This is the first in a three-part series that will explore the state of the race for the Republican nomination for President. In this first installment, I explore the frustrations of the Republican base. In Part 2, I will explain what the base is demanding in its nominee for 2012. And in Part 3, I will discuss the one candidate who might meet those criteria.
In order to properly understand the dynamics of the race for the 2012 nomination for President, it is important to understand what is going on in the minds of the Republican electorate. The Republican base is enormously frustrated, and that frustration is not fully appreciated by the establishment news media and most pundits and analysts.
We elected a Republican Congress in the 1990s based on the Contract with America, only to watch those Republicans only a few short years later under Speaker Dennis Hastert devolve into typical unprincipled Washington politicians whose reelection campaigns were based not on conservative principles but on the amount of pork they brought home to their districts.
We elected George W. Bush to the presidency in the belief that he was a sincere (albeit “compassionate”) conservative, only to watch him nationalize education standards, enact the largest entitlement expansion in history, and shepherd through Congress the Keynesian TARP bank bailout, which cost our kids and grandkids $800 billion and gave political cover to his radical movement leftist successor, Barack Obama.
We watched the Republicans nominate the inept RINO John McCain in 2008 and then watched him humiliate himself on the national stage and get defeated by Barack Obama, the most unqualified presidential nominee in modern history.
And we watched Obama fully exploit the political cover given him by Bush and McCain to dramatically expand the size and scope of government and of the national debt by passing a $1.3 trillion (including interest) “stimulus” sop to his public-sector union sponsors, imposing a government takeover of our health care system on an American people who deeply and loudly opposed the scheme, by nationalizing car companies and student loan programs, and by increasing the national debt that it took the 43 previous presidents 232 years to accumulate by 60% in just two years.
And so, after years of watching Republican leaders act without principle or political courage while simultaneously watching leftist Democrat leaders act boldly to advance their statist agenda, Republican voters are now demanding certain very specific qualities in our nominee for 2012.
Tomorrow, in Part 2 of this series, I will spell out exactly what those demands are.
