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Dear BlackElk;

What good does making the case of standing for true conservative principles do if the those who THINK that only a RINO can win will not vote? What of all those who wiil REMAIN deluded into thinking that only a "moderate conservative" can win, and will waste their vote on the media-promoted Statist-controlled candidate, because you have failed to make your strongest case?

I do not understand you. Why do you spend so much of your time pounding the table? Why not play to your strengths that are available in the evidence, counselor?

Why do you not convince wavering conservatives that RINO pols like Schwarzennegger-marionettier Wilson is a Statist every bit as dangerous to them as Leftist-needy Doofus or cruzing Leftist-racist Bustamante?

McClintock, in his platform that gets almost no press, threatens Wilson's buddies with his promise to cancel multi-billion dollar energy contracts. Think man! As McClintock says, Davis couldn't very well cancel those contracts on the basis of collusion -- even if he wanted to -- because that would implicate Doofus in the collusion.

The Leftist/Statist axis has rarely been more obvious. The RINOs DID NOT WANT THIS RECALL. Why not? Follow the money!

It will be a sorry situation if you take the next question either as reason to attack me or to ignore the question. But I've gotta ask.

Are you avoiding the Statist connection and argument because of your social-conservative allies, the Neo-Cons? Am I wrong, or are not the former Leftists mostly avowed, Statists? I.e., seeking total control through influencing every aspect of life thru economics? I suspect you, of all poeple, understand this description for such professors: Mammonites.

Please forgive me if my aroused suspicions are misplaced, or if I've slandered your allies in my ignorance. But, if I am right, I am warning you as a friend who loves your energy to argue for a cause I support but who is concerned for your soul. If you are avoiding making the Statist connection to Arnie's friends -- a case I have every confidence you have the ability to make -- because of your loyalty to the Neo-Cons for backing your social causes, perhaps you should reconsider any deference you have for them in view of the truth in my tagline.

sincerely,

-Av

This is a good piece which was posted on one of the threads yesterday.

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Opinion piece - The Ventura Star

GOP wrong about Schwarzenegger; McClintock better
By Andrew Russo
August 29, 2003

Arnold Schwarzenegger's failure to move beyond the 22 percent to 25 percent range in most recent California surveys is sending the Republican Party's country-club establishment into panic. Schwarzenegger, after all, fits that mold perfectly. A so-called "fiscal conservative," but "social moderate," the Terminator was supposed to be the great white hope of the comatose California GOP. We all know true conservative Republicans can't win general elections in the Golden State, so the Republican rank-and-file were supposed to play good soldiers, follow the lead of the moneyed party elite, and joyfully climb aboard the Arnold Express for the only train back to the statehouse.

Well, as is usually the case, the GOP establishment was wrong. Its great white hope isn't quite catching on. Between his questionable choice of advisers (one a prominent Democrat who wants to scuttle Proposition 13) and his liberal views on a host of issues, ranging from abortion, gun control and gay marriage, to his support of new high-spending big government programs (i.e., Proposition 49), the Terminator is a hard pill for the hard core to swallow. And, if the polls are correct, they're not swallowing.

The Los Angeles Times poll showed Schwarzenegger drawing only 39 percent of the Republican vote. This despite the fact he's a household name, a movie celebrity in a state where Hollywood is king, the massive media buildup prior to his announcement ("will he or won't he?"), and the subsequent Arnoldmania that has swept the state. Yet, fewer than four in 10 Republicans in California are biting.

This fact alone proves once again that the Republican elite is all wet and that it's the grass-roots Republicans -- the precinct walkers and envelope-lickers -- who are the real representatives of the state GOP. It proves conclusively that one endorsement from the California Republican Assembly is worth a thousand endorsements from the Lincoln Club of Orange County.

Now, the party bigwigs are desperate to save Schwarzenegger. As Cruz Bustamante roars ahead of the Terminator, are the bigwigs having second thoughts about the actor-turned-politician they have put their money on? Have they seen the light and are they perhaps reconsidering?

No way. This gang is temperamentally incapable of admitting error. They have decided instead that the only way to salvage their political mistake is to demand that the real Republican in the race for governor, state Sen. Tom McClintock, drop out and toss a life preserver to their golden boy.

Yet, why is Arnold's weakness the fault of McClintock?

Is it McClintock's fault that Schwarzenegger's negatives are almost as high as his positives?

The truth is that voters are beginning to recognize that the Hollywood megastar is, to use Texas terminology, all hat and no cattle. Any individual who seeks to be governor of California but has to seclude himself for 10 days with consultants and counselors to tell him what to think simply cannot be taken seriously. You just can't cram for the governorship of the nation's largest state (and one that's suffering the worst financial crisis in history) like you would for a 10th-grade history exam.

McClintock doesn't need anyone to tell him what to think or what to say. Motivated by a strong Jeffersonian philosophy of limited government and with a 20-year track record of carefully dissecting the problems confronting California, McClilntock is perhaps overqualified to be governor. And, look what his dark-horse candidacy has accomplished in less than a month:

With a limited campaign budget (and no personal fortune to pour into the contest), a small staff and no box office sensations to his credit, McClintock is quickly becoming the candidate to watch in the recall race.

Doubling his voter strength in the Times poll in just a few weeks, McClintock is generating the kind of enthusiasm and excitement among rank-and-file Republicans not seen since Ronald Reagan's first campaign for governor in 1966.

Actually outraising Democrat presidential candidate Howard Dean on the Internet, the insurgent Thousand Oaks senator is attracting the support of Californians fed up with the deceit and doubletalk of conventional politicians and seeking a breath of fresh air. McClintock offers them that and more: He's an authentic populist who, if elected, will shake California's political establishment to the core.

And, isn't that what the Gray Davis recall is all about? A true populist uprising against the same kind of corrupt politicians beholden to special interests that Hiram Johnson, father of the recall provision, railed against in the early 1900s.

With an agenda that is simple and direct, McClintock is rallying Californians fed up with high taxes, out-of-control spending, a laughable public school system and stifling bureaucracy. He is offering hope to voters in a state where cynicism reigns. He is speaking truth to power. And, in the year of the unprecedented recall election in this, the trendsetter of states, that could just be the ticket to victory.

-- Andrew Russo, of Salinas, is a California political consultant and former executive director of The Lincoln Club of Monterey County.

I think that you mistake either my motives or my actions. I used to be a libertarian in my distant youth. I was even a state libertarian party officer. I was cured by Roe vs. Wade and its equally illegitimate progeny.

I am NOT any kind of so-called paleocon nor will I ever be. I have had too close an encounter with the Rockford Institute crowd of paleos to EVER be tempted by what passes for their philosophy or view of history post-1900. It is sterile. It is dead. It has no purposes worth achieving. It would diminish the United States to a puny shadow of what the United States should be. I am a contemporary but traditional Catholic. The only ancient traditions that stir my enthusiasms are those of Catholic culture. I am not eighteenth century in my approach. I believe that, although I have been a Republican since high school and my labor union family of cousins and such has largely joined me in voting habits if not always in actual party registration, the traditional Catholic Faith is infinitely more important than ancient constitutional squabbles.

What is a statist? If it is someone who believes that the government has a role in foreign affairs that is interventionist and not internationalist nor, may God forbid, isolationist, then I guess that makes me a statist. If a statist is someone who believes that there is room at the banquet table of life for all of God's children, as John Paul II has said, then I guess I am a statist. I am not even slightly moved by a desire to exclude Mexicans from our land. I see them as social issue allies and as the new immigration needed as was the old immigration of Irish and Germans and Slavs and Jews and Italians and Scandinavians and Chinese and Japanese and Cubans and Vietnamese. As I came to Illinois because it was a better place for my family than Connecticut, so these folks are coming to America as a better place for their families. If that makes me a statist, so be it. If those immigrants apply for services, education, benefits and what not, from government sources, they are going to get them under the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause on the same basis as citizens even if some folks already here have apoplexy as a result.

I am the product of a family of people who were blue-collar labor union Democrats. I do not think that the largely private sector AFL-CIO of the 1950s and 1960s was any kind of communist inspired or controlled movement. In fact, I know it was not. Today's AFL-CIO is a disgrace by comparison and objectively.

As it happens, the handful of actual "neo-conservatives" who are largely very elderly New York City Jewish intellectuals: Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Dean Donald Kagan, Eugene Rostow, Walt Whitman Rostow, the late Sidney Hook, and a few ohers like the late Senators Henry Jackson and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Except for the two senators, they abandoned the Demonratic Party when it was seized by communists, social anarchists and other enemies of Western Civilization. They had distinguished careers as liberals (yes, as statists) and then distinguished secnd careers in shoring up a GOP used to being the puny 90 pound weakling on the political beach. They never claimed to be pure capitalists but then neither did most Americans or even most Republicans. The genuine "neos" were worthy opponents and have become quite worthy friends.

I am a member of the only genuinely conservative movement in our nation other than conservative but non-political religion, reflected by Young Americans for Freedom, Young Republicans, College Republicans, National Review, Human Events, American Life League, Concerned Women for America, Christian Coalition, and many other groups and publications consistent in their values. We are not "neo-conservatives because we are not New York intellectuals and former leftists who were born in the immediate aftermath of World War I. We are not "neo-conservatives" just because a group of cranks, eccentrics, neo-isolationists and idiosyncratic "blood and soil" types like the Rockford Institute are having delusions of competence that they are a political movement of "paleoconservatives" (suggesting that they are the heirs of an older conservatism) just because Ronald Reagan would not hire them or their socially strange comrades into his administration. No matter how many magazine articles may claim otherwise, we know the conservative movement that elected Ronald Reagan and the paleos aren't it.

The conservative movement contains materialist elements, i.e. people who are primarily concerned with lower taxes on themselves and sometimes on others and a deregulated marketplace. The most articulate enemy of free trade on the right is Pat Buchanan. As is often but not always the case, he has much worthwhile to say on the subject and on others. He is tragically misguided in foreign policy and military matters. I regard GATT and WTO as unmitigated disasters, and prefer a restoration of sensible tariffs to replace some existing federal revenues, but most importantly to restore American economic and political sovereignty. The elderly actual "neos" are accustomed to using levers of economic power to achieve desireable societal results. In this respect why should they be any different from the AFL-CIO of George Meany or the Board of Directors of General Motors or of Microsoft?

As we near your big question, I will point out three axioms that are genrally valid but may have exceptions. First, Loyalty to one's allies is a good thing. Second, you have no reason to believe that I would attack you. We are often in agreement. See first axiom. Third, I do generally answer questions even when they are not softballs. I may sometimes err but I am never uncertain.

If by "Neo-Cons", you mean the New York elderly mentioned above, their social conservatism is really social moderation. Some may accept abortion, let's say, as worthy of being legal. I certainly do not. Fewer accept homosexuality. They are certainly neither partisans of McClintock nor partisans of Arnold nor, to say the least, of the formally Demonrat candidates. I think they are irrelevant to the discussio of the California election.

If by "Neo-Cons" you mean the conservative movement as I have described it, I am afraid that some like Dana Rohrbacher and Bob Dornan have sold out to Arnoldmania. I like Bob Dornan a whole lot but I also remember him being a major mouthpiece for Bush the Elder whom I did not care for as I do for his much wiser son, Dubya. Most conservative movement folks know a candidate who is no good when they see him and Arnold is no good.

I can and do sometimes make the point that Arnold is untrustworthy on economics and will likely revert to what you call Statist positions on taxing and spending. To me, however, guns, abortion, marriage and morality are far more important issues. They are also more natural objects of absolutist remedies than are mere matters of economics.