Part 4: 2016 THE REBIRTH OF AMERICA
The Outstanding article by Gary North which was presented in part 1. of this extended analysis explained why political and economic considerations must be secondary to moral ones when charting a nation's course. Part 2. explored the issue of morality, and Part 3. considered the options open to conservative voters in respect of the Romney candidacy.
In this concluding article, Part 4. John Hayward comments on Sarah Palin's address to CPAC, and Anand Giridharadas explores Palin's address at Indianola.These two observers present to a large degree the core of conservative "Palinism" which represents the morally grounded economic and political substance for the rebirth and renewal of America.
Of much interest is the fact that the leftist establishment journal, The New York Times, presented a report which saw much value in Palin's analysis, and even advised that it could have cross party, or even above party appeal.
I use the term "Palinism" as although Palin at present best represents the values required to bring about this renewal she is, of course, a mortal human being and these concepts are transcendent. Movement founders arise and depart and their value may be in that they commenced, or reinforced a new or incipient mood for change.
Further I want to get away from the idea that these articles are in any manner a "Palin support club" sort of thing. Certainly it would be exciting and challenging if in 2016 Palin was the nominee who as president could effect these changes. But that is not an end in itself, rather the transformative process, as initiated by Palin, is the key factor no matter who is the standard bearer.
With thanks to John Hayward (pictured) for permission to reprint parts of his outstanding analysis on Sarah Palin at CPAC from "Human Events".
CPAC 2012: Sarah Palin cleans out the Washington hot tub
By;John Hayward
"The door is open."
None of the Republican presidential candidates got anything like the response Sarah Palin earned from the CPAC crowd. Not even close. I lost count of the standing ovations.
Is it easier to get the whole crowd surging to its feet when you’re not a candidate, and nobody in the audience has an axe to grind? Maybe, but no other speaker at CPAC rocked the house like Palin did, either.
Could there be some residual protective affection warming a crowd that remembers how Palin was savaged during her days on the McCain ticket, and even more brutally attacked during the Left’s bizarre and despicable attempts to pin the Jared Loughner murders on her? Perhaps. Conservative audiences honor those who fight for their ideals, and never sell out. Selling out is easy. The rewards can be rich.
There aren’t enough inspiring, uncompromising heroes for a conservative audience to applaud. There’s a reason we’re still re-discovering Ronald Reagan through lectures and panel discussions, almost a quarter-century after his presidency ended, with people less than a quarter-century old filling the audiences.
But mostly I think Palin fires up a crowd because of her sincerity. At one point, she said the Republican presidential candidate should be someone “who instinctively turns right to Constitutional conservative principles,” and it’s “too late to teach that.” She has that instinct. She doesn’t have to check off any boxes or carefully plan her oratory to please a conservative audience. She understands. She makes it look easy. She makes you wonder how her countrymen could have been foolish enough to put Barack Obama in the White House, and what he’s still doing there.
It’s possible her observation that it’s too late to teach our presidential candidate how to turn Right was meant as a veiled jab at Mitt Romney. She didn’t endorse anyone, and she repeated her desire for the primary season to continue, because “in America, we believe that competition strengthens us.” Not surprisingly, given her experiences during and after the 2008 campaign, she has a dim view of campaign consultants.
“The federal government has never cast a bigger shadow,” Palin said, “so for the past three years we’ve been waving a bold banner that says ‘Don’t Tread On Me.’ You see, the Tea Party rose up because Americans rose up.” Has any presidential contender looking for the Tea Party vote summed them up so vividly, and succinctly?
Palin pointed out that Obama’s debt pile amounts to $135,000 worth of red ink for every taxpayer. It’s getting deeper at $3 million per minute, and Obama has “no plan to stop it… no plan… no budget. Going on 1000-and-some-odd days, and still no budget. He mucked it up. Folks, this government isn’t too big to fail. It’s too big to succeed. It’s too big to ignore, and it is too big to bear any more.”
What did we get for all that madcap spending? “Eight and a half percent unemployment, and 13 million Americans who can’t find work. 46 million living in poverty. Now, government dependency has gone up under Obama has gone up 23 percent, and for the first time in our history, folks are fearing that our future is going to be worse than our past.”
The President’s dead-end defenders have been reduced to squeaking that he did the best job anyone could have done, given the “mess he inherited.” It’s hard to imagine anyone doingworse than that muck-up, Barack Obama.
Palin described our grim state of affairs as, not a failure of the American people, but a failure of our leadership. “But we know how to change that… oh, yes we do. Oh, yes we can! ‘Hope and change?’ Yeah, you gotta hope things change.” Then she swiped “We Can’t Wait” for good measure.
Someone tried to heckle Palin, but the crowd blew them out of the room, first by chanting “USA!” and then by shouting Palin’s name. “See?” she declared happily. “You just won! See how easy that is?”
Another easy gift Palin gave the crowd was a glimpse into the future, which requires nothing more than reading the headlines from Europe. “If they keep trying to tax, and take, and spend our way to prosperity, we know where we’ll end up. Just look to the Old World to see the New World’s future. It’s a future of downsizing, and downturns, and downgrades. Now that’s the future of the far Left’s dreams. That’s not the American Dream. And, so help me God, it’s not a future we will ever accept!”
She’s good at laying out the conflict of visions, noting that President Obama’s last State of the Union speech was another raft of pie-in-the-sky promises, from a man who has already broken the government’s bank several times over. She zeroed in on Obama’s imperative to create “an economy that’s built to last,” saying that the last thing we want is for his horrible economy to last any longer. Instead, we need an “economy built to grow.” Re-distribution and creation are mutually exclusive. It really is about stasis vs. growth. Leave it to Sarah Palin to notice that Obama explicitly promises stasis. That’s what comes naturally to him.
Palin noticed that Obama’s mania for regulation somehow didn’t prevent the $1.2 billion disaster at MF Global, the investment firm run by his good friend, top contributor, economic guru, and Democrat Party stalwart Jon Corzine. Recalling Obama’s comment about Americans bitter clinging to God and guns, because they were frustrated with the pace of his big plans to change America, Palin said, “Keep your change. We’ll keep our God, our guns, and our Constitution.”
Time and again, she easily reduced Obama to the absurd and preposterous figure he is. At a CPAC forum earlier in the day, the value of humor as a political weapon was discussed. Liberal comedians absurdly insist they can’t find anything to mock about Obama because they know once Americans start laughing at him, they’ll never stop. Sarah Palin understands that as well as anyone in Hollywood.
She’s not just funny, but inspirational, in a no-nonsense “if not us, then who?” way. She finds the Obamanoids’ contempt for average Americas insulting, and their refusal to project both American strength and values abroad to be dangerous. From unborn children to the state of Israel, she doesn’t think anyone who deserves America’s protection should have to wonder about whether it will be there for them. “We will refuse to accept that a weaker America means a better and safer world,” Palin declared, cutting very close to the heart of what passes for “international community organizing” these days.
Palin observed that Washington D.C. has prospered, even as the rest of the economy withered, even though Washington makes nothing and produces nothing. The “Washington of the permanent political class” should not be “the playground for the government rich,” a place where “millionaires are minted overnight.” It’s ridiculous that such a place should be able to use envy and hatred of the rich as a weapon against the rest of us.
She joked that reclassifying the Washington swamp as a “wetland” might be the only thing that could slow down its growth, as such a designation would arouse the zero-growth EPA. She returned to the theme of “crony capitalism” she has often stressed, the “capitalism of connections, and of government bailouts, handouts and waste.” She fears “how many more Solyndras might be out there” as Obama repays the rest of his campaign debts. It’s funny how so many who come to D.C. “denouncing the cesspool of corruption” decide “it’s more like a hot tub” after a year or two. “And they’re hopping in and enjoying the Jacuzzi!”
The Tea Party victory in 2010 was the first step in draining that hot tub. Although dismissed and lied about, the Tea Party members of Congress “have kept their promises to the people who voted for them,” and “now they need reinforcements.” She expects the Republican hierarchy to reward those Tea Party stalwarts with leadership positions, after the reinforcements show up.
Above all, what Palin encourages is unity. She has no truck with those who would sit out the election because their favored candidate didn’t win. “For the sake of our country, we must stand united, no matter who our nominee is,” she declared. With victory in 2012 secure, “we will have a President who defends our American way of life, instead of apologizing for it. We will have a Commander-in-Chief worthy of our troops.”
“We are the heirs of patriots, who cast off the chains of tyranny,” Palin concluded. It is freedom that makes us exceptional, and protecting that freedom is an exceptional duty. It always has been as simple as that. The guys who muck everything up are the ones who make it sound complicated. They’ve got a billion reasons why you shouldn’t kick them out of that hot tub.
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PALIN IN INDIANOLAYeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.
We’re here because America is at a tipping point. America faces a crisis. And it’s not a crisis like perhaps a Midwest summer storm – the kind that moves in and hits hard, but then it moves on. No, this kind will relentlessly rage until we do restore all that is free and good and right about America. It’s not just fear of a double dip recession. And it’s not even the shame of a credit downgrade for the first time in U.S. history. It’s deeper than that. This is a systemic crisis due to failed policies and incompetent leadership. And we’re going to speak truth today. It may be hard-hitting, but we’re going to speak truth today because we need to start talking about what hasn’t worked, and we’re going to start talking about what will work for America. We will talk truth.
Candidate Obama pledged to fundamentally transform America. And for all the failures and the broken promises, that’s the one thing he has delivered on. We’ve transformed from a country of hope to one of anxiety. Today, one in five working-age men are out of work. One in seven Americans are on food stamps. Thirty percent of our mortgages are underwater. In parts of Michigan and California, they’re suffering from unemployment numbers that are greater than during the depths of the Great Depression. Barack Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and instead he turned around and he tripled it. And now our national debt is growing at $3 million a minute. That’s $4.25 billion a day.
He wants to “Win The Future” by “investing” more of your hard-earned money in some harebrained ideas like more solar panels and really fast trains. These are things that venture capitalists will tell you are non-starters, yet he wants to do more of them. We’re flat broke, but he thinks these solar panels and really fast trains are going to magically save us. He’s shouting “all aboard Obama’s bullet train to bankruptcy
Now to be fair, some GOP candidates also raised mammoth amounts of cash, and we need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect in return for their “investments”? We need to know this because our country can’t afford more trillion-dollar “thank you” notes to campaign backers. It is an important question, and it cuts to the heart of our problem. And I speak from experience in confronting the corruption and the crony capitalism since starting out in public office 20 years ago. I've been out-spent in my campaigns two to one, three to one, five to one.
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Palinism is a blend of Jeffersonian/ Madisonian and Jacksonian democratic, states rights, and small government principles allied to modern low taxation, small government, strong armed forces Reaganism.
From Jefferson's First Inaugural Address;
About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.
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