MUTH’S TRUTHS

For those who said the early caucus in Nevada wouldn’t hold any significance, note that it knocked GOP candidate Duncan Hunter out of the race and perhaps sealed Hillary Clinton’s nomination on the Democrat side. Why? Because for Democrats, Nevada’s caucus was all about Big Labor. And the biggest, most active labor union in the state - the Culinary Union - rolled the dice and sided with Barack Obama. And they crapped out. As Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post put it yesterday:

“The influential Las Vegas (Culinary) union came into today’s caucuses with a lot on the line. A win for Obama would have affirmed the union as the most powerful force in Nevada Democratic politics. The loss, however, and the depth of the defeat along the Vegas Strip — where Culinary was supposed to be at its most powerful — is sure to stoke talk among Silver State politicos that the emperor has no clothes.”

If the Culinary couldn’t take out Hillary, it’s highly unlikely anyone else can. Sure Barack will still likely win South Carolina’s Democrat primary there this week, where half the voting population is black like he (sorta) is. But how many other states are that black-friendly. Indeed, many states will be more influenced by the Hispanic voter than the black voter - and Hillary chalked up the Hispanic vote in Nevada, as well.

Which brings us to yesterday’s GOP South Carolina primary, where Fred Thompson’s disappointing showing likely marks at least the beginning of the end of his run for the gold. Which prompted blogger Jeff Goldstein to write what I suspect a large and growing number of conservatives are similarly thinking today:

“I will not, will not, vote for John McCain. I will not, will not, vote for Mike Huckabee. . . . I *might* hold my nose and vote for Mitt Romney, but to be perfectly honest, I have no confidence in him… Which means that if Fred Thompson drops out of the race, I’m resigning myself to a Democratic presidency in 2008 - and to the years of pain that will follow should the Dems maintain control of both the Executive and Legislative branches of government. Who knows? Maybe they even get the courts, too.”

Goldstein failed to note that Rudy Giuliani is still, barely, in the running for the GOP nomination and has placed all his eggs in the Florida basket next week. But for every fiscal conservative for whom Rudy might be considered an acceptable alternative to McCain or Huckabee, two social conservatives would bolt the reservation. So again, hello Democrat president.

Which brings us back to Mitt Romney as the only possible alternative to the bad prospect of John McCain as the GOP nominee, or the even worse prospect of Mike Huckabee.

Side Note: For all those hard-headed knuckleheads who still think Huckabee is a limited-government “conservative,” get a load of this quote this week from the man-who-would-be-Reagan advocating for the end of independent political involvement by Americans in U.S. elections:

“I personally wish that all of this (independent expenditures) were outlawed. I think that every candidate ought to speak for himself, and that everything that involves the candidate’s name or another candidate’s name should be authorized and approved by that candidate, otherwise it shouldn’t be spoken.”

In other words, if, for example, Americans for Tax Reform wanted to run an a radio ad truthfully telling voters that Mike Huckabee raised taxes a bunch of times as governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee doesn’t think they should be allowed to do so. He thinks such free speech by taxpayer groups should be outlawed. You know, like John McCain - only worse.

Anyone who still thinks Mike Huckabee is a limited-government conservative is not only smoking something illegal, they’re inhaling deeply and washing it down with Kool-Aid.

So again, limited-government conservatives’ last best hope in this 2008 GOP presidential selection process appears to be Mitt Romney. But if his post-victory rhetoric after the Michigan primary this week is any indication…peeee-yew! Get a load of this from Jeff Jacoby, the Boston Globe’s token conservative columnist, this morning…

“Consider some recent sound bites:

* ‘You said we would fight for every job! You said that we would fight to get health care for all Americans! You said we’d fight to secure our border! You said we’d fight for us to be able to get lower taxes for middle-income Americans!’

* ‘Guess what they’re doing in Washington: They’re worrying, because they realize, the lobbyists and the politicians realize, that America now understands that Washington is broken. And we’re going to do something about it.’

* ‘Washington told us that they’d get us better health care and better education — but they haven’t. Washington told us they’d get us a tax break for the middle-income Americans — but they haven’t.’

“You don’t have to be a political junkie to recognize those as specimens of populist Democratic boilerplate, right? The only challenge is to match each quotation to the Democratic candidate who said it. Except that no Democrat uttered those words. The three big-government platitudes above were taken from Republican Mitt Romney’s Michigan primary victory speech on Tuesday.

“No one is surprised when Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards insists that it’s the federal government’s responsibility to ‘get us better health care and better education.’ Coming from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the claim that the Bush tax cuts shortchanged middle-income Americans is all too familiar. But from a Republican like Romney, who casts himself as the truest, most Reaganesque conservative in the GOP field?

“Romney’s message used to be one of unabashed small-government conservatism: ‘Government is simply too big. State government is too big. The federal government is too big. It’s spending too much.’ Those words still appear on his website, but there was nothing like them in his remarks last week. He told his supporters that Washington is broken and needs to be fixed — which is decidedly not the same as saying it needs to be shrunk.”

Pretty darned depressing, isn’t it?

In conclusion, let me mention Ron Paul, since failure to do so, in itself, is enough to elicit oodles of hate emails from his small but passionate corps of supporters. And let me remind everyone that I’m a Ron Paul supporter. I contributed money to his presidential campaign this year. Twice. And I’ve been a Ron Paul fan since long before many of his supporters today had even heard of him. In other words, I was a Ron Paulite before being a Ron Paulite was cool.

But come on, folks, the party’s over.

Ron Paul will not get the GOP presidential nomination unless every one of the remaining candidates drops dead. Or even then. His political future - along with those of us who still harbor the “radical” notion that when it comes to a strictly limited federal government, the Founders actually had it right - lies elsewhere.

So it appears at this juncture that no matter who the Republicans nominate in the coming weeks, the ONLY chance they have of remaining in control of the executive branch is if Hillary Clinton is the Democrat nominee, which after yesterday again appears inevitable.

Enough limited-government conservatives *might* just hold their noses and vote for whoever the Republican candidate turns out to be just to keep the Arkansas Hill-Billies out of the White House. Then again, maybe limited-government conservatives will look back at history and recall that it took the colossal hell-in-a-handbasket foreign and domestic policy failure of the one-term Carter administration to make Ronald Reagan possible.

So while the 2008 nominating process is all but over, the search for a true limited-government conservative 2012 GOP candidate to pry the Clintons’ interns out from under the Oval Office desk is about to begin. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Posted on January 20th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: National