Posted by
VBushmills on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 8:01:21 AM
I was recently asked by a local GOP officer (who agrees with me!!) to look in on a debate going on inside the state party about the possible removal of the state chairman. He'd only been in less than a year, so surely they weren't laying November at his feet. (But I note that since Pres Obama has raised the bar of executive management so high, possibly undoing in a year or less what Americans have worked so hard to achieve, and fought and died to achieve, the past two hundred plus years, and mankind has prayed for the past two thousand, maybe we need to rethink that whole "executive honeymoon" thing anyway. There's a war on.)
But I don't think the GOP gets it. Indeed, I look at everything in the context of the collapse of the Constitution, and maybe it is me who is wrong to view things this way. But just as I was contemplating that nearly half the GOP House members voted for an illegal tax on the AIG bonus recipients (what do you want to bet it never sees a court room?), I was struck by the content of this debate among some very well-heeled members of the Virginia GOP...ostensibly over the direction of the Party. The arguments, such as they were, centered around personalities (which always lead back to personal vanities and a sense of "class") and regionalism, even county-ism, which in Virginia is just this side of tribalism, as with Saddam's tribe in Tikrit, or Daniel Moi Arap's tribe in Kenya. Virginia has long been separated, culturally, economically and linguistically by the rural south and the urban/suburban northern neck around Washington (and my area around Richmond). "Thay don't git along."
Class, pure and simple, and it does seem to repeat what Peggy Noonan so aptly said, the first time she lifted her skirt for Barack Obama, "It's not what you say, but how you say it." As we have written here before, it is easy, once you decide you can no longer stomach having to rub shoulders with the redder-necked Americans, the next best thing is to find a way to manage..er, lead them...from a distance.
In this debate I picked up the tell-tale odor of what I wrote awhile back that many modern "conservatives" of this new era, much like the old liberals-turned-leftists from the 60s, define themselves less by what they are for and more by what they are against...and there is a coarse culture out there that weaves a common thread all the way back to the founding they are definitely against.
In several pages of "debate" I could find very little mention of the Constitution, or the principles upon which the Party was founded, or which are derived from the Constitution itself. Just caterwauling. There is no real flag, no banner, and while it sickens me to say that the Left now has a banner and our side does not, and are actually more driven, better trained, and just plain smarter, the fact remains: you cannot even begin to start a fight with a guy carrying a banner when you ain't got one.
Then I recall the original convention that drafted the Declaration, and the real players who made it all happen. Standing out, of course, was the tireless "keeping the eye on the prize" work of John Adams (we could use more of him, too) but always, over in the corner was the national philosopher, who always reminded everyone of that prize. South Carolina never had a position that they didn't have to first bounce off the sounding board of the conscience of mankind, Ben Franklin, over in the corner, half asleep, half the time.
Seems to me, it takes two. You can't have a John Adams running around griping palms, whispering, squeezing arms, keeping that prize firmly in everyone's focus, if you don't first have a Keeper of the Prize.
That one person, in the national councils, or the local or regional councils, I cannot find. The GOP has lost a full quarter of its members, and spiritually over half. It's true, old GOP voters have no other place to go, but you can recall (I hope) how well M'Cain did with that strategy.
VB