Posts Tagged → campaign
Pitfalls and pratfalls of primary elections for candidates and volunteers alike
While digging through old stuff in my office recently, I encountered a bag in a corner with a bunch of campaign tee shirts made for volunteers who had helped me run in the 2010 primary race for congress here in central PA. Seeing the pinned-on names on each shirt, I felt embarrassed that somehow I had neglected to get these tokens of appreciation into the hands of those dedicated volunteers. They had donated their time to me, to a campaign they believed in, and it is absolutely incumbent upon all candidates to express appreciation, and show it if they can, to their volunteers, win or lose. Here was evidence that I had failed to do that fully with these several people whose names appeared on the tee shirts, and it made me feel badly.
Fast forward fourteen years, and I have just learned by doing an internet search that a political candidate I had contributed real time and effort to had dropped out of the race last Thursday. This person and I had exchanged many emails and texts for the past month, I had drafted a press release for her, and gotten her about forty ballot petition signatures to help get her on the April 23 ballot. Despite all my time and effort on her behalf, I did not qualify for the email the media says she sent to her supporters, announcing her bowing out of the race. I felt like all my time and effort dedicated to this person was not appreciated or valued, which makes one feel badly.
Dear political candidates, you have to express your appreciation to your volunteers! Volunteers are how every campaign runs, whether it succeeds or fails, and showing your appreciation to the people who make up the campaign is your duty to those people who take time away from their families, their businesses, jobs, etc to help you get ahead. Failing to express appreciation hurts not just your own reputation, but it also leaves your volunteers wondering if they should ever volunteer on a campaign again for anyone else.
I have seen other candidates cold-drop their volunteers when the campaign ends, and even drop their campaign staff. This is usually due to the exhaustion a candidate feels at the end of the race. Campaigns are all brutal exercises, all-out sprints over a relatively short amount of time, and at their end usually everyone involved is feeling tapped out and emotionally drained. It is tough to sustain that high energy after the race ends, but again, dear candidates, you absolutely owe it to your volunteers to say Thank You. An email, some text messages, some cards to the people who put in the most work and hours. Tee shirts if you made them.
What took out this latest candidate I was helping was Pennsylvania’s archaic ballot petition process. Depending upon the office sought (state house, dog catcher, US senate, congress etc) candidates for office in Pennsylvania are required to collect hundreds or even thousands of registered voter signatures on complicated forms where the slightest mistake, mis-spelling, or poorly written word can result in a disqualification. There is an entire arcane process surrounding the screening, challenging, and defending of the ballot petition signatures. The only people who benefit from this are the attorneys who specialize in this arcana, and the two main political parties.
If enough of the candidate’s ballot signatures get disqualified, then the candidate does not achieve the minimal threshold of signatures, and does not qualify to be on the ballot. A lot of hard work and volunteer hours can get flushed down the drain if insufficient signatures are obtained to keep the candidate on the ballot.
PA’s complicated ballot petition process is designed by and for the political parties, which have the experienced volunteers, lawyers, and updated voter lists necessary to get far more signatures than are needed. It is designed to keep political outsiders out of office, and political insiders in.
According to this now un-candidate’s statement in the news article, the attorney who challenged her ballot petition signatures had also threatened to bury her campaign in a pile of legal costs if she tried to fight her way through all the nit-picky challenges. All indications are that US Senate candidate David McCormick is behind this challenge and threat. This is really about a billionaire bully booting pesky candidates out of his way on his path to self-serving elected office.
Yuck.
Pennsylvania voters want choice, and we do not benefit from the current ballot petition process, which was once described to me by a Dauphin County Republican Committee Woman as a necessary precaution to prevent “unqualified people” from running for office.
Said I, “Why don’t we just let anyone run who wants to run? Shouldn’t all citizens have a right to run, aren’t we all qualified? Isn’t that the heart and soul of the democratic process, to keep it as open and accessible to The People as possible?”
Said she, “That sounds like too much democracy to me.”
And so we see yet another victim of this ridiculous gatekeeper process, which both political parties can agree must be kept intact so they can retain maximum control of who gets to run, and who does not. It is really about control, not democracy.
Yuck.
These are some of the pitfalls of running for political office here in Pennsylvania, and while some are unavoidable, it is best to work hard to avoid the pratfalls: Campaign volunteers and supporters will always appreciate and fondly remember a kind word, a nice email or text message saying thanks. And also will they remember that their hard work went unnoticed and unremarked in the end, and so they will feel used.
Double yuck.
Kellyanne Conway’s figurehead on Jake Corman’s dead pirate ship
Kellyanne Conway, Trump advisor and advocate extraordinaire, has hired her political gun out to the Jake Corman for Governor campaign. What an odd couple, this highly principled, positive, and well spoken woman with this unprincipled, mean-spirited, spoiled, corrupt product of nepotism, Jake Corman.
It is easy for Pennsylvania conservatives to smack their foreheads and cry out “Why Kellyanne, WHY?” Because her action here is at a right-angle inconsistent with what she said and did when she was in the Trump Administration, where she fought daily against RINOs just like Jake Corman. You can’t find two more different people in politics than Conway and Corman…and yet, politics makes strange bedfellows.
I am willing to bet that Kellyanne Conway suffered a lot after the stolen 2020 election. I will bet that her private life and her finances took serious beatings, and I will also bet that she has been very nearly canceled out of just about every aspect of her prior life. She probably went from international spotlight articulate presidential spokeswoman and advocate for America First principles in January 2021, to almost a political nobody in January 2022.
That has to be tough to take. If this same kind of crushing lifetime cancellation landed on you or me, like all negativity when we went to restaurants or the library or the food store, we would be desperate to get some aspects of our former life back. It would be too painful to ignore, unless a person is substantially independently wealthy. And even then those ultra wealthy people tend to live inside their own weather system, so that even small disruptions to their personal lives are artificially magnified and extraordinarily painful to them. And if you aren’t independently wealthy, and I do not believe Conway is, then all the more so does an opportunity like this political consulting job with Corman become attractive.
I think we can all understand her needs and what this job provides her. There is no need to judge Conway harshly. And there is no need to take her seriously, either.
Thus, even a corrupt RINO like Jake Corman has something to offer Conway: some redemption, a small opportunity to re-enter public life with some dignity and public standing; some recognition of her former importance. And some big, big bucks.
Because we just know that the GOPe is writing her a huge check, because so much RINO-ism and continued political corruption is riding on the success or failure of a corrupt man like Corman. The GOPe and their little pet Jake Corman need every swinging awesome woman on deck they can get. I would not be surprised if Conway is being paid a million dollars or more for her campaign role as symbolic figurehead until Primary Day this Spring.
And what does Jake Corman’s campaign get out of spending crazy money on a figurehead like Kellyanne Conway? He gets some of that Donald Trump aura, some of that gen-u-ine all-America-First patriot that Jake Corman himself cannot produce and does not himself represent and can never have. Corman is too well known in Pennsylvania, and especially in his own senate district (where he was about to get primaried), as a corrupt phony and backstabber, to ever stand on his own two feet. After all, his entire career is due to his daddy being a state senator before him. Jake has literally never had a real job!
And oh, the irony of an anti-America RINO like Jake Corman trying to bathe himself in the stars-n-bars Trump glow, transmuted by Conway, because Corman is the primary reason why Trump’s voters never got an election recount in Pennsylvania. Corman not only did all he could to block a recount or an audit of the stolen 2020 election, but he then fired all of PA Senator Doug Mastriano’s senate staff when Mastriano got too close to starting an actual election audit.
Corman’s campaign is like an evil, rotting, dead pirate ship slipping through dark waters, trying desperately to attach a new figurehead to the bowsprit to fool voters from afar. Many people are sad to see Kellyanne Conway in this figurehead role for someone as gross as Jake Corman. I hope it is worth it, honey, because the Pirate Corman stench will never really rub off.
Welcome to PA.
Former President Trump advisor and spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway
If political pirate Jake Corman had a ship, this evil, demonic skeleton would be its figurehead
What RINO Jake Corman is hoping his evil pirate ship’s figurehead will turn into with his hiring of Kellyanne Conway
Fake News Media Fakes Out Its Own Self; NY Recount Needed
By trying to fake out the world about the American election result last week, the politically partisan, politically activist, factually fake news media faked its own self out.
So eager and quick were the various “news” outlets to declare Biden the winner of last Tuesday’s election, different channels were actually calling certain state races for him even before a single vote was reported in those states. Minnesota and Michigan come to mind. There were others.
Even as voting was still ongoing, the fake news media were declaring clearly contested states like Arizona for Biden. Even FOX did it, with their empty talking heads most seriously announcing that Biden had won the election long before all the counts were done, long before all the voting was even done. On YouTube the AP (Associated Press) is now cited on every discussion and post about the election as the putative authoritative source for Biden winning the 2020 election. As if the AP counted all the votes.
So there we have it, I guess. Right? We just have to accept what the AP says along with all the other Democrat News sources. After all, this fake news media told us the election outcome before there even was an outcome, so we have to just accept it, I suppose.
Nope, we don’t have to accept it. Who the hell is the AP, and who put them in charge of the election! In fact, we need to really consider what the AP’s inaccurate declaration actually meant.
It was all a bluff, if not an attempted coup d’etat, meant to create the illusion that Biden had won the election early on, when in fact all kinds of states and key localities were and still are in play, in every way, with neither candidate having enough Electoral College votes to authoritatively declare the win.
And now that the massive multi-state voter fraud is beginning to become evident, known, and analyzed, the many Trump Campaign objections, lawsuits, challenges, demands, and specific accusations of fraud are beginning to get traction. Which is now indicating that at the very very least Biden MAY have won by an extremely narrow margin, like just a few Electoral College votes, or in the alternative, Trump may have won this election with 300 Electoral College votes.
Despite the news media’s ongoing attempt to keep the “Biden won” narrative alive, we will have to wait and see the actual results, won’t we? At the very least, it appears that Justice Alito’s order to Pennsylvania to segregate the ballots received after 8:00PM last Tuesday night away from the others received during Election Day hours is not going to be fulfilled by either Philadelphia or PA Governor Wolf. This means that those suspect late ballots will (correctly) be disqualified and will not be counted, which results in Trump winning Pennsylvania.
Who knows how the other contested states will go, now that we are all becoming familiar with the several savage ways the Democrat Party aggressively cheated in this election? We will just have to all wait and see. There is no quick and easy answer, despite the partisan media’s ongoing best efforts at the ever-popular immediate gratification. And frankly, democracy is almost always messy and cluttered up with stuff, because it’s the nature of its system of checks and balances. It is the tyrannies who have super smooth and so easily predictable elections. Isn’t it disconcerting that America’s media tried to emulate how a tyranny runs an election!
Until the final and actual legal voting (not balloting) results in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and possibly other states, are known to us citizens, we have other things to discuss. Like how this attempted media coup d’etat raises questions about the role of the media and the supposed First Amendment protections it enjoys. An openly partisan and politically activist media is no longer a news outlet, it is a mouthpiece for certain political and economic interests, including America’s arch enemy, China. That makes the people who own them and run them official traitors.
Which makes you wonder why we have to accept New York State’s close election outcomes as official and accurate. New York is run by one of the most partisan and corrupt governors in America, Andrew Cuomo, beloved of the fake news media. He would do anything to prevent a Republican from winning New York.
So let the New York election result challenge and digging begin. If we dig deep enough, we might end up in China…
November 8th screenshot of WHP580’s home page, a FOX News affiliate, doing its best Dewey Defeats Truman attempt.
Here is today’s November 9th screen shot of WHP580’s home page. Backtracking happening as the Dewey Defeats Truman effect takes hold of a corrupt and partisan media
Illegal billions: Big tech & national media’s undeclared in-kind political donations
For twelve years at least, billions of dollars worth of undeclared in-kind political contributions to just one political party have been made by the Big Tech companies and our national media.
Owners and staff at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and all of the national media (NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Patriot News and Capital Star here in Harrisburg, etc.) have gone out of their way to treat one group of people one way, and another group of people a totally different way.
Big Tech and the media go so far as to report only good things, even fake good things, and not report the negative things, about one group. Yet Big Tech and the media only report negative things, especially fake negative things, about the other group, and never report the good things. This artificial treatment of the two groups has had a hugely disproportionate effect on the flow of information to American voters, and, therefore, a hugely disproportionate effect on election outcomes.
Who are the two groups who receive such different treatment at the hands of Big Tech and the national media?
Why, they are Democrats/ liberals/ anarchists/ socialists on the one hand, the favored fair-haired child, and then Republicans/ conservatives/ patriots/ constitutionalists on the other hand, the hated red-headed stepchild. Because the treatments these groups receive are so totally over the top different from one another, you could almost swear that Big Tech and the national media are owned and run only by Democrats and liberals, to the point where they are acting like they are part-and-parcel of Democrat political campaigns.
Today, the Republican National Committee FINALLY filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about Twitter’s obviously one-sided effort to suppress damning information and news articles about the Biden Crime Family. I say finally, because this issue has been out there in the wide open for many years, and the GOPe never acted on it. It is hard to believe that it took this long for someone to file a complaint, when for years people like me, and much higher profile than I, have documented the unfair one-sided treatment conservatives and Republicans have received from Big Tech and the national media. For my own part, posts on the Josh First Facebook page were mostly shadow banned, and my paid political campaign ads had dubious reach, which appeared to be fraud by Facebook. They took my money, and then launched weak ad campaigns into which I had limited views. Facebook has been doing the same thing to the Donald Trump campaign, too, by the way. Activist Laura Loomer, now a candidate for Congress, has been completely de-platformed from all of these services, without any explanation why. But her political opponent, communista yehudia Lois Frankel, enjoys all the benefits of Facebook etc
It is just not fair. And it is not legal.
All of these one-sided activities by Big Tech and the national media amount to an enormous undeclared political campaign contribution effort that by the simple reading of the statute is blatantly illegal.
During the Obama administration, conservative political activist Dinesh D’Souza was sent to prison for a long time for giving someone money to make political contributions with. About twenty thousand bucks total, if I recall right. Here we have Big Tech and the national media donating billions of dollars worth of free political advertising and political information suppression to the Democrat Party, without ever disclosing it. If D’Souza went to jail for a couple years, then how many decades in jail do Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Dorsey, Google’s Brin, and so on for the many other Big Tech owners and content managers, now face?
All of the Big Tech and national media owners and managers deserve to pay huge fines and go to jail for long times.
I have written about this before, and it is worth it to write about it again. That is because America’s election rules and laws are supposed to apply to everyone equally. No one person or group in America is supposed to receive special treatment, the way Democrats and liberal socialist anarchists do when it comes to our election laws and campaign contributions. That kind of special treatment up-ends the rule of law on which America is based. One rule is supposed to apply to us all equally.
So, if Hillary Clinton is finally going to face the music for her wild crime spree, then the Big Tech and national media activists and political donors, should too.
Lock them all up. They earned it all.
Why I am voting for Paul Mango for governor, and not for Scott Wagner
When I stood out for twelve hours in the freezing weather four years ago, handing out Scott Wagner for Senate brochures at a polling place in York County, I was helping Pennsylvania elect someone to state government who promised to remain independent of political party leaders and the insider dealings that are the despicable hallmark of Pennsylvania Republican party politics.
Within a few months of Wagner’s historic upset win over a creaky establishment, I began to regret his obvious character flaws. And then six months later I had the unfortunate experience of having Wagner lie through omission to my face.
“Yeah, I know John DiSanto,” said Wagner.
What Wagner did not say was that he was aggressively promoting DiSanto as a would-be candidate for state senate. Fast forward another six months, and DiSanto was on track to be the state senator for the 15th district. He has been a huge improvement over the former senator, Rob Teplitz, a political radical out of place here in this region who was also dedicated to his constituents. I have no real hard feelings about DiSanto now bearing the burden of serving in state government, as it comes with big personal costs that I realize I would not want.
But I saw then that Scott Wagner was not the straight-up guy a lot of us believed he was when we worked hard to get him elected.
Wagner has this habit of ascribing to himself full responsibility for his material and political successes. As a capitalist I applaud anyone who can and does leave to their son or nephew a running business and millions of dollars. And I also applaud those people who are strong enough to take those inheritances and build on them, instead of squandering them, as so many Americans do.
But it upsets me to hear Wagner take credit for these things when he was simply the beneficiary of other people’s hard work.
No, Mr. Wagner, you did not win that special election in York County all by yourself.
Rather, we, the hard working campaign volunteers won it for you, by getting fired up people out to every polling place in the district and demonstrating to the voters that we, the people, wanted you to be elected. Voters saw our passion and responded by handing the GOPe a tough and well-deserved loss.
No, you did not create that trucking business as you constantly claim, you inherited a good portion of it.
Two days ago at a dog-and-pony show press event, Scott Wagner released a phony “internal” poll result saying that he already leads in this primary race by 50.2% to Paul Mango’s 20-something percent.
Flanking Wagner was the chairman and the vice-chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, the same GOPe that Wagner once opposed but which he has now shamelessly joined. Wagner’s willingness to trade his political independence for political gain with the same old political insiders is another indication that he is not a straight-up guy. Rather, Wagner is just another aggressive political opportunist willing to sell his grandma and his former supporters to get ahead.
The message of having the two GOP political bosses next to him at the event is simple: “Vote for our insider stooge here.”
But if Wagner is already so far ahead in the polls, then why does he need the personal presence of political bosses at his press event? The whole thing is phony – the supposed poll (two other recent polls show a statistical dead heat between Mango and Wagner, with also-ran Laura Ellsworth in the single digits), the fake political endorsement, his supposed political independence. One thing is for sure, Scott Wagner is now yet just another political insider, trying to use every object around him to gain power and prestige. Just like he used and then discarded us campaign volunteers to get into the state senate.
Wagner’s political views have spanned the full spectrum, from great to crazy left, like his transvestite bathroom bill sponsorship.
Will the real Scott Wagner please stand up? Without screaming at anyone, please.
Contrast this chaotic mess to his primary opponent Paul Mango.
Paul Mango is about as exciting as watching the grass grow.
He is soft-spoken, measured, very smart and articulate on policy, and to me, mostly boring. Though he has gotten better at public presentations as time has gone on.
Is Mango the fiery revolutionary that Scott Wagner was four years ago? Nope.
Neither is Scott Wagner.
Is Mango the political trench warfare conservative that Wagner used to be, and which many of us wish for more each day? Nope.
Neither is Scott Wagner.
Mango is a work horse, not a show horse.
Instead of having all of Wagner’s drama and duplicity, Mango is a simple guy with true blue collar working class roots, who put himself through West Point and became a real-deal warrior in the US Army 101st Rangers, and who went on to build a career for himself that put him at the financial top of American society. Not to mention his all-American family. He is a US Army veteran who served our nation, thank you very much.
Mango is the all-American rags-to-riches story every American politician wishes to be, and which Wagner has tried to falsely claim he is.
This is why I am voting for Paul Mango and not for Scott Wagner.
You make up your own mind on this race, and you should also know I made up my mind through direct experience with both candidates. Sometimes it isn’t just how great a candidate is, but also how awful the other guy is.
Mango is good enough, Wagner is awful.
Speaking of campaign contributions
Is anyone tallying the in-kind political campaign contributions donated by the US media, Google, FakeBook, Twitter, and the rest of Silicon Valley to one particular political party?
The hoopla surrounding the pairing of FakeBook user data with Cambridge Analytica sounds like someone committed a crime. But that is only because conservatives did it, and they actually paid money for it. As opposed to Google and FakeBook, which practically lived full-time at the Obama White House.
For free. As in they donated their private user data to one political party for free. Without disclosure, without attribution.
Google and FakeBook in particular have been working hand-in-glove with just one political party, and especially with the past Obama administration, giving away user data for free, and artificially suppressing users opposed to the Obama revolution.
Recall how typing into the Google search engine variations of “Hillary Clinton crime criminal” would generate ridiculous results, like “Hillary Clinton’s position on crime control” complete with a smiling glamor shot of Hillary Clinton. Nowhere in Google’s search results would be anything about how Hillary Clinton was an actual criminal, or a suspected criminal who had been and was being criminally investigated.
That is worth money.
And how about that September 2016 Barron’s Weekly, with the grinning glamor photo of Hillary Clinton under the headline “Time for President Hillary?”
This kind of free promotional advertising is worth huge bucks.
And the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times were all proud to openly promote Clinton and attack Republicans. Not just in their editorial pages, but in their “news.” Their “news” reporting became wall-to-wall political advertising and attacks.
The US media has been an obvious mouthpiece for this one political party and its candidates, cheering them on and covering up for them. Big bucks, folks, huge contributions.
What’s that you say, what about Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity?
Folks, if the US media just did their jobs as reporters – facts instead of activism – there would be no demand for Limbaugh or Fox News or Breitbart. Only because the media is a wholly owned subsidiary of one political party is there a demand for other views to be aired. And that is going to happen somewhere.
God forbid there are literally a handful of news outlets not controlled by the establishment media and their political party!
So what is the value of all this collusion between Google, and FakeBook, and Twitter? All the user data they gleefully provided to the Obama White House and the 2012 Obama campaign? You know, the private user data that the Obama campaign gloated about in public.
Someone needs to get to the bottom of this. I’d just ballpark the in-kind contribution value at about a billion dollars. At least. And none of it was officially disclosed on campaign disclosure documents.
All illegal behavior and political contributions, folks. A lot of fines, and maybe jail time for people. But because the chosen side did it, it’s fine, apparently. Well, not to me, it isn’t, despite the mainstream media’s unwillingness to report it.
Get a special investigator and prosecutor on this right away. Hold these law-breakers accountable. Because we all really care about upholding the law, right?
Second Letter to Candidate Josh Feldman
Dear Josh,
Congratulations, you did maintain your position on the ballot after our challenge. But you have traded away your credibility and integrity in the process.
I read the courtroom transcript of your March 17, 2017 testimony, and on page five you stated under oath that you consciously falsely signed two affidavits. Even though you have only been an active attorney for a grand total of 78 days, surely you know that affidavits are the bedrock of our legal system. A falsified affidavit undermines everything our legal system stands on and stands for. The person who falsifies an affidavit is obviously unqualified to fill a judicial role. You are unqualified, Josh. Your own court testimony impeached your own credibility.
Additionally, you have run for this magisterial seat on the representation of being “the only attorney” among the candidates. But you only became an active licensed attorney on March 2, 2017, the day before you filed your first set of ballot petitions. On page three of your court testimony, you admit that you do not actually practice law and have no court room experience, having become “inactive” just one month after bar admission and having been “retired” from 2010 until this March 2nd.
Your attorney information page on the Disciplinary Board of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court says “I do not maintain professional liability insurance because I do not have private clients and have no possible exposure to possible malpractice actions.”
So your biggest selling point is actually flim-flam, a faint technicality. What is the point of electing an attorney who has no experience actually being an attorney, and who right out of the gate violates the most important election laws to try to get ahead?
Josh, how on earth could your lawyer have allowed you to take the stand in your own defense at the ballot petition hearing? Do you not realize the self-damning testimony you gave in court?
Perhaps no one should be surprised, as your incompetent goofball lawyer Adam Klein now has yet one more loss to his credit. You have learned an expensive but important lesson: Just because a lawyer is smug and arrogant does not mean he is seriously up to the task of effectively representing you.
Josh, I pledged $250 toward the outcome not as some sort of silly bet or wager, but as a principled statement about my belief in personal accountability. My philosophy of government requires me to do this: I had put my name out there as a plaintiff in a formal complaint about your ballot petitions, and you stayed on the ballot. In that process we learned that you have poor character, your word means nothing, and you have greatly over-represented your qualifications.
So, Josh, you do get the enclosed $250 check, but you will get no apology from me, because when you took the stand in court you admitted to filing false affidavits on your ballot petitions. You impeached your own credibility. If you cannot be trusted to file basic honest paperwork, then what do the voters expect of you if you become a magistrate and sit in judgment of us? Your petitions were flawed, Josh, and remain so, even though they technically contained enough signatures to keep you cross-filed and on the ballot.
This whole experience is sad to me. You have hurt yourself through your own over-reach, and then you were further injured by poor legal counsel. I like the fact that you are a fellow small business owner, and I wish that you had earnestly run for office on that good qualification alone. People could respect you for that.
Sincerely,
Josh
Josh First
Harrisburg City, PA
May 12, 2017
What is in a political “party”?
The Communist Party.
The Democrat Party.
The Republican Party.
What is the difference between these three and many other active political parties?
Their party agenda is what defines them.
Their cause, their unifying principles, their policies and political platforms, these are the things that separate political parties from one another.
All political parties have their own structure, their functionaries, their own bureaucracies, lawyers, and bosses. All have become self-interested organisms, influenced by a constellation of special interest groups. At a certain point, the party exists simply for its own benefit.
But what happens when these parties begin to bleed into one another, when they begin to blend across their boundaries and blur their boundaries? When they lose their distinctive appeal?
When political parties lose their way, do they lose their reason for being?
Although my own Republican Party has pledged overall to serve the taxpayers, plenty of fellow Republicans hold personal and official positions contrary to the interests of taxpayers, voters, and citizens. Their positions are subtle, often only visible in the important background decisions they make.
Many times in recent history, the Republican Party has been used as a weapon to silence voices of political activists who sought to return the brand to its more basic principles and its more elementary purpose, which would naturally be defined as the cause of liberty.
It is my own hope and the hope of many other dedicated citizens that the Republican Party, also known as the establishment, will stay out of any upcoming elections around Central Pennsylvania.
It is one thing for a candidate to ask, say, State Rep. Ron Marsico for his individual support, or to ask individual party committee members for their support. It is entirely another thing for the Dauphin County Republican Committee to endorse a candidate so that the Pennsylvania Republican Party can spend money to challenge a Republican candidate’s nomination ballots, because he (or she) is too independent-minded. Or too “conservative.” Or not enough in the pocket of some party boss.
My experience tells me that this controlling, anti-freedom behavior has happened so often that many political activists are inclined to become political Independents, which means that the Republican base, the most passionate Republican voters, become driven away from the party and become less interested in its success. We saw this with the past election, where former governor Tom Corbett had little street game. The people with the most passion were not going to do door-to-door for Corbett.
Even more worrisome is if the one-time Republican becomes an Independent candidate, or mounts a write-in campaign. Sure, these efforts may hurt the Republican Party’s nominee, but if the party didn’t want that independent-minded candidate in the first place, what right does anyone have to expect him to stay loyal to them?
Put another way, if some political boss doesn’t want a certain candidate to get elected, then what expectation does that political boss have of earning the support of the candidate he opposed?
Put another way, if you don’t want John to get elected, then why would John want you or your ally to get elected?
Do the Democrats have this problem? Sure. But that political party has become overrun with foreign policy extremism and anti-capitalism. Wealth redistribution is completely contrary to American founding principles, but it is nevertheless now a core of the Democrat Party.
That is sad, because at one time, the Democrats just wanted more opportunity for everyone. Now they want to take from one person and give to another person, which is theft.
But I am not a Democrat, so this is not my political problem.
My problem is with so-called Republicans who actually share a lot in common with liberal Democrats, but who stay in the Republican Party.
There are different ways a Republican can share values with a liberal. For example, a Republican staffer who believes in the supremacy of bureaucracy….despite bureaucracy being the enemy of freedom and individual liberty. Working from within the party, these functionaries stamp their own flavor on policy and principle alike, often softening edges and blurring lines, giving the voters fewer choices, more government intervention, and ultimately less liberty.
The same could be said for certain “Republican” lobbyists, whose connections to money, political funding, cause them to promote bad policies such as Common Core, which strikes deep at the heart of liberty. They would rather ally with liberals than support a conservative Republican candidate. People like this have great influence in the Republican Party. They influence its agenda, and the kind of decisions the apparatus supports.
If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. I myself will stand for liberty, freedom, and opportunity for everyone. If that puts me and others like me at odds with some political party, then that says everything a voter needs to know about that party: It does not have your interests at heart.
I am a Republican because I hold old-fashioned, traditional American values, the kind of values that created America and kept her great for so long. I will vote for and support only those candidates who hold similar values. Regardless of what a party spokeswoman may say, a Republican Party that has no conservativism in it isn’t really a Republican Party any longer, is it?
My take on tonight’s Corbett – Wolf Debate, and Tom Brokaw’s Plea for Control of Our Lives
Like a few thousand other attendees at the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce dinner tonight, I sat in the audience and watched Governor Tom Corbett and Democrat nominee Tom Wolf debate each other, with reporter Dennis Owens moderating. Dennis was outstanding. I also stayed for the Tom Brokaw speech afterwards.
Here are the highlights as I see them:
1) Corbett beat Wolf hands-down, in substance, poise, accuracy, and humility. And damned if I am not still surprised. Given how insipid the Corbett campaign has been to date, I expected the worst performance from him tonight. That did not materialize.
2) While overall the debate was Dull vs Duller, and neither man was exciting or inspiring, the amazing fact is that Tom Corbett found his voice tonight. Tom Wolf talked in circles, kept stating that he is a businessman (six, seven times), mis-spoke (“the vast majority of married Pennsylvanians file separate tax reports”), spoke in vague generalities bordering on fluffy clouds and flying unicorns, and addressed none of the substantive issues pegged by moderator Dennis Owens or by Corbett.
3) Wolf seemed to play it safe, venturing nothing new, nothing specific. He did not even respond the to the Delaware Loophole questions posed to him. He simply ignored them. If he persists in this evasiveness, Corbett can catch up and beat him. Voters can now see it, and it ain’t pretty. Corbett may be The Most Boring Man in the World, but Wolf looked completely unprepared to be governor.
4) Wolf’s “I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it” response to policy and finance questions is not acceptable for a candidate to run a state government.
5) Corbett actually ate some humble pie, admitting that he is not a good communicator. Understatement, yes, but he is not a guy who likes to admit he’s wrong. So that was big. Again, expectations for Corbett were super low, and he started out looking and sounding defeated. But even he recognized that he was beating Wolf, and his performance picked up as the debate went on.
Brokaw:
1) Ancient establishment reporter Tom Brokaw has a great voice, and lots of stage presence. He’s good looking for a guy that old. He wrote a book about The Greatest Generation, so he must be a pretty great guy. That is the marketing, anyhow. His ideas run the gamut from standard liberal to downright contradictory and mutually-exclusive confused, to pathetic control freak.
2) Although Brokaw started talking about the Tea Party, and he complimented its members for getting involved in the political process (which he said is necessary), he never said or recognized the American Constitution as core to tea party’s goals, values, principles, or guiding role. So although he talked about it, it didn’t seem evident that he understands or has thought about the Tea Party much.
3) Brokaw said “I leave it to you determine if the Tea Party is good for America. I’m just a reporter, I just report the facts. You have to come to your own conclusions.” As if he was not passing judgment on the Tea Party. Yet, he asked the question and obviously thinks the Tea Party is bad for America; that is his hint. Given that Brokaw is a liberal at war with America, this is a big cue to conservative activists: Keep it up, the liberal media establishment is scared of you.
4) He called for “filtration” and a “filter” of the internet, and talked about the “simple people” who manage his Montana ranch and get news from the Internet, which he disavowed and sees as unworthy. This is the kind of intellectual region where Brokaw makes no sense. On the one hand, the big establishment media is all over the Internet, so if people get their news from the Internet, and not TV chatterheads or fishwrap newspapers, then there’s no real problem with the Internet as a news source. What Brokaw seemed to be challenged by is the fact that Breitbart and citizen reporters (think Watchdogwire, or my own blog) are circumventing the establishment media. He does not understand or care that the ‘simple’ masses are hungry for unfiltered news, for real news, for facts and not liberal agenda. How his imagined filters jibe, square, or conflict with the First Amendment was not mentioned; I am unsure it even occurred to Brokaw that purposefully filtering information is censorship. But he is a guy who believes in sixty years of past liberal censorship, so I guess he has to stay consistent today.
5) Brokaw implied that the establishment media are the source of accurate information and “big ideas,” and that alternative news and opinion sources are not. He said he doesn’t believe what he reads on the internet. He is clearly bothered there’s now no difference between establishment media and bloggers and citizen reporters in terms of equal accessibility. He’s having a tough time letting go of controlling the message Americans receive, which is really his objection: Liberal media elites are losing the propaganda war because they no longer have a choke hold on the information flow; ergo, the Internet is full of bad information.
An indication of just how undeveloped his thinking is: Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon…for Liberals, Nixon was the High Priest of Done Bad in Government. It does not seem to occur to Brokaw that Nixon’s crimes pale in comparison to the lawless tyranny Obama has inflicted upon American citizens. E.g. NSA spying and IRS crushing of political dissent.
6) On the other hand, he’s into high tech and the future of technology. Very impressed by Google staff and all of the “big minds” gathered at tech conventions. Brokaw doesn’t reconcile his adulation with his view of information flow on the net. I am guessing here that he’d be OK if Google ran all the news on the Internet, because Google is made of liberals who share his political agenda. “Good” liberals and “bad” conservatives is what he is after.
7) Annoyingly, Brokaw dropped names all over the place, as if to impress us with how important he is: Jon Stewart, the NFL commissioner, et al. “I was emailing with ____ _____, and he says ‘Tom..’.” “My books.” “I’m on the board of…..” This seemed self-conscious and actually undermined his standing, because truly great people never look at themselves this way. They simply Are Great.
8) Finally, he called for a new form of foreign service corps, some hybrid of the Peace Corps, Americorps, and the military. It was terribly confused, but it was also the kind of Big Idea he admires others for having, so evidently he must have one, too, even of it makes no practical sense.
Cantor loss is shocking only to those who are not paying attention
Yes, yes, yes, Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) was an important man, high up, famous, powerful…blah blah blah. And he lost his five-million dollar primary campaign to a grass roots candidate who spent a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Hey, Republican establishment folks, are you now paying attention?
Do you maybe now understand what so many of your own voters have been telling you for years?
To wit: America is worth saving, and it can only be saved by breaking from the creeping Big Government identity of “moderate” Republicans. That means No on amnesty, No on gun control, No on universal background checks aka gun owners database, No on ObamaDon’tCare.
In other words, Hell Yes on freedom and liberty.
Cantor failed on these issues, and his voters punished him for it.
While the NRA lost out to Gun Owners of America in this race, probably no group was more closely identified with Cantor, and the Republican establishment around him, than the Republican Jewish Coalition, a nice group I have had some exposure to. Sadly, RJC mishandled Cantor’s loss in a gargantuan way that may spell the organization’s descent or even demise. In many ways, Tuesday night’s RJC is emblematic of the larger Republican establishment, which also seems determined to drive itself over a cliff.
Late Tuesday night, 11:26 PM, to be exact, the RJC issued a brief lamentation about Cantor’s electoral loss and how great Cantor was and blah blah blah.
Did RJC acknowledge that REPUBLICAN voters had spoken? Nope. Did RJC congratulate the winner, economics professor David Brat? Nope. Did RJC publicly stake out hopes for Brat to follow closely in Cantor’s pro-Israel shoes? Nope.
Instead, RJC came across as soundly rejecting the wisdom of REPUBLICAN voters in Cantor’s former district, and failing to acknowledge the Big Government issues of a) gun (citizen) control and b) illegal aliens, who are destroying American democracy, disenfranchising American voters, and robbing American taxpayers.
RJC may be a small group with great intentions, but Tuesday night, they were the lost voice for the entire Republican Establishment. And it shows just how out of touch the establishment is with the American citizen. Every conservative activist who reads the RJC statement will wonder what the hell is in the DC Beltway water, because it sure isn’t anything they’d want to drink.
The folks who ran and funded Cantor’s campaign, who issued public statements for him, who stood by him when he wafted in the wind on critical issues, and who bewailed his loss, are incredibly out of touch with the actual voters, taxpayers, citizens, moms, dads, students, and out-of-work-car-won’t-run Americans who are slowly, surely, awakening to the crisis we are in, and who are not not shocked that Cantor lost.
But the experts…they are shocked.
What does this portend or mean to Pennsylvanians? Here is one suggestion: Political parties are supposed to represent the voters and stand for principles. Once the PA GOP returns to that model, winning elections will be easy.