Takeover (3 page)

However, the arguments against a third-party are the same now as they were when Bill Buckley and Ayn Rand first jousted over where conservatives should find their political home a half a century ago.

The bottom line is that while third-party movements, such as Libertarians, have gained some recognition and added to their numbers, they haven’t actually been electing candidates to office. Limited-government constitutional conservatives running as Republicans win, but the same candidates, with the same ideas, running as Libertarians, lose.

Congressman Ron Paul admitted as much when he said no one would have paid any attention to him or his ideas if he had run as a Libertarian, and there is no doubt that his son Rand Paul would not be a US senator if he had run as a Libertarian, instead of as a Republican.

But there is good news and bad news in Libertarian ideas.

The good news is that, while as yet imperfectly realized, Libertarian ideas have had a powerful influence on the twenty-first-century conservative movement, and due in part to Libertarian influence, the Republican Party may truly become the party of less regulation, lower taxes, and more personal freedom—this certainly hasn’t always been the case when one considers that fewer than forty years ago the EPA was established and wage and price controls were instituted under Republican president Richard Nixon.

The bad news is that many in the national and state Libertarian
parties actually pride themselves on being destroyers, and when they lose a primary or otherwise don’t get their way, rather than selling themselves and their ideas harder, they try to “teach Republicans a lesson” by running a third-party candidate and thereby causing the Republican candidate to lose, as happened in the November 2013 Virginia governor’s race, when Ken Cuccinelli, one of the most principled limited-government constitutional conservatives ever to seek statewide office in America, was defeated because a Libertarian candidate siphoned off enough conservative votes to elect Terry McAuliffe, a radical liberal Democrat.

This is a bad way to sell your ideas in the best of times; it is dangerous to the future of the country if a splintering of the conservative coalition returns conservatives to permanent minority status in America.

Yes, Ron Paul and his delegates to the 2012 Republican Convention were treated in a ham-handed way by Reince Priebus and other establishment Republicans.

Yes, it makes all of us angry when John Boehner, who was made Speaker of the House through the efforts of millions of Tea Party movement voters and volunteers, refers to limited-government constitutional conservatives as “knuckle-draggers.”

But the future of this country is more important than the personal slights and short-term wins or losses that any candidate and his adherents might suffer.

When Libertarians run their own third-party candidates, as they are certainly free to do, they all too often split the twenty-first-century conservative coalition and hand victory to Big Government Democrats—as they did in Virginia’s 2013 gubernatorial election.

The greatest challenge limited-government constitutional conservatives running as Republicans will have in future elections where there is a Libertarian Party candidate on the ballot is to earn enough support from liberty-minded voters, who might be inclined to vote for a Libertarian candidate, to achieve a plurality in the election—and the only way to do that is to campaign on and deliver limited
constitutional conservative government.

Movement conservatives have been steadily working the plan envisioned by “the Buckley generation” for over fifty years. Inspired by leaders and thinkers such as John Ashbrook, Morton Blackwell, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., William F. Buckley, Jr., Lee Edwards, Tom Ellis, Jerry Falwell, Ed Fuelner, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Howard Phillips, Henry Regnery, Bill Rusher, Phyllis Schlafly, F. Clifton White, Paul Weyrich, and others, we have made great progress in the Republican Party, and more important, in public opinion at large.

For over twenty years polls have shown that Americans, by a two-to-one margin, self-identify as conservatives. Today, a record number of Americans—60 percent according to the Gallup Organization’s governance poll—say that the federal government has too much power.
²
This follows on an earlier Gallup poll in which 64 percent of those responding said the greatest threat to freedom is Big Government—and the biggest jump in that fear is among Democrats. Conservatives and libertarian-minded voters should see that as a sign that American opinion is moving in our direction.
³

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat, and the discrediting of the Republican establishment that tied the future of the Party to Romney’s content-free campaign, now is not the time for conservatives to give up on the Republican Party and bolt to a third party. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to finish the job we started more than fifty years ago and complete the takeover of the GOP.

In large measure we conservatives have accomplished Baroness Thatcher’s first step; we are winning the argument. Now is the time to take over the Republican Party and start winning the vote.

That’s why the title of this book is
TAKEOVER
. In it you will find the history, the facts, the arguments, the vision, the goals, the strategy, and the tactics needed for conservatives to complete the takeover of the Republican Party by 2016 and govern America in 2017.

TAKEOVER

I
t’s a cinch that you are going to lose a fight—let alone a war—that you don’t even know you are in, but for the past one hundred odd years, the grassroots conservative voters of the Republican party have been under regular attack by the very people they elected to run their party—the establishment leadership of the GOP.

In 1912, at the Republican party convention in Chicago, former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt sought to hijack the Republican Party as the vehicle to advance his “progressive” philosophy. Roosevelt initially ran for the Republican nomination but failed—the convention endorsed incumbent President William Howard Taft for reelection—so TR created his own Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, and ran anyway.

Roosevelt’s egotistical third-party run split the Republican vote and ensured that he and the GOP’s candidate, William Howard Taft, lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who garnered less than 42 percent of the vote. Wilson turned out to be one of our most disastrous presidents, and the damage Teddy Roosevelt did to the Republican Party and brand was severe.

How is it possible that Teddy Roosevelt could be a bad guy? His face is on Mount Rushmore, for crying out loud!

Here’s the damage Teddy Roosevelt did that still haunts the Republican Party to this day.

At the grassroots level, the Republican Party’s strength has always been found among solidly conservative voters who opposed the kind of Big Government favored by the Democratic Party.

These conservative voters looked to the Declaration of Independence for their inspiration and to the Constitution, and the lean federal establishment it envisioned, for the kind of government they wanted.

Progressivism, or Big Government Republicanism, gained legitimacy through the cult of personality surrounding Teddy Roosevelt, and it became the governing philosophy of the establishment Republican leadership.

Suddenly, no one was sure what Republicans stood for, and the war to decide that question began.

Except the Big Government leaders of the establishment conveniently forgot to tell the average Republican voters there was a war going on.

So, while conservatives were routinely the grassroots-favorite candidates, for most of the past one hundred odd years, Big Government Republicans have held sway in the Party leadership.

During the Great Depression and the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, these party leaders finessed the nominations of Republican candidates for president, such as Alf Landon, the 1936 GOP presidential candidate who had supported Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912; Wendell L. Wilkie (a former Democrat who had been a pro-Roosevelt delegate at the 1932 Democratic National Convention), who was the GOP candidate in 1940; and Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, and the GOP presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948. These men were the candidates of Big Business and the Big Government Republican establishment.

Through the establishment media’s deification of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Americans have forgotten that the New Deal created monopolies, allowed price fixing, and brought about all
kinds of anticompetitive economic regulation that went far beyond Social Security and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Senator Robert A. Taft, and other conservatives, drew a sharp contrast with FDR and the New Deal over these policies and opposed them.

Taft argued that totalitarianism and loss of freedom would be the inevitable result of the economic regulations and bureaucratic government Roosevelt pushed through Congress as part of the New Deal.

But while Wilkie and Dewey criticized the New Deal as being inefficient and wasteful, they shared FDR’s internationalist ideas about foreign policy, and they certainly weren’t prepared to campaign against the New Deal as unconstitutional and
wrong.

Naturally, running as FDR-lite candidates (or “dime store Democrats” as FDR’s Democratic successor President Harry Truman called such Republicans), Landon, Wilkie, and Dewey lost.

One of the most critical contests in this one hundred year battle for the soul of the Republican Party was the 1952 battle between Senator Robert A. Taft, representing the constitutionalist wing of the party, and the progressive wing’s choice, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Prior to running for president, General Eisenhower wasn’t even a registered Republican. As the architect of the Allied victory in Europe, Eisenhower’s attractiveness as a presidential candidate was obvious, and going into the campaign he had been actively recruited by the Democrats and President Truman to run on the Democratic ticket.

No one really knew where Eisenhower stood politically, but that was somewhat the point. Wherever he stood, “Ike” was trusted and esteemed for his role in defeating the Nazis, and that made him the perfect vessel in which to carry the Republican establishment’s political goals.

Senator Robert A. Taft was a man of towering intellect and character who was the leading conservative of that generation, and his analysis was that “if we get Eisenhower we will practically have a Republican New Deal Administration, with just as much spending and socialism as under Mr. Truman.”
¹

Despite Eisenhower’s status as a war hero, Taft far outpolled
Eisenhower in primary votes: 35.84 percent to 26.30 percent.

Going into the Republican National Convention, Taft was just seventy-five or so votes shy of having a majority and winning the Republican nomination for president.

However, the Republican National Committee, and the Convention process, were both controlled by establishment Republicans. Most delegates to the national convention were not allocated through primary elections; they were selected by Republican Party leaders.

Taft was right, these establishment party leaders were not conservatives or constitutionalists; they were what Democratic president Harry S. Truman derisively called “dime store Democrats.” These were the same party leaders who had nominated Landon, Wilkie, and Dewey—they bought into the New Deal and its vast expansion of federal government power.

Senator Barry Goldwater saw these same tendencies in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Modern Republicanism,” which he characterized as a “dime store New Deal.”

The 1952 Republican National Convention was to be a bitter fight between conservatives and these “dime store” New Dealers.

The Republican Party’s establishment leaders, with the power and money of their Big Business allies, were prepared to do anything to make sure Ike secured the nomination over Taft—who was the preferred candidate of the conservative grassroots movement.

They accused Taft, a man of almost puritanical rectitude, of “stealing” delegates and paraded through the Convention hall with signs that read “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” and they promoted the line to the media that “Taft is about to win because he has stolen key delegations.” They also questioned his intelligence. Taft’s support began to waver under the relentless assault on his character.

Taft was tough, but he was out maneuvered by the leaders of the Republican establishment. They mounted fights over credentials at the National Convention, and duly and legally selected Taft delegates from Southern states, such as Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia, were challenged and ousted in favor of Eisenhower backers.

Once again, the conservative candidate was defeated because the progressive-leaning establishment controlled the levers of power within the Republican Party.

Eisenhower’s nomination and election in 1952 marked the beginning of eight more years of Big Government Republican ascendency, but the election of 1952 also brought Barry Goldwater of Arizona into the United States Senate.

Senator Taft died six months after Eisenhower’s inauguration, and conservatives lost their most recognized and esteemed spokesman and leader.

President Eisenhower wasn’t about to question or attempt to roll back the New Deal; even during the years when Republicans controlled Congress and he was president, liberals and progressive Republicans set the agenda in Washington.

However, newly elected senator Barry Goldwater certainly was prepared to challenge the progressive conventional wisdom, and into the leadership vacuum left by Senator Taft’s death strode Goldwater.

Barry Goldwater didn’t have his roots in the old Midwest–Northeast Republican base that had fought and won the Civil War, as Senator Bob Taft did. Goldwater, from Arizona, was a successful businessman and a man of the New West; and he had new ideas about what being a conservative meant, but he didn’t yet have a national reputation or following.

As Eisenhower’s loyal vice president, Richard Nixon was reluctantly seen by the Republican establishment as the logical choice to carry the Republican banner in the 1960 election.