be any reasonable expectation of such a pick having been made at this point in the contest. It’s a futile taxpayer-funded circus of Byzantine artificial tradition serving only the interests of those in the Democrat Party.
Again, it would be childish to talk of unfairness and politics in the same breath. This appalling process now used by both established political parties isn’t just unfair, it has become ridiculous.
Because I’ve been a supporter of former Senator Thompson, it’s important to point out that I have felt this way for a very long time, and I would be saying these things even if he’d made “a clean sweep” of these small and expensive plebiscites, and was now heading strong toward what they are, with a straight face, calling “Super Duper Tuesday.”
In North Carolina, where the Primary isn’t scheduled until May, it isn’t easy for a Republican to find himself in agreement with the late Democrat Governor Terry Sanford.
This late and enshrined member of this state’s Democrat Pantheon wrote a book shortly after his failed presidential bid in 1976 entitled A Danger of Democracy, and in it Sanford spelled out his great displeasure with what was then the very new emergence of the Primary System for selecting the Democrat’s presidential nominee.
The Democrats had reflexively introduced big changes in the methods used to select their delegates and their presidential nominee after having their clocks cleaned in 1968 and 1972. Republicans followed suit or were forced by state laws to adjust accordingly, allowing all sorts of strange and “open” Primary elections to be calendared while still respecting the “importance” of those traditional early tests, especially the one in New Hampshire, with California taking up the end of the rumbling train in June.
Seeing opportunities for undue influence and money dangled before them, State Party committees and their state legislatures naturally went along. The contest then for being first and the most “important” has driven the Calendar for New Hampshire’s Primary and the Iowa Precinct Caucuses earlier and earlier until now when both are finished before the clean-up crews sweep up Times Square after New Years Eve.
As we saw for the first time last month, candidates actually competed with merchants over Christmas, and added a new variety of tasteless advertising to the Holiday blend.
To call this “traditional” is silly, and making predictions of the eventual outcome and gaining any real perspective of the probable outcome truly vain or an opportunity for manipulation, a bid for even more “manufactured consensus.”
Obscure candidates used to go all the way to conventions, sometimes announcing their availability the day before the convention convened.
For all the talk of the present day Primary System being somehow “better” than bargaining in “smoke-filled rooms,” history has yet to show whether the change was really much improvement. For all the talk of the Primary System being traditional, there is nothing traditional about it at all.
Barely thirty years ago, events, agendas and ambitions combined to create the hit or miss or “open” process you see unfolding before you in January 2008. The warped Primary System, where qualified candidates fall from the ballot and the preferences of Independents and Democrats decide the Republican nominee, likewise Independents and Republicans influence the choices available to Democrats, may seem orthodox, but it began in an atmosphere of revolution.
Only a similar revolution, perhaps A Grassroots Revolt in favor of the Uncommitted, taking the partisan decision to the Convention, can set things aright. No one is better suited to lead that effort than Fred Thompson, but before advocating such a revolt a brief examination of the best intentions that brought Republicans (and Democrats) to such a stage is worthwhile.
Late in tempestuous 1968, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota declared his intention to run for president, hoping to become the nominee of a very fractured Democrat Convention. During his very brief campaign, this “progressive” alternative from what was then only a twenty five year old Henry Wallace and Socialist orthodoxy, McGovern sold himself quite naturally as the man who might reconcile a very angry Old Guard and a unhesitatingly violent, Socialist New Left.
His late entry in the summer of 1968, however, qualifies best perhaps as the earliest beginning of the presidential contest four years ahead of 1972.
Primaries weren’t anything new in 1968, but their importance in public perception was underscored as never before that year, becoming milestone events during a milestone year. With the War in Vietnam just beginning to wear on our economy, in a nation struggling with racial and social turmoil unlike anything before or since, 1968 still waits for the death of all who witnessed it for any comprehensive or unbiased perspective.
In March, not quite forty years ago, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin challenged President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Primary. Few paid much attention until the President addressed the nation immediately after his victory. Taking time on the three existing television networks to discuss developments in Southeast Asia, President Johnson stunned viewers by announcing he would “neither seek nor accept the nomination of my Party for another term as your president.”
He was tired and sick, wounded again by a strident and new element in his Party that he could not put his pulse on. Regardless of whether it’s reputation was deserved, the perception of New Hampshire’s Primary as “important” became more or less fixed, though the small New England State has had to progressively move the date earlier and earlier over the decades to maintain that importance to which its citizens now feel “entitled.”
We can draw more than a few appropriate and inappropriate comparisons between 1968 and 2008, though any comparison between the campaign calendars of today and forty years ago make no since. In what was still only April as Robert Kennedy, the Junior Senator from New York and former attorney general, the brother of Johnson’s murdered predecessor, became subject to the same “will he or will he not run” kinds of speculation Fred Thompson endured in September in the previous year. To the deep chagrin of McCarthy’s youthful supporters, Kennedy announced his run, and he quickly swiped McCarthy’s Peace Party mantle, but could seal his challenge only briefly on the night of June 5 when he won the California Primary.
After his speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot in the head like his older brother. Though he lingered, as both Republicans and Democrats re-lived the still very fresh and tender memories of John Kennedy’s assassination four years before, but he too was soon dead. The stunned nation’s mythology canonized Kennedy as a martyr equal to his brother and the jolting killing of Dr. King in Memphis in April, and already reeling in racial and social upheaval, continued to relive the late president’s assassination and that of Martin Luther King as Senator Kennedy was buried next to his brother in Arlington.
Among many other things, the importance of the California Primary would also never be the same.
Soon came the Chicago Convention, and despite its deliberately provoked “police riot” both on and off the Convention Floor, the first Vice President appointed under the new 25th Amendment, Hubert Humphrey won the nomination.
By stark contrast, from Miami Beach, the Republicans nominated former Vice President Richard Nixon in a deliberately well-ordered convention that saw the beginning of something now a standard part of conventions staged by both major parties in the present day, the “spontaneous demonstration.”
With as slim a Plurality of the Popular Vote and as clear a Majority secured of the Electoral College as John Kennedy received defeating Vice President Nixon eight years earlier, the Republican’s nominee similarly defeated Vice President Humphrey in November. And, also as it had been in 1960, anyone who had sought certainty of the outcome the previous January would have been proven foolish indeed.
In defeat, the Old Guard in the Democrat Congress and on the National Committee sought reconciliation with the New Left within that had shaken if from the White House. Senator George McGovern, whose short-lived presidential candidacy was based on a peaceful reconciliation, was among those selected to be among the group they hoped would plan out a more “predictable,” more democratic candidate selection process for 1972.
Predictably enough, no one knew that fresh selection process better than George McGovern, and the people who spent the following four years marrying national candidate selection to the laws of the Several States. Still unquestioned, even among Libertarians, is the fact that soon after established was a system where the taxpayers of the States pay for and regulate each of their parts of the candidate selection process.
If a Worldview, an ideology, can be thought of as no different a set of presuppositions about the world and truth than any religion, the present system amounts as an establishment of Religion.
Predictably, Senator George McGovern weaved his way through the rudimentary equivalent to the present day Primary process he helped build. And in 1972, this time also from Miami Beach, the Democrats peacefully nominated him to be their presidential nominee to challenge Richard Nixon.
He was defeated in a landslide, and, in turn, among those chosen by the National Committee to further perfect perhaps a less predictable but more “democratic” Primary process for 1976 was a little known southern governor from Georgia. In a field of eight candidates hoping to capitalize on voter rejection of Republicans demonstrated in the mid-term elections of 1974, former Governor Jimmy Carter sewed the Democrat nomination with only little in the way of competitive drama. Carter would defeat Gerald Ford, not Ronald Reagan, in 1976.
But the pattern of our Primary process has changed very little since then, with consultants and pundits working hard to sell predictability to their clients. The line, however, has been crossed. The concept of the Political Party, more or less an established feature of the American system since Washington warned against it, and beginning with his “bipartisan” first Cabinet, is firmly a part of American Government.
But, should it be? It seems a case could be made that both the Republican and Democratic parties are private institutions. If not, what are they? And if so, why, for example, should the Democrat Oligarchy in charge of North Carolina’s state government, for example, decide whom legitimately can and cannot be the official nominee of the Republican Party? What is a Party?
A Party is, in fact, a private group, who are exercising their right of free association and seeking to use their collective strength to get as many of their own into as many elected positions as possible. It is a private organization of like-minded individuals who are can be organized for ideology or for a common interest. However they may seem essential, the present system, particularly for 2008 is relatively new and nowhere to be found in our founding Documents.
Republicans should not allow anyone else to choose their champion. And candidates defeated in this early and “open” stage should not be discouraged by margins smaller than the voting rolls of our smallest counties. Since Perceptions can be made, then they are not “reality.” The modern technique of manufactured Perceptions, the theory they must be “resonated with” leave little left for the demonstration of leadership.
The jaded gypsy consultants and pundits, and those of us who have participated or been spectators of the quadrennial Primary Circus for decades are, despite the televised confidences, are really clueless where the 2008 process will take us because it is unlike any experienced before. Experience is valuable, but nearly everyone will admit the old warning about planning and preparing for the last war has hit the wall of the new. The background, however, has not changed.
Whatever may turn out to be unique about this election, the temptation to throw up our hands and walk away, to bemoan our fate and cast blame, it’s essential to remember this is not the semi-finals of a basketball tournament, despite the apparent similarities in the fast-paced, often plain stupid “color commentary” from the sky-boxes overlooking the arena, this isn’t the prelude to a championship sports event, this is war.
Because it is war, it is, as Sun Tzu wrote, “essential to be studied,” because it is “about life and death.”
War is unavoidable because war is about survival; because there are forces in play here using real weapons and “metaphors with teeth” that will take all you own, including your life, driven by ideological imperatives, because plunder is easier than labor, or for no apparent reason whatsoever.
A sporting event can be lost, and the loser can return to fight again another day. Not necessarily the same thing in politics.
We have, for the most part, avoided true civil war in the United States for many reasons; not least among them our complacency in knowing the exact year and day, which we may prepare to fight again. We know the first Tuesday in November of 2012 there will be another decisive battle, and in 2016, 2020, 2024, etc., because we suppose this basic tenant of our Constitution will always because it always has, and we can be correct in this assumption until we are wrong.
Isn't Florida winner-take-all? If so, spending time and money there won't benefit him anything and he ought to fight other battles.
Yep. I for one welcome a brokered convention. It will be good for the process as well as the party and may end of giving are party the conviction we have so sorely been lacking.
The GOP Primary system is causing a severe case of Electile Disfunction.
More important... who’s FR going to endorse?????
Cliffs?
Stick a fork into U.S. conservatism! It’s dying, and it truly will be over for this country soon enough!
“Uncommitted” is not on the GOP ballot, so what is Plan B?
“Then there are those remarks by former Governor Mike Huckabee that were particularly offensive. “The fact of Fred Thompson’s being in the race took away some votes that we most likely had,” Huckabee told the dying organ of the Liberal Center, Time magazine.”
God is merciful.
May Gid bless Fred for that.
One thing the author screwed up early - only republicans need to be voting in these primaries, regardless what form they’re in. Open primaries have completely screwed the pooch when it comes to picking our candidates.
Huckabee’s god-complex is showing. For him to assume that those who voted for Fred would have ever voted for him is incredible. I would never and will NEVER vote for Huck.
I know many people like me.
Conservatism isn’t dying, the GOP just ignored it for the past 8 years.
I read someplace today that he is skipping Florida and going to Georgia. Anybody know anything about that?
What say ye ?
Interesting read........
you may want to try the decaf......
If you don’t have a link we can assume you are making it up!
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