Posted on 06/22/2002 9:46:05 AM PDT by quidnunc
This summer will mark the 47th year since I took my first Republican job: as public relations director for the party in Minnesota. Since then I have rarely strayed from politics, or my party. I served as a staffer to two GOP congressmen, to a GOP governor, as a federal appointee to Richard Nixon and as a corporate executive who supported in Washington and Springfield much, if not all, of the Republican agenda.
You can describe me as a conservative. Thus I am qualified to say that although I dearly love conservatives, they tend to be querulous, disagreeable and threaten revolt when Republican office-holders don't please them. So it is now with George W. Bush. Here is a president who has surprised us all with the firmness and resolve he showed after 9/11. I must tell you I voted for him with less enthusiasm than I had for many of his predecessors. But his administration has pleased me often most notably on two issues: defense of America and social policy.
Yet, Bush has to get re-elected in a country that is evenly divided on philosophy. Thus he must occasionally on matters that sometimes offend conservatives dip into the other side's ideology for support. He has done so on three notable occasions: on the issue of steel protectionism, where he departed his free-market proclamations; on the signing of a campaign finance bill tailored by his enemies, and allowing his attorney general (in the words of Libertarian Nat Hentoff in the Washington Times) "to send disguised agents into religious institutions, libraries and meetings of citizens critical of government policy without a previous complaint, or reason to believe that a crime has been committed."
In a perfect political world, where conservatives are in the majority, these things would be sufficient to encourage a boycott of the polls. Either that or a protest vote for the Democratic opposition. But we are not in a perfect world. We conservatives have a president who didn't receive a majority of the votes, and has one house of Congress against him. He must make compromises to get re-elected. Conservatives who do not understand the nature of politics ought to stay in their air-conditioned ivory towers and refrain from political activity altogether. If they cannot adjudge the stakes in this election and the difference between Bush and an Al Gore or a John Kerry (D-Mass.) or a Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), they are foolish indeed.
-snip-
To read the remainder of this op/ed open the article via the link provided in the thread's header.
I think the statement above has a great deal of merit.
I voted for Bush twice in 2000, in the primary and the general. In '96 I voted for Keyes and then Dole. In '92, I voted for Buchanan (I think) and then Bush the Elder. I don't regret any of those votes, though I'd never vote for Buchanan or Keyes again, they're no longer even serious enough candidates for a primary vote.
Does that leave my re-election vote in the bag, no matter what Bush might do? No.
If the election was held today, I'd don a tight pair of noseplugs and vote for Bush with some heavy reservations. The "what about Gore/Hillary/etc." argument isn't especially persuasive. Trotting out the boogeyman to keep me in line no matter what Bush might do doesn't win my vote. The President needs to do that on his own merits.
Does that make me unappeasable? I don't think so. I'd been a straight line libertarian during the 80s, but got tired of that and eventually registered GOP in the early 90s. Even so, I totally surprised myself voting for Bush the Elder in 1992. Perot and Clinton just turned my stomach for any other alternative to be feasible.
Yet I can't join those in this forum who blame Perot voters for Clinton. George HW Bush took those votes for granted, and acted in ways that lost his majority from 1988. He has no one to blame but himself. Politicians serve at our pleasure, and our franchise is not their birthright.
George W. Bush starts out the 2004 campaign with a half-million vote deficit. The votes he got in 2000 are his "base." He barely eked out an Electoral College victory with but dozens of votes to spare. Maybe his new poll numbers will hold until 2004, maybe they won't. But if he alienates enough voters that he loses in 2004, then like his father, he'll have no one to blame but himself for his loss.
Many of us in this forum who protest loudly a number of Bush's recent actions are doing so to prevent such an erosion of his base and a potentially disastrous loss in 2004. But if the President knows our votes are in the bag, he has every reason to ignore us, just as he will if he knows we'd never vote for him. As the election nears, politicians only focus on getting out their base and winning the votes in play.
The best scenario possible is that Bush governs as we'd like and wins re-election. I'll take a certain amount of compromise in governance, but I don't like some of the trends. Where the conservative agenda can't realitically be advanced, the line must at least be held. Yet I see too much incrementalism in favor of the Left's agendas, where holding the line holds little risk. Thus my uneasiness.
So for now, I've determined I'm a Bush-leaning swing voter. And I won't cut him any slack
Large MINORITY of people who watch TV religiously? And, oh yeah, publishers put pictures of the royals all over the covers of their magazines so they WON'T sell, right?
Most people I know don't approve of what government does.
Do you talk to anyone besides people who think as you do? I don't think you've been spending much time in the real world.
Of course you can pretend that I said I feel that people are imbeciles. What I said is still there for anyone to see, so you're doing yourself no favors by making delusional statements like that.
You're right, the statements are there for anyone who chooses to read.
Josef Stalin had the same sick ideas: "True, we are oppressing the workers, which is apparently a contradiction to our stated goals. But in that contradiction will come another dialectical leap to the utopia we want to bring to them! We are thereby freeing them by enslaving them!" (and ideologues wonder why normal people shun and reject their weird mindsets in droves!)
As did Charles "Helter Skelter" Manson.
Agreed. There's plenty of opportunities to walk precincts, work phone banks, donate to campaigns, etc., coming up in the next few months.
You statist, you! Only socialists tell people to put their crack pipe down and seek help. Smoking crack is a human right; it's listed in the BoR somewhere or other. In fact, the Constitution itself was written on pressed cocaine paste, or so I've been told. ;)
Or we can passively agree no matter what, and it will not change a thing, either...
"Freedom Is Worth Fighting For!!"
Agreed...and Freedom includes limiting the Size and Scope of the Federal Leviathan...MUD
Conservative Republicans unite, not in unanimity, but rather in a common cause. To beat back the liberal and socialist Democrats in this coming election and take back the Senate, while increasing Republican majorities in the House. Let's give President Bush elected officials he can better work with. Let's elect more conservative minded individuals and move the conservative agenda forward.
Rah Rah Rah!!!
Misfits like Twodees, need not apply.
Malcontents like DoughtyOne, need not apply.
Militants like tpaine, need not apply.
Why don't all you extremists, reactionaries and absolutists get together and just walk out on that political fringe a little more and jump off into the empty void of unreality. Face it, you're basically there already. Why not complete the move.
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