On Conventions and Compromise

convention_2013

OK, I’ll bite.

Much ado has been made over Chip Muir’s post on Virginia Virtucon about “the grand compromise” — namely, trading the 2016 Presidential nominating contest for financial support from “RINOs” (the pejorative for the business community and those outside the “libertarian populist” uprising (TM) of recent years).

Bearing Drift contributor Matt Hall went absolutely gaga over the proposal, while Rob Kenyon went to war against any notion of compromise:

Why should the Conservative Fellowship, its allied organizations (Full disclosure: This includes RLCVA) and the Republicans who helped elect them to the State Central Committee of RPV, compromise here? Does it gain us anything? That wing of the party, and its shills on social media, have spent considerable time and effort making clear that they will not financially support RPV with the current leadership, and will indeed, encourage others not to, either. We don’t owe them a thing.

It might surprise folks to know that the conservatives don’t want a deal, either.

The sad truth is that for as much sense as Chip Muir’s proposal might make in abstract, it will not mollify feelings on either side of the fence.  Both wings of the party — conservatives and libertarian populists alike — are at war with one another, and not over ideology; it’s over personality.

Amazingly enough, both sides are pro-life, pro-2A, pro-family, and invested in lower taxes and smaller government.  It is the speed and design of how we get there that constitutes a good half of the disagreement.

The other half?  Kenyon nails it:

No, if the roles were reversed, conservatives would be told to shut up and get in line, and maybe, just maybe, they’d let us have a seat at the table.

Republicans have been in the wilderness for decades before George Allen took the governor’s mansion in 1993.  It took another seven years before Republicans could capture the House of Delegates, and the State Senate has been held in the balance ever since as Democrats realized that the demographics of the Commonwealth were stacked against them in a big way (gerrymandering works both ways).

Kenyon’s sentiment rings true.  It’s as if the raiding party sacked the castle, and pulled the drawbridge up behind them, leaving a good number of folks on the outside.

That’s the other half.

Add to it the tax hikes of 2004, 2007 (defeated in a courtroom), and 2013… add to it a number of insurgencies in 2005, 2009, and 2012 that were ultimately squashed and treated with laughable contempt until Dave Brat slayed Goliath in the middle of the public square, plus the slow and methodical takeover of State Central Committee over the last few years, and the libertarian populist wing of the party can count some notches in the shillelagh.

Add to it the rise of leaders like Rand Paul.  Now there’s a battle standard to rally around.

Which brings us to 2016.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell.  In an era after Citizens United there is no reason to pool your money within either the national or state party.  True, there is value to the institution… but if the party is not a paperweight to keep coalitions together, but rather a wrecking ball or a tool used to impose rigidity and orthodoxy, then the merits of the institution simply collapses.  RPV becomes, in the words of one Richmond operative, a bulk mail rate and little else.

With regards to a convention vs. primary vs. canvass vs. trial by combat there are a number of factors.  Primary contests help flesh out the ground game, this is true.  They are expensive, but if the 2013 lieutenant governor nomination contest revealed anything, it’s that conventions can be just as expensive as primary contests.  Yet in a battleground state, the ground game and the lists of voters that are gathered through a primary contest are one more layer of data (in an already data-driven world) that politicos can use to drive voters to the polls.

Conventions, OTOH, have a myriad of advantages as well.  Cheaper to run, better for the state party (when run well), aimed and organized around the activists who make the Republican Party live and breathe, and most importantly provide a better environment for Republicans to choose Republican candidates, whereas Virginia’s Byrd Machine-era “open primary” system allows independents and Democrats to select a nominee — and given that Hillary Clinton has all but sewn up the nomination, you can expect the Dems to play a little bit of Operation Chaos should we go to a primary.

So should there be a compromise?  The better question is whether or not a compromise even exists.

The answer to that question is no, and for the reasons Kenyon stated.  Both sides are so fed up with the other, that there isn’t even a common language for them to discuss what a compromise would look like.

Of course, it would be easier for State Central to simply give the nomination process to the State Board of Elections and have a taxpayer-funded primary.  Less muss, less fuss.  The avenues for pitfalls in a 2016 convention environment that determines which federal candidate receives Virginia’s votes in the first round of balloting at the RNC Convention (scary word, I know) are legion, because rather than state rules, the convention falls under federal rules and regulations.  Given the opportunity for scandal or mistakes against well-financed campaigns and their high-powered law firms, a primary would be a far safer bet.

…but the grassroots don’t want that.

Muir makes a worthwhile argument, but it falls flat when it cages the opposition as RINOs and the loyalists as conservatives.  Again, common language.  Folks on both sides need to realize that we are witnessing the rise of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz — and if Reagan was right that libertarianism is the heart of conservatism, this ultimately becomes a war between head (conservative) and heart (libertarianism).  Add to it the brand of Tea Party populism, and Rand Paul’s push away from his father’s more libertarian view and towards a new coalition, and you can see where the differences are — and they are not inconsiderable.

convention_2013_obenshainWhat’s more, you can start seeing why — short of a uniting ticket at the top — the Republican coalition isn’t going to unite anytime soon, and in Virginia, might not unite until we have a statewide elected official take office in January 2018.  If we get that far.

Those who know me know that I am a huge fan of conventions, or more accurately, any nomination method that gives us the most conservative candidate who can win (to paraphrase Buckley).  Even if we had closed primaries, I would still opt for conventions by and large, because they do give us conservative candidates selected by the folks who are going to be doing the bleeding in the trenches needed to win.  People forget that Gillespie — darling of the “establishment” conservatives — won in a convention, and Dave Brat — champion of the “kooky” Tea Party — trounced Cantor in a primary.  In short, there is no bargaining chip…

But the trade of nomination methods for resources isn’t there.  We’re grasping at straws to think so.

UDPATE:  Chris Beer over at Mason Conservative jumps in with his typical erudition:

Forget the nomination process. Shut up and go win.

…and by erudition, I meant brevity.

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