I hear many conservatives these days talking about following the example of their forbears who escaped tyranny in Europe by fleeing to America.\u00a0 They\u2019re reading books about a quieter, more stress-free life in Costa Rica, Ecuador, or Panama.\u00a0 At the other end of the spectrum we have those who\u2019ve given up on the idea that Republicans will ever have the guts to go toe-to-toe with Obama and his criminal gang.\u00a0 They\u2019re in a stand-and-fight mode, hoping either for secession or a second American civil war.\u00a0 I tend to find myself in both camps, depending on what day it is, but allow me to offer a heretofore overlooked theory that may cause us all to reconsider.<\/p>\n
As political pundits speculate about the possibility of a Hillary Clinton run for the White House in 2016, it becomes clearer and clearer that, beginning sometime prior to 2008, Democrats made a critical strategic decision.\u00a0 Since they were unlikely to ever again elect a president based on ideology\u2026 because it simply is not possible to ram a blatantly liberal agenda down the throats of a population that is largely conservative\u2026 they concluded that the only way they could win back the White House was by engaging in political \u201cgimmickry.\u201d<\/p>\n
But first some history.\u00a0 Looking back to the Vietnam era\u2026 the first major pivot point in U.S. political history since the end of World War II\u2026 they found that Republicans had occupied the White House for 28 years, while they had controlled the White House for only 12\u2026 and those were not particularly satisfying years for rank-and-file Democrats or for liberal ideologues.<\/p>\n
Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), was not a \u201cbig picture\u201d leader.\u00a0 Unlike Nixon or Reagan, Carter was a micro-manager, and although he was the \u201ccream of the crop\u201d among the eight who sought the nomination in 1976, he turned out to be the sort of man who would dole out the paper, pencils, and paperclips from the White House supply closet.\u00a0 And when he failed to take decisive action to rescue the fifty-two Americans held hostage for 444 days by radical Islamists in Tehran, he caused major damage to the Democrat brand and was defeated for reelection in 1980.<\/p>\n
Bill Clinton (1993-2001), owed the greatest success of his presidency to Newt Gingrich and a Republican-controlled Congress.\u00a0 However, welfare reform was not popular among Democrats who\u2019d spent more than four decades creating a permanent underclass of poor and disadvantaged who populated the Democrats\u2019 welfare plantation and who were all reliable Democrat voters.\u00a0 To the extent that millions of Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum discovered that the \u201cpursuit of happiness\u201d in America was all about becoming independent and self-supporting, the ranks of the Democrat Party shrunk proportionately.\u00a0 A simple cause-and-effect analysis proves that, as more people realize the American Dream, the fewer Democrats there are.<\/p>\n
Coupled with the fact that Clinton was only the second president in American history to be impeached, the failure of his healthcare reform effort in his first two years in office, and the success of his Republican-sponsored welfare reform program in the last two years of his first term, put his presidency in a less than favorable light among many rank-and-file Democrats.<\/p>\n
With all of these things in mind, and with George W. Bush nearing the end of his second term, Democrats apparently concluded that the only way they could guarantee a return to power in the White House was by engaging in political \u201cgimmickry.\u201d\u00a0 They would have to nominate either an electable black man or an electable white woman.<\/p>\n
The black male \u201cgimmick\u201d Democrats chose was Barack Obama, an inexperienced and totally unprincipled \u201ccommunity organizer.\u201d \u00a0It was irrelevant to Democrats that, had they hired an executive search firm to evaluate the eligibility, experience, and leadership capacity of the 1,000 most able black men in America, Obama\u2019s name would not have appeared on that list.<\/p>\n
Not only was he ineligible to serve as president\u2026 he is not a natural born citizen\u2026 he couldn\u2019t produce a valid birth certificate, he used a stolen Social Security number, his draft registration card was forged, and he couldn\u2019t pass a simple Social Security E-Verify test.\u00a0 However, he was an attractive man with an engaging smile\u2026 Joe Biden once described Obama as \u201cthe first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy\u201d\u2026 and although he is incapable of delivering a simple declaratory sentence, extemporaneously, he has been trained to read a speech from a teleprompter with such conviction that low-information voters will swear he knows exactly what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n
In short, Democrats didn\u2019t care that Obama was ineligible to serve or that he had no relevant experience.\u00a0 What the Obama gimmick was all about was his ability to charm low-information voters into voting for him.\u00a0 No other black male Democrat in America had a snowball\u2019s chance of being nominated or elected.\u00a0 Obama was, and is, a one-of-a-kind political \u201cgimmick.\u201d<\/p>\n
The white female \u201cgimmick\u201d Democrats offered up was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the carpet-bagging U.S. senator from New York.\u00a0 To enumerate the many shady escapades of Rodham-Clinton\u2019s adult life would require a book.\u00a0 However, to recall just a few, we can begin with her highly questionable commodity futures trading experience.\u00a0 In 1978, while serving as first lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was able to turn an initial investment of $5,000 into a $100,000 windfall in just ten months, relying on the cattle futures trading advice of an attorney for Tyson Foods, Inc., one of Arkansas\u2019s largest corporations.<\/p>\n
In late 1998, with more than two years remaining in her husband\u2019s second term, New York Democrats were not confident that they could defeat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the likely Republican candidate, for the open U.S. Senate seat.\u00a0 Unable to recruit a New Yorker with real star power, they began to focus on potential carpetbaggers.\u00a0 Several top Democrats urged first lady Hillary Clinton<\/a> to move to New York to run for the Democratic nomination.<\/p>\n After winning the senate nomination unopposed, Clinton campaigned heavily in the large and influential New York Jewish community.\u00a0 Six weeks after the 2000 election she participated in a 45-minute meeting with her husband and Rabbi David Twersky, of New Square, New York, a Hasidic community that had given Hillary 1,400 votes to only 12 for her Republican opponent. The Rabbi pleaded the case of four New Square men who had been convicted of bilking the federal government out of some $30 million in federal housing subsidies.\u00a0 In one of the most controversial decisions of his last day in office, Clinton granted clemency to all four of the men.<\/p>\n Another major constituency Hillary needed was the New York Puerto Rican community.\u00a0 So it was quite fortuitous that, on August 11, 1999, her husband commuted the sentences of sixteen members of FALN<\/a>, a violent Puerto Rican<\/a> terror group that set off 120 bombs, mostly in New York <\/a>and Chicago<\/a>, killing six and maiming dozens more, many of them police officers. \u00a0The sixteen men were convicted of conspiracy and sedition and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 35 to 105 years.\u00a0 During her campaign, Hillary initially supported the commutation but when the commutations backfired on her husband she withdrew her support.<\/p>\n But now, as Hillary ponders a second run in 2016, and as Democrats, generally, feel that Hillary is still owed something big because of her courage in standing by her philandering husband, she is once again embroiled in controversy.\u00a0 Apparently as a means of assuaging any bitterness that remained after her loss to Obama in 2008, she agreed to serve as Obama\u2019s secretary of state.\u00a0 And although liberals and Democrats are fond of proclaiming her to be \u201cone of the greatest secretaries in history,\u201d the fact is that she had little or no impact on U.S. foreign policy during her four-year tenure.\u00a0 During her four years at the State Department she was given a large staff, an airplane, and an unlimited expense account and told to just travel.<\/p>\n And while she visited most capitols on the globe and participated in thousands of photo-ops\u2026 exactly what Obama wanted her to do\u2026 he and his pro-Islamic aides conducted U.S. foreign policy out of the Oval Office.\u00a0 And when a U.S. ambassador and three others were murdered by Islamic terrorists\u2026 all on her watch\u2026 Clinton insisted to the surviving families that the attack was in response to an obscure Internet video, promising that she and Obama would bring the murderers to justice.\u00a0 The fact is, she was such a non-entity as Secretary of State that her own Benghazi Accountability Review Board didn\u2019t even bother to interview her.<\/p>\n The thing that conservatives and Republicans need to recognize is that Obama and Hillary are nothing more than political \u201cgimmicks.\u201d\u00a0 Democrats reasoned that whichever one lost in 2008 would be all but a shoo-in for the 2016 nomination.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not the way things are turning out.\u00a0 All Hillary has accomplished in four years at the State Department is to further damage her already shaky credibility.\u00a0 As the Benghazi cover-up continues to unravel and more and more whistleblowers step forward, her political prospects grow dimmer and dimmer.<\/p>\n Since George W. Bush left the White House in January 2009, the Democrat Party has been a \u201cone-trick pony.\u201d\u00a0 The American people have now seen that trick and they\u2019re not likely to want to sit through an encore, with Hillary as the star performer.\u00a0 So, take heart, patriots, take a long hard look at the Democrat Party.\u00a0 What you\u2019ll likely find is that they only had two political \u201cgimmicks\u201d worthy of mention; they don\u2019t have a third waiting in the wings.\u00a0 And if they should try to create a Hispanic \u201cgimmick\u201d between now and 2016, they\u2019ll soon find that Republicans now have Hispanics who can easily top theirs.\u00a0 Unlike Hillary and Obama, Hispanic Republicans are true patriots, men and women of real quality.\u00a0 They are not \u201cgimmicks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hear many conservatives these days talking about following the example of their forbears who escaped tyranny in Europe by fleeing to America.\u00a0 They\u2019re reading books about a quieter, more stress-free life in Costa Rica, Ecuador, or Panama.\u00a0 At the … Continue reading