Yesterday, in Part 1 of this series, I explained that after years of Republicans at the highest levels betraying our core conservative principles, the Republican base this year is insisting on certain specific qualities in our presidential nominee for 2012. Here are our specific demands:
1. We want a principled conservative who espouses conservative principles with passion and conviction.
2. We want our candidate to have a background of executive leadership that not only qualifies him for the presidency but instills confidence that he will be effective in advancing the conservative agenda.
3. We want our candidate to understand the Constitution, pledge to follow it, and advocate the wisdom of its limits on government.
4. We want our candidate to be able to articulate conservative principles in a way that makes those ideas not only understandable to the American people but appealing to them.
5. We want our candidate to recognize that we face extraordinary problems that can be met and overcome only through the bold and confident application of conservative ideas.
6. We want a candidate who believes that America is a great and good country because our founding principles are correct and wise.
In short, we want a candidate in whom we can place our confidence as the leader of our cause to reverse the programmatic statism of the past eighty years, repair the enormous damage left in its wake, and restore our country to greatness by applying our country’s historic and fundamental principles of limited government, individual rights, and personal responsibility.
The pundits tell us that Republican voters are unrealistic, that we are expecting perfection that can never be achieved.
The pundits are wrong: Republican voters do not expect perfection. We expect sincerity.
And we know it’s achievable because we have previously achieved it:
In 1980, we elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. He won by espousing conservative principles as the solution to the mess left behind by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. He won on those ideas because the American people knew they could trust him: He had been advocating those ideas for decades as a public figure and as Governor of California. He implemented those principles by enacting an across-the-board tax cut that resulted in the longest peacetime economic expansion in history. And he pulled America out of its post-Vietnam and post-Watergate funk by consistently articulating his positive and optimistic vision of America as “a shining city on a hill” and, while leftists were predicting that our best days were behind us, assuring us that it was actually “morning in America.” Ronald Reagan wasn’t perfect, but he was sincere and effective, and he succeeded in restoring America.
After Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, proved not to be sincere and principled and led America into a recession by breaking his promise not to raise taxes, another great conservative leader emerged. Newt Gingrich had served as the Republican Minority Whip under Minority Leader Bob Michel, the latest in a long series of Republican leaders who had given up on ever winning a majority and were content to merely get along with the entrenched Democrat majority. Gingrich boldly declared that a Republican majority was achievable by nationalizing the congressional elections around a series of conservative ideas encapsulated into a Contract with America. And in 1994, the voters, fed up with check-kiting scandals and efforts by Democrats to socialize the health care system, responded by sweeping Republicans into power after forty years in the wilderness. In fact, when Newt Gingrich assumed the speakership in January 1995, only one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives had served in Congress the last time the Republicans had held the majority (Democrat John Dingell, who graciously swore in Gingrich as Speaker). Newt Gingrich wasn’t perfect (as subsequent events would prove), but he was sincere and effective, and his Republican majority succeeded in restoring America by forcing Democrat President Bill Clinton to cooperate with their conservative agenda, which resulted in years of the most vibrant economy in American history.
So, no, Republican voters are not being unrealistic in looking for a candidate who is a principled, sincere, qualified, dependable leader who can restore our country and inspire its people. Such leaders do exist and have arisen when their party and country needed them most. Republican voters know that we desperately need such a leader now and are not going to be content with anything less.
One, and only one candidate, has emerged in this election cycle who might meet the demands of the Republican base. That candidate is the subject of Part 3 of this series, coming tomorrow.
