Race for the Republican Nomination (Part 1 of 3): A Frustrated Base
By Ken Falkenstein | Sunday, September 11th, 2011 | Politics
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.
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About the author
Ken Falkenstein has been a staffer in the United States Senate and the Virginia House of Delegates. He has managed political campaigns. He was a military intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army in West Germany during the Cold War. He is currently the Vice President of the Down Syndrome Association of Hampton Roads and practices as a civil litigation attorney with the law firm of Poole Mahoney PC in Virginia Beach. His concern for his kids' future is what most informs his writing.
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2 Responses to "Race for the Republican Nomination (Part 1 of 3): A Frustrated Base"
Isn’t any base going to be frustrated when they don’t have 50% of the voters agreeing with them? The balance of power will reside in the percentage difference between 50% and the base percentage. The base wants the candidates to convince enough of what might be termed the waverers that what the base wants is right. Of course that’s hard work because by definition waverers waver. So most candidates find it easier to work with the waverers and try to convince the base the waverers are, umm, to be humored or, horrors, may have a point. So in a nutshell the base has to find a way to reduce the percentage of waverers if they want to succeed. Historically that has been accomplished by force but in our thankfully more enlightened circumstances we must depend on education and persuasion. So why do conservatives cede the educational system, the entertainment industry and the news media to their opponents who have rather less “restraint”???
I have always said: I didn’t abandon the Republican Party, the Republican Party abandoned me.
If you examine Washington politics closely, you can see that the national Ds and Rs and merely different images on the same side of a coin. Same goals, same methods, mostly the same rich donor groups, slightly different “voter” bases though with the same tolerance for constantly being lied to. When needed, emotional appeals (abortion! religion! envy! class!) are used to slap the bases into alignment for elections. “Look, you really do have a choice! Voting matters!”
I am not alone in making this observation. A great many in the electorate have done so, and this has given rise to such phrases as “false two-party paradigm” and “appearance of choice.”
The speed with which Obama turned his back on the base which elected him is stunning, as was the speed with which Bush abandoned his small government stance. As will be the speed with which Perry abandons his anti-Fed rhetoric should we suffer the misfortune of his election to the Presidency. This, from someone who once chaired Texas’ democratic campaign for “Gore For President.” It’s laughable.
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