"I had my bout with spite. I had it in 1992..."The legacy of those "principled conservatives" who broke from the GOP in 1992 to stand by their convictions, will forever be known as the Clinton presidency.
Most are not as willing to admit it as you have...it takes a big man.
Perot appealed to two great weaknesses in the American electorate in those times, gullibility and a temptation to follow the Man on the White Horse that the Framers foresaw in all democracies.
People had allowed themselves to be convinced that they were in the second Great Depression. Carville's strategy worked like a charm. Unfortunately, it gave an open to Perot's brand of crypto-fascist politics.
Perot asked us to "let him put his head under the hood" for a while and fix things. He understood that the "electronic" town hall was a way to bring direct democracy into our representative system. Direct democracy must, of needs be, lead to fascism, as the whole idea is untrammeled majority rule.
The Framers understood this, which is why they strove for a representative Republic with limited powers.
Bush ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has a good strategic sense and a sound knack for tactics. In addition, he has learned to put his ego in place in a way that McCain and Prince Albert never could have.
What many conservatives don't understand is that the pursuit of a strategic aim requires tactical adjustments to benefit one's position on the political battlefield. Think in terms of terrain. Sometimes you want to give territory to an enemy so that he will move into a position where you want him to be. Napoleon achieved this at Austerlitz against the Russo-Austrian forces. He retreated a small force in the face of the advance of the Russians, iirc. When they had advanced onto the low ground, Bonaparte brought up his reserves, including the Guard, and defeated both armies in detail. Austerlitz was a slaughter.
If you attempt a static defense (think of Adolph Hitler's "no withdrawl" rule on the Eastern Front in 1942-44, or better yet, the Maginot Line) in politics, you leave the strategic initiative with the enemy.
In this case, our enemy is the kombinat of Democratic Party legislators, beaureaucrats, K-Street lobbyists and political hitmen, and of course, our friends in the nonpartisan media .
Even if the DWI story hadn't broke at the end of the last campaign and George W. had captured all the idiot voters, thus gaining the popular vote, we would still be in the same position that we are, with the other side screaming "No Mandate!". We would still have obstruction in the Judiciary Committee because Jeffords still would have jumped. The Usual Suspects (such as P.A.W or NARAL) would still be there.
Despite his poll numbers, George W. Bush operates in a terrain in which the nation still has not made up its mind. Oh, they've made up their mind about him. They like him. They have figured out that George W. and his unassuming wife, Laura, are much like them. People tend to reelect presidents who are much like them. They have seen him act with a decisiveness that they did not know was there, and saw him rise to a terrible occasion.
But they have not made up their minds about the domestic issues of the day, be it Right to Life, affirmative action, or Health Care. So Bush has to make tactical adjustments, using the other side's issues to throw them off balance and maintain his position on the High Ground.
Understand that something extraordinary has occured. Tom Daschle has searched feverishly for something with which he could drive Bush into the ground. He thought he had the magic bullet with Enron. He didn't. Then, in a fit of madness, he bought into the Konspiracy Theorists and the Blak Helikopterz Krowd and appeared to second Hillary Clinton's implication that "Bush Knew".
Bush was playing a positional game, like Wellington in June of 1815. Daschle was charging like the French at Waterloo, thrown back each time they assaulted the British squares.
Had Bush come straight out with Our agenda here at FR, across the board, he would have been easily flanked by the political and media apparatus of the Kombinat. But he didn't, because he knew that he had to play Give and Take in a atmosphere of political stalemate.
Take Gun control. A year ago, out of the blue, Bush has Ashcroft state how the Justice Department is going to argue Second Amendment cases. This p'o's the liberals, and all the Usual Suspects come out against Ashcroft's letter to the NRA.
Bush did this because he had already detected that his stance against the gun grabbers won him West Virginia, Tennessee, and the Presidency. Don't ever let anyone tell you that Florida was where we won that thing. It was the gunner vote that took us over the top in all three states. He also understood that rural Democrats were abandoning the position of the Washington Kombinat because they had districts they had to run in. Districts filled with gun owners.
The Democrats played static defense on gun control. Bush played maneuver. A politician like Al Gore, who stated that he supported gun ownership by "hunters and sportsmen" obviously left the question open whether non-hunters and non-sportsmen should have their rights abridged. Gore had to come out and say that in a desperate attempt to hold on to Gun owners and keep his base and the moneyed elite who run the Kombinat happy at the same time.
Gun owners picked up on that ruse quick time. The Democrats counted on us being too stupid to pick up on their little half-truth. They were deadly wrong. That is why we have won the day. The return of gun ownership to respectability was merely capped off by civil reaction to Islamic terrorism on September 11th. The joke went, "When a liberal hears about terrorism, he buys a book about Islam. When a conservative hears about terrorism, he buys a gun."
We cannot win the day on our issues by playing All Attack, All the Time. When we attack everything, we end up attacking nothing, because we do not concentrate our forces on what the Germans called the Schwerpunkt, or "breakthrough" point. We have breached such a Schwerpunkt in the gun control debate. The wailings of the Brady Center remind me of the old Trotskyist chantings back at the University of Chicago. In the atmosphere that Bush, his people, and conservative gun owners across America helped to create, not even Chuckie Schumer is screaming gun control anymore.
All of you must of had a bit of a chuckle, btw, when the Hildebeast came out and said she owned a shotgun in her youth.
It was all positioning, and it took time. While we were "caving in" on Education or steel tariffs, we basically put the gun grabbers to bed. And by "caving in" on Education or steel tariffs, we just may retake the Senate, keep the House, and reelect the President in '04.
Remember Welfare Reform? People remember that Clinton signed it. They don't remembert that Republicans proposed it. The same thing is true with education or steel tariffs. It's what soccer mommies and steelworkers want. We gave them what they wanted. We'll get lots of their votes. It's that simple. Don't believe me? Bush already has Jimmy Hoffa virtually in his pocket. The USWA could be next. That makes it much harder for Democrats.
So, my fellow conservatives, take the Gun Control battle as a template for how to win. We won by using the techniques of the Democratic Party against them (especially agitation, propaganda, and salami tactics). Only, unlike the Democrats, we had the truth and the Constitution on our side.
Our victories will be all the sweeter if we recognize that no, George W. Bush is not some liberal in sheep's clothing. He has conservative aims; some not as conservative as we would like, many all right by most of us.
But as I have said in other debates, you can't win the day if you don't elect conservative Presidents who will appoint conservative Justices.
And you don't get conservative Justices by voting for guys like Perot. Or Buchanan, for that matter.
Indeed, history will record that all that was achieved by the "Let's show that liar; let's vote for Perot!" Crowd was a stain on a dress, a serial liar, and two justices named Ginsberg and Breyer.
Think on that fellow conservatives, before some of you are so quick to send George W. Bush to the showers.
Be Seeing You,
Chris