Feder's Rules For A Conservative Resurgence – Part III
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
02/07/2013
Conservatives need a new playbook. Our principles are sound (time-tested, some would say, because they’re eternal), but unless we want to keep getting our brains beaten out in the political arena, we need better strategies – guidelines for winning in the new century.
Our enemies may not understand the way the world works, but they are fiends when it comes to political organizing. I witnessed this first-hand with the student protest movement of the ‘60s, and saw it morph in the ‘70s, when the New Left took over the Democratic Party.
The past election was a debacle, due in part to the dud at the top of the Republican ticket and in part to the fact that we woefully underestimated the opposition. It bounced back spectacularly from its losses in 2000, 2004 and 2010. The left is now more entrenched, better funded and more determined than ever before.
The hour is late and the stakes could not be higher. We are on the verge of losing America forever. We need to honestly confront our past mistakes and move into the next election cycle fired by determination but free of illusions.
Here is Feder’s Rules for a Conservative Resurgence, Part III. (Links to Parts I and II follow.) It’s based on half a century of political activism and commentary.
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
02/07/2013
Conservatives need a new playbook. Our principles are sound (time-tested, some would say, because they’re eternal), but unless we want to keep getting our brains beaten out in the political arena, we need better strategies – guidelines for winning in the new century.
Our enemies may not understand the way the world works, but they are fiends when it comes to political organizing. I witnessed this first-hand with the student protest movement of the ‘60s, and saw it morph in the ‘70s, when the New Left took over the Democratic Party.
The past election was a debacle, due in part to the dud at the top of the Republican ticket and in part to the fact that we woefully underestimated the opposition. It bounced back spectacularly from its losses in 2000, 2004 and 2010. The left is now more entrenched, better funded and more determined than ever before.
The hour is late and the stakes could not be higher. We are on the verge of losing America forever. We need to honestly confront our past mistakes and move into the next election cycle fired by determination but free of illusions.
Here is Feder’s Rules for a Conservative Resurgence, Part III. (Links to Parts I and II follow.) It’s based on half a century of political activism and commentary.
22. Don’t Limit Your “Activism” to Forwarding E-mails –The Internet can be a marvelous device for advancing conservative values. Unfortunately, too many conservatives spend altogether too much time doing nothing more than reading prophesies of apocalyptic doom, forwarding the same to all of their contacts and writing blogs with a combined readership of three. Frequently, I’ll get the same e-mail five or six times in the course of a day. One would have been more than enough.
There are useful things you can do on the Internet. You can make contributions to worthy candidates and organizations doing good work. You can distribute notices of lectures, rallies and conference calls. You can submit a letter to the editor.
But life doesn’t begin and end with the Internet. You can call your Congressman and other elected officials. (Nothing beats a live voice for making an impact. Unlike e-mails, which many Congressional offices don’t even bother to read, staffers do keep track of phone calls and FAXes.) Go to a Tea Party rally or campaign event. Better yet, do volunteer work for a conservative candidate or a referendum campaign.
Frequently, the Internet provides the illusion of forward motion when all we’re doing is running in place.
23. Make America Your Cause – More than the free market, limited government or even the Constitution, our cause is America (which encompasses all three and more). Don’t be shy about proclaiming it.
Only conservatives are true to this nation’s founding principles. We are proud of America’s history and heritage. We are the ones keeping faith with the brave men who fought and died for America at Concord and Gettysburg, in the Argonne, on Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal. We are the heirs of Washington, Adams, Lincoln and Reagan. We see America as they did – as the greatest blessing to humanity in the modern age and the one hope for the future.
Leftists are traitors of the heart. If only subconsciously, they feel guilty for America’s greatness, which they believe is based on exploitation at home and abroad. They habitually side with our enemies, whether it’s Castro, the Viet Cong, the Sandinistas or Islamists. Their agenda forces them to betray America’s ideals – equal justice, freedom of expression and association, free enterprise and private property, the right to worship God as we see fit, the sanctity of home and family, and the right to self-defense.
Because he’s a doctrinaire leftist, Obama is also anti-American, witness his refusal to endorse the concept of American Exceptionalism. He views this nation as a bastion of racists, xenophobes, fundamentalists and gun nuts who need to be saved from themselves by the elite.
Americans are among the most patriotic people on earth – with good cause. Even a steady drumbeat of revisionist propaganda from public education, academia and the media hasn’t changed that. We saw an outpouring of love of country in the aftermath of 9/11. It’s easier to rally our countrymen with appeals to patriotism than with lower marginal tax rates.
We should regularly remind our fellow citizens that we are fighting for America. The left is fighting against her.
24. Never Underestimate the Opposition – After surprise Republican victories in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts and the tsunami on Election Day 2010, Republicans convinced themselves that 2012 was going to be a cakewalk. According to this script, Obama was the most despised president in history – a demonstrable failure economically, a catastrophe on foreign policy – arrogant, cold and unlikable to boot, and with a buffoon as a running mate. All true, but so what if the GOP nominee isn’t willing to say it?
As Election Day 2012 approached, Republican pundits vied with each other to make the most extravagant predictions. Karl Rove said Romney would win with 279 electoral votes and 51% of the popular vote, to 48% for the president. Dick Morris predicted a landslide for Romney and a 53-47 Republican majority in the Senate. Obama was reelected by 51% of the vote to Romney’s 47.2%, and swept the Electoral College 332 to 206. Democrats picked up two Senate seats, increasing their numbers in the upper chamber to 53.
The pundits missed a few minor details: Obama had a significant fundraising advantage (taking in over $1.1 billion in the 2012 election cycle). The president played a strong offense to Romney’s weak defense. The latter thought he could coast to victory with we-can’t-afford-four-more-years. Team Obama was spectacularly successful in putting together a gimme coalition and turning them out to vote.
Republicans were swayed by opinion polls (about as reliable as weather forecasts from witch doctors), crowd size at campaign stops and the sheer force of logic (“How could voters conceivably re-elect a president who” – fill in the blank) – none of which ultimately mattered.
The right also suffered from an echo chamber effect. Most of us spent so much time on conservative websites, listening to conservative talk radio and watching Fox News that we managed to convince ourselves that there was no way on earth that Obama could win. We failed to consider the unthinkable.
25 Don’t Overestimate It Either – Having tragically underestimated him in 2012, many conservatives are now determined to overestimate the president, by convincing themselves that after winning with 51% of the vote against the weakest candidate in memory, Obama and his leftist allies are suddenly invincible.
According to the conservative blogosphere, Obama will shortly confiscate every privately owned firearm in the United States, import the entire population of Mexico, nationalize every business with more than three employees, tax away all income above $100,000 per annum and build huge detention camps for dissidents – and get way with it.
Take a deep breath. Obama may be a great campaigner but he's terrible at governing. Unlike Bill Clinton, he’s incapable of tacking toward the middle to achieve a political advantage. (With Obama, ideology is everything.) While they may often be weak and foolish, Republicans have a solid majority in the House and three-fifths of the governorships.
On issue after issue, the public is with us – whether it’s the need to reduce public spending rather than raise taxes (73%, Rasmussen 2012), a belief in the Second Amendment rights (two-thirds, Public Opinion Research, 2012), a demand for border security instead of amnesties (63%, Rasmussen 2012) or a desire to prohibit all or most abortions (62%, Gallup 2011).
Obama believes his own PR in the mainstream media – that he’s the best communicator and most savvy strategist since FDR and Reagan. We can count on the president to overplay his hand, as he’s doing now with immigration, marriage, his war on the Second Amendment and his nomination of Palestinian flak Chuck Hagel.
With the jobless rate rising again (and long-term unemployment seemingly intractable) and the debt bomb about to explode, Obama could end up presiding over the worst economy since the Great Depression, which will do nothing for his popularity.
If we remain true to our principles, truth and logic will win out.
26. Don’t Circulate Wild Rumors And Charges Without Substance – Someone sent me an e-mail that claimed all of those involved in the more notorious mass shootings of late (Columbine, Ft. Hood, Tucson, Virginia Tech , Aurora, Sandy Hook) were registered Democrats or the children of leftists. Sounds great, but there’s not a scintilla of evidence to support it.
Some of the killers lived in states without partisan registration. One was a resident alien. Several were so psychotic that they probably didn’t know which planet they were on. (Aside, it is true that most religiously-inspired murderers, here and abroad, are motivated by Islam, including Major Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood killer.)
The conspiracy theories revolving around Dear Leader are legion and increasingly bizarre.
Based on a conversation that’s impossible to verify (as reported by someone no one had ever heard of before), the administration supposedly is asking senior military leaders if they’d be willing to order troops to fire on civilians. If true, how long could that be kept a secret? The truth about Obama is ugly and scary enough that there’s really no need for doomsday fantasies.
All too many of us automatically forward the most outrageous allegations without even bothering to ask if they’ve been verified (and based on what evidence?). Conservatives should cultivate a reputation for accuracy and clarity, not hysteria.
Except for professional researchers, few of us have the time to try to thoroughly document every charge leveled against Obama and the left. But if you want to be believed, at the very least, look for credible documentation. If nothing else, apply the sniff test. (Does it smell bad?) In the famous words of an unknown British civil servant during World War II, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
27. Don’t Adopt the Language of The Left – If you do, you’ve needlessly surrendered territory that may never be recovered. Words shape thinking. Once the left got people talking about “gays” instead of “homosexuals,” they’d gone a long way toward normalizing what once was overwhelmingly considered deviant.
Are the hordes streaming across our southern border illegal aliens or undocumented workers? (What happened to their documents? Did they lose them wading across the Rio Grande?) Is it a tax hike or revenue enhancement – which is akin to calling torture “enhanced interrogation”? Is the object of abortion an unborn childor the products of conception? Does Diane Feinstein want gun control or firearms prohibition? Are an unmarried couple sharing a roof and a bed fornicating or cohabiting? Are we increasing spendingor addressing unmet needs? Are we spending money we don’t have, or investing in the future? Are we combating hate speech orengaging in censorship?
Conservatives often promote liberal ideas by unthinkingly adopting leftist labels. Every totalitarian movement has succeeded, at least initially, by getting the public to accept expressions that contained built-in assumptions. Conservative who acquiesce to liberal word-games make a terrible mistake.
Don’t sugarcoat the awful truth. Gay is an expression denoting mirth and joy. Homosexuality spreads disease and frequently results in untimely death.
Insist that the public debate be conducted in language that reflects reality. Don’t let the opposition hide its agenda behind a smokescreen of euphemisms and clichés.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website,DonFeder.com.
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