Conservatives can take heart, if former Alaska legislator Fritz Pettyjohn is correct:
We have five conviction candidates, Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Cruz, and Rubio. While we can all have our disagreements over which will win the nomination, and who would be strongest in the general, or who would be most effective if elected, any of them would take office with a mandate for fundamental reform. They’re not governors, but we don’t need somebody to run the government. You hire people to do that. We need someone who’s ready and eager to ride this tide as far as it can take us. An agent of institutional change. A true believer.
Kasich’s running on competence. How’d that work for Dukakis? Bush plays the competence card as well. It doesn’t sell. This whole Beltway idea that people were going to want a Governor for President turns out to be a fiction.
After the landslide of 1920 — a 26% margin of victory, the most lopsided win in the history of contested presidential elections — Harding gave us a Return to Normalcy and the Roaring 20’s, but they didn’t last. Neither Harding nor Coolidge was able to make any structural or institutional reforms. The cancers of the 16th and 17th Amendments would soon metastasize into the New Deal. What could be different from 1920 is that, this time, we can have structural, Constitutional change, the kind you only get to make every 100 years.
Most of the forces at play a century ago have returned, with a vengeance. The American people are again desperate, hungry for something more than a change in the cast of characters. A majority know that federal government is far from benign, it is the greatest threat to their freedom. Something big has to change if we are to continue as a functioning constitutional republic.
It seems every four years we’re told that this election is the one that matters, that this time we really do face a fork in the road. Four years ago a lot of us thought that preventing Obama’s reelection was our last best hope. If we couldn’t beat someone with his dismal record, who could we beat, and under what circumstances? Demographics was slowly killing us, and Obamacare was going to be another Social Security, an untouchable entitlement that bought loyalty to the government from its millions of beneficiaries.
But the tide has turned, and we are poised for a victory that could be among the most politically consequential in our history. We are, indeed, now at a fork in the road, and we need to listen to the counsel of a recently departed wise man.
We need to take it.
The “recently departed wise man” would be Yogi Berra who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” We aren’t at a fork in the road, however. In order for what he wants to happen all of the Democrat party and half of the Republican party has to be defeated. That’s a tall order when the Republican establishment wants the same things the Democrats want.
If the Republicans nominate another RINO, Democrats will win again in 2016 and the Republican establishment will be OK with that. The country will be horrified but unable to do anything about it. None of the things Mr. Pettyjohn predicts to occur will be possible. I make this prediction in hopes that I’m wrong and feel good about it because I’ve always been wrong in the past when I had hopes for conservatives to win. If I predict they’ll lose again, maybe they won’t.
Saving America will never be possible if Dems win the presidency again because the Republicans set themselves up to lose. Republicans win in 2016 only if they nominate one of those conviction candidates named by Pettyjohn. I’m not sure Rubio belongs on the list.
UPDATE: There’s an interesting analysis of Ted Cruz’s campaign at 538 Politics.
The post The beginning of a new era? appeared first on TeeJaw Blog.