Posts Tagged ‘pharisees’

DaveG: “Romney has spent the past few years letting the GOP Pharisees know that they can push him around—He’ll change his views on anything and everything in order to please the Pharisees.”

January 25, 2008 in 2008, analysis, argument, conservatism, election 2008, GOP, mitt romney, republicans, romney, strategy, stupidity, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
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[…] “That’s why the GOP’s other post-Florida choice, Mitt Romney, troubles me so,” opines race42008‘s DaveG in an editorial discursis titled Uniters and Dividers

Ultimately a sane, empirical, good government Northeastern Republican, Romney has spent the past few years letting the GOP Pharisees know that they can push him around. He’ll change his views on anything and everything in order to please the Pharisees. Instead of running to lead the GOP, he’s running to be the proxy candidate of the dividers. And the sad part is, that sort of strategy might actually work due to the cocoon mentality of today’s Republican base. Conservatives who react with dismay at the Independents that cross the aisle to vote for McCain in GOP primaries need to step back and think about what they’re saying — that no new voters are welcome in today’s Republican Party. We’ve seen this attitude before in places like California and New Jersey, where similarly terrified conservatives destroyed their respective state parties rather than allow them to be modernized. Sadly, the GOP may have to lose a couple of more elections before the base finally learns that fifty-one percent, and not moral certitude or a sense of entitlement, is what makes a majority […]

We heartily concur.

Regard: Political power requires developing the issues—living issues, felt issues, current issues—that can form the basis of a coalition. After you have developed your issues coalition, or at least its basis, and after you have tested its themes at the ballot box or other performance indicators (e.g. fund raising, attendance at rallies, play in the media), then and only then you can begin the slow, patient, and often painful process of popular education through political action and calls to action or calls for support, through policy proposals, and through the pursuit of a positive program to consolidate and continually renew your coalition. You will suffer reverses, setbacks, take a lot of beatings, and you will be forced to compromise at every turn, but this is the way the game is played.

In other words, you begin from the experience of the people, especially the people who vote, by acting on their self-interest, which you identify with the national interest because, after all, they are the nation or at least an important part of it. Then you begin the slow, painful process of drawing them closer to your point of view—this is when ideologies form—after, and not before, political labor, action, and thorough self-criticism and review.

This is where the center-right and the conservative movement have failed most critically, and probably fatally at least in the short term.

In the person of Willard Milton Romney, however, the GOP establishment and its institutions propose another path to power, only it isn’t popular power but their own power, a path predicted by the iron law of institutions.

We call it Romneyism.

Here is our question. Is the Romney candidacy

(a) the case of a corrupt party establishment bilking a super-rich ingenue of his many millions?

—or—

(b) the case of a super-rich Richard III purchasing a morally, deologically, as well as financially bankrupt GOP establishment to pursue his own advantage?

Or could both (a) and (b) be true? To be honest, we don’t yet know.

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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