We hear so much about the counterinsurgency strategy Gen. David
Petraeus has pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have lost track of
another insurgency that’s being fought here between conservatives
and the Republican establishment.
Conservatives will win this battle. The only question is
whether we will win it in time to reform the Republican Party and
defeat Obama two years from now.
In some ways it’s like 1976, when conservatives fell short
of nominating Ronald Reagan. Then, as my friend and editor Wlady
Pleszczynski reminds me, conservatives were less organized and most
Americans were still thinking in the terms of 1972, when the
“Silent Majority” had to choose between the counter-cultural
McGoverniks and Richard Nixon, who to the media was — if not the
devil himself —at least the devil’s first cousin. But it is like
1976 in the fact that Barack Obama is as much a counter-cultural
force as were Obama’s pal Bill Ayers, Jane Fonda, and the others
who were the faces of angry liberalism in their day.
As a new Rasmussen poll shows, “conservative” is still the
most positive political label, “liberal” the least popular and “Tea
Party candidate” the most influential. The media — with the help
of the conservative establishment and RINO party switchers like
Charlie Crist and Lisa Murkowski — are desperately working to make
“Tea Party” synonymous with “extremist” and “radical.” They are
suffering a case of the vapors over the “civil war” within the
Republican Party, as CNN’s Candy Crowley called the conservative
insurgency yesterday.
In some ways it’s also like 1992 and 1996 when Ross
Perot’s independents tried to run against the Republican
establishment and only succeeded in providing Bill Clinton with the
margins he needed to defeat his Republican opponents. But this year
huge numbers of voters are politically active for the first time.
They are angry for many of the same reasons the Perotistas were,
but this time — because people feel that the government no longer
represents them (see, e.g. Obamacare, which most Americans opposed
and still want repealed), the continuing economic slump and fear of
the long-term damage created by Obama’s spending tsunami — voters
are taking this election personally.
I remember a conversation I had about a year ago with
Republican chairmen from big states. When I asked them what they
were doing to capture the energy of the Tea Parties, there was dead
silence on the other end of the phone. Only the Texas chairman had
a good answer. They, and most of the Republican congressional
leaders, didn’t understand the need to reach out to the
independents and turn their energy into votes. It only got worse
when this year’s primary season began.
From the outset, the Republican establishment has chosen
to fight the conservative insurgency rather than support it or even
stay out of the fight until a nominee is chosen.
Fresh from its giving monetary support to Arlen Specter’s
campaign before he switched parties, the Republican Senatorial
Campaign Committee, led by the otherwise admirable Sen. John Cornyn
(R-Tex.) launched an unprecedented interference in primary
races.
The NRSC threw its financial support very early to Charlie
Crist, who was no match for Marco Rubio, and went on to support a
whole string of establishmentarian losers: Jane Norton in Colorado,
Sue Lowden in Nevada, Trey Grayson in Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski in
Alaska who lost to John Miller (Cornyn’s team had sent attorneys to
Alaska as well as money to help save Murkowski from Miller), and
most recently Mike Castle in Delaware.
Sen. Cornyn should tell us how much money has been wasted
on defending establishment candidates and now cannot be thrown in
to support the conservatives in their races against the
Democrats.
And it’s not only in Senate races in which the
establishment has taken a beating. In the New York gubernatorial
primary, tough-talking conservative Carl Paladino left
establishment candidate Rick Lazio looking like the coyote in Road
Runner cartoons, lying flat on his face with footprints up his
back.
The reason conservatives will win over the establishment
Republican/media counterinsurgency is explained in the book that is
reportedly Gen. Petraeus’s bible: Counterinsurgency Warfare,
Theory and Practice,” an obscure 1964 work by French Lt. Col.
David Galula who learned counterinsurgency first-hand in China,
Greece, Indochina, and Algeria.
One of the most important features of a successful
insurgency, Galula wrote, is that the insurgent has to espouse a
cause that the counterinsurgent cannot or can only do so by losing
power. The 2010 conservative insurgency has two such causes, and
the Republican establishment is so unsure of what principles it
stands for that it cannot bring itself to join conservative
insurgents in those causes.
The first of the insurgents’ causes is to reduce the size
and cost of government. Opposition to Obamacare and outrage at
Obama’s spending spree is what created the Tea Party. Suffering a
grand mal seizure of denial, Democratic Party Chairman Tim
Kaine said in a CNN interview yesterday that Tea Party candidates’
radicalism doesn’t appeal to independent voters. Kaine cannot seem
to admit that the vast majority of the Tea Partyers are
independents. Will the congressmen and senators who voted for
Obamacare over the objections of most voters fare better with Tea
Partyers than those candidates who promise to repeal it?
Small government conservatism — Reagan conservatism, the
conservatism of Thomas Paine — doesn’t register any better with
Republican establishmentarians than it does with Gov. Kaine. A
redundant proof, as RET’s recent
column pointed out, was in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s
(R-Ohio) concession a week ago that he’d support repeal of some of
the Bush tax cuts. Boehner thus made it impossible for
conservatives to hold the line against Obama and Pelosi. Boehner
cut the legs out from under the faux-moderate Democratic “Blue
Dogs” who might have helped block the repeal. Boehner may have a
rough time with newly elected conservatives in January, whether or
not he has the opportunity to achieve the House speakership he
covets.
The other cause that conservative insurgents espouse is
the support for social values — everything from abortion to the
military’s ban on openly-serving homosexuals — which the
Republican establishment wants to ignore. The massive August 28
Glenn Beck rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial was an appeal to
the religious element of America that is another massive element
abandoned by Republican establishmentarians and even some
conservatives looking toward 2012.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels needs to rethink his call for a
“truce” on social issues while economic issues are resolved.
Independent voters — like those at the Glenn Beck rally — won’t
tolerate a truce with the counter-cultural Democrats who want to
repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” and impose amnesty for some illegal
aliens with the “DREAM Act.”
The 2010 election is ineluctably the foundation for 2012.
In the summer of 2009, when the Tea Party movement burst on the
political scene, the Republican establishment could have taken to
heart Lee Iacocca’s admonition to lead, follow, or get out of the
way. Because they rejected the first two options and won’t
willingly follow the third, the conservative insurgency will
succeed. Just how fast it does depends on what the voters do in 43
days.
