Army of Dog

This discussion at Rachel’s site has prompted a rather long, and at many points hostile, comment thread about the choice for conservatives of various stripes come November. This post actually started out as my response to a couple of other comments there, but I soon realized that it was getting way too long, so I’m just dedicating a post to it.

I really want to make this point in a way that will appeal to rationality, but the problem is that this issue seems to get people to the emotional hot-button almost immediately. With that risk in mind, here goes.

The hard reality is that the viable candidate list always comes down to two, Republican and Democrat. Third-party, Perot-style fantasies aside, every President of the United States since Millard Fillmore has come from one of those two parties.

The modern Democratic Party is controlled largely by leftists. The platform of the party is inextricably linked with big-government, socially-left, anti-capitalist policies. There is simply no way that that will be changed in the foreseeable future.

The modern Republican Party is a coalition of fiscal, religious, and foreign-policy conservatives paired with pro-business, pro-capitalist types who like the relatively laissez-faire attitude of the party towards industry and the economy. While there is certainly a bothersome level of political action that runs counter to traditional conservative ideals, the platform of the party itself is still very much in line with what most of us want.

Conservatives, both fiscal and social, must find some platform upon which we build the candidates we want to see in high office. From what I’ve outlined above, I think that the Republican Party is still the clear choice for that foundation. Ideal, or at least more ideal, political candidates must be recruited, elected to lower office, supported by infrastructure, and given publicity in order to become viable. The process takes time, money, and tremendous effort by those dedicated enough to cultivate candidates through the maze of local, state, and federal elections. For those reasons alone, the use of a major party political infrastructure is essential.

Ronald Reagan, the last Presidential candidate most conservatives remember voting for in good conscience, was recruited for office in 1964. He won his first political campaign in 1966, a full 14 years (three and a half Presidential terms) and one failed run in the Republican Primary before his first term as President. He didn’t just appear one day, riding on a white horse, and proclaim his dedication to conservatism. He was recruited, cultivated, and supported for more than a decade and a half before he ever saw the White House.

The lack of acceptable candidates is our fault. Not John McCain’s, not the media’s, and not the Republican establishment’s. You don’t get to have candidates paraded in front of you and judge them acceptable or not from the comfort of your couch like some kind of third-world dictator judging wives for his harem. The amount of whining about the choices in the upcoming election by the very people who are most responsible for the dearth is starting to drive me crazy. If you’re not donating time, money, or effort to candidates you believe in at the state level in the hopes of cultivating a future President, and I’m as guilty as anyone of not, then you are at least partly responsible for the problem you’re complaining about. If you are in the trenches, then the approach you’re taking needs to be reexamined.

Conservatives spend a lot of time, and I believe rightly so, bemoaning the tendency in our culture to claim victim status whenever bad things befall us. The problem is that those same conservatives are doing just that in response to the dearth of acceptable Presidential candidates. It’s time to stop playing victim, stop talking about taking your toys and going home, start taking action, start building better candidates, and start doing the hard work of convincing others of the value of your ideas.

I get it, you’re angry. Welcome to the club, the line forms here. Everyone who loves the idea of smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and a strong commitment to core American values (the real ones, not the nonsense Obama keeps talking about) is pissed off about the choices we have. It’s our damn fault. Plain and simple, we didn’t do our job as conservatives. Now we have to pay the piper.

There is a discussion that desperately needs to take place about the best way to move forward, and how we start rebuilding what we have neglected. No matter what the result of that collective discussion is, we have to act in the meantime. We have to make a choice about how we play our collective hand in this election, and probably the next one without a candidate we truly like. It sucks, but that’s life. Like Denis Leary said, “Get a helmet.”

So we are left with a choice, we can vote in a candidate that we don’t like based on a few areas where we share common cause (the war, judicial appointments, etc.) and do our damnedest to keep him on the reservation, or we can throw a fit, stay home, let Obama get elected and make the challenge we face much, much worse. And make absolutely no mistake, it will get much, much worse. McCain at his most liberal could never dream up the massive government power grabs that Obama will not only advocate, but, given a Democratic House and Senate, pass. To say nothing of the effect of four years of an Obama administration on military readiness and strategy.

Conservatives have every right to be frustrated and angry, but we should be willing to put some of the blame for our predicament on our own shoulders. More importantly, we should be willing to put our anger aside and not allow it to create a dangerous myopia in our political strategy. The temptation to throw out shallow phrases like “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” must be resisted because any reasonable analysis of the two candidates belies that statement. McCain is a knee-jerk moderate who is more in love with being “bipartisan” than he is with upholding most conservative principles. Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist with the ability to put a pretty package around some of the most hard-left policy positions of any serious modern Presidential candidate. That’s a substantial difference.

I think much of the “I won’t vote for McCain” phenomenon on the right is rooted in an idea that, in my opinion, is deeply flawed. The logic goes something like “If McCain is too liberal and I still vote for him, then the party will continue to move left and take conservatives for granted, therefore, I will stay home and teach the party that they must uphold conservative principles.” This sounds good, but it is based on the flawed assumption that the primary weapon of conservatives is withholding votes and electing liberals. Pardon me if this seems like a less-than-ideal strategy.

I would contend that the primary weapon that conservatives should wield is the ability to replace elected officials who move too far left with more conservative ones. This strategy has been tried before with little success (Toomey in PA, Laffey in RI), but I believe that, given time and commitment, it can work. To accomplish that, we need for conservatives to build powerful candidates that can loom as an ever-present reminder to incumbents that their reelection is contingent on pleasing their base. All of this requires a tremendous amount of work, obviously, but it’s the only way that I can see to reclaim our party without enduring four years of disastrous, hard-core leftist policy that will take decades to reverse.