Conservatives and Republicans need new principled leaders who will go off defense and go on offense

Remarks at Freedom Fest 2008

Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.Com

Bally’s Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada

Friday, July 11, 2008

Americans are troubled and America is in trouble, domestically and around the globe.

More than any time in memory, most of the leaders of America’s major institutions have failed us, many have lied to us, and some have betrayed us.

And the people know it.

·        82% of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction.

·        66% disapprove of President Bush’s performance.

·        9% approve of Congress.

·        86% believe the news media try to influence public opinion…

while fewer than 20% believe most or all news media reporting.

Never in the history of America have our leaders failed us in so many big ways:

·        The mortgage crisis

·        Government schools that don’t educate but do indoctrinate students to believe in a socialist, secular world view

·        America being dependent on the likes of the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez for our energy supplies, a dependency that transfers hundreds of billions of dollars yearly to America’s enemies

·        Over $59 trillion of unfunded obligations (that is, debt)

·        Programs such as ethanol – enriching a few while raising the price of food for all, causing starvation in many parts of the world and harming the environment in the name of protecting it

·        Judges legislating from the bench and issuing decisions according to their personal likes and dislikes, ignoring the Constitution (Remember the Kelo decision)

·        Politicians and bureaucrats who ride roughshod over the rights of Americans by ignoring the Constitution

·        Wars without end and wars fought in violation of the Constitution

·        Campaign laws and ballot access laws that are really designed to protect Republican and Democrat incumbents from competition, to protect the monopoly shared by the Republican and Democratic professional politicians, and to protect big institutions from grassroots Americans

One after another of America’s major institutions are rocked with scandals and corruption:

·        Sports

·        Big business and unions

·        Organized religion

·        The legal profession

·        The education establishment

·        Financial institutions

·        Big media

·        And perhaps the worst of all, our government

Almost daily we read of another politician at the federal, state, or local level being forced to resign because of a crime or other scandal.

Power has corrupted Republicans and Democrats. Absolute power corrupted the Republicans absolutely when they had all power during through most of the Bush administration. And if Obama wins the White House and Congress this November we can count on the Democrats doing likewise – becoming absolutely corrupt.

In the case of Republicans, they became that which they beheld.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Republicans beheld the corruption of the Democrats and their abuse of power.   Republicans promised to change things, and the people voted the Democrats out, and the Republicans in. But soon, the GOP became corrupt. Soon, the Republican majority in Congress was abusing power just like Democrats. And the Republicans became that which they beheld.

In the late 1950s, as chairman of the Young Republicans in Harris County (Houston) Texas, I would hear the party leaders talk about

·        Government being too big,

·        Government spending too much money,

…and about how we must shrink government programs, and abolish this or that government agency.

Government, they said, was the problem, not the solution.

And that sounded right to me; it sounded good to me.

And I continued to hear that in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, '90s from Republicans at all levels of government.

But all that talk stopped in January 2001 when the Republicans took the White House, and held the Senate and the House of Representatives.

You could almost hear Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, Trent Lott, Karl Rove, George W. Bush and friends say:

·        “Just kidding.”

·        “We didn’t mean it.”

You could almost hear them say, “What we meant was that we didn’t want the Democrats spending the money – but now that we can spend the money any way we want, let’s blow the doors off the bank vault and spend and spend and get re-elected and re-elected.”

I can visualize a meeting in Karl Rove’s White House office in January 2001 with the Republican leadership to decide on a governing strategy and someone coming up with the idea of a one-word governing idea:

BRIBERY… as in “Let’s bribe the voters.”

…as in “You the voters have the votes…. We the Republicans have the taxpayers’ money…. Let’s talk. Let’s make a deal.”

In recent years, many Republicans in campaigning against Democrats told the voters they wanted to come to Washington or their state capitol to clean out the cesspool, and voters believed them and elected them, and within a few years most sent a message to the voters: I made a mistake; this is not a cesspool, it’s a hot tub.

In the big picture, the corruption of Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and others is not a serious problem. They’ve been caught and punished and their illegal activities will not affect your children or grandchildren one iota.

However, what will seriously threaten the quality of life for our children and grandchildren is the Republicans’ legal theft, or, as Frederic Bastiat might say, the legal plunder by President Bush and Congressional Republicans.

They tried to bribe the voters with trillions of dollars of your children’s inheritance.

·        They tried to bribe the people of faith with the Faith Based Initiative.

·        The Republicans bribed the farmers with the largest farm subsidies in American history (and in the summer of 2008 they are doing it again).

·        They bribed the Midwest steel workers by putting a tariff on steel imports.

·        They bribed seniors with a $7 trillion prescription drug bill.

·        They bribed the entire state of Florida with money to repair homes in areas where no one would build unless someone else was paying for hurricane damage.

All of this was done for the sole purpose – the immoral and corrupt purpose – of holding onto power.

And how appropriate that it has turned to ashes in their mouths.

Today we have Republican leaders in the White House and the Congress who have moved left and abandoned the base of their party – the conservatives.

A few years ago I wrote a book Conservatives Betrayed, How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.  If I were writing the sub-title today I’d probably write “How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Set the Conservative Cause Back 10-20 years.”

Republican leaders have treated conservatives with utter disrespect… and, in turn, conservatives have lost all respect for Republican leaders.

Millions of grassroots conservative activists and donors have left the Republican Party and taken with them their volunteer time, their checkbooks, and their votes.

John McCain has had the Republican presidential nomination sewn up for five months and has done little to convince conservatives to come off the sidelines and enthusiastically support him.

Senator McCain is trying to get the conservative support on the cheap – that is, without having to give ironclad assurance that he will fill the government with people who believe in individual liberty, individual responsibility, and in freedom.

He hasn’t given conservatives any encouragement on what I believe is the most important question: Who will advise him? Who will run his administration? Whom will he appoint? 

That’s the ballgame. Personnel is policy. Tell me who you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are.

John McCain fails the Reagan test. Conservatives, myself included, saw Reagan a lot in the late 1960s, the 1970s, and in 1980 as a candidate for President – but we never saw him that we didn’t see next to him our friends: Lyn Nofziger, Ed Meese, Dick Allen, Marty Anderson, Judge William Clark, Paul Laxalt, etc., etc.

Conservatives need to be very clear about John McCain. Senator McCain has never been a conservative, he’s not a conservative now, and if elected President will not govern as a conservative. It’s with good cause that he relishes and revels in his reputation as a maverick.

The fact is, after more than 25 years of John McCain surrounding himself with supporters of Big Government, he’s very unlikely to change now, and history shows he would only get worse in the Oval Office.

The only thing Senator McCain and his consultants can say to conservatives is –

·        The Democrat boogeyman is going to get you if you don’t vote Republican

                    or

·        I’m the lesser of two evils

                    or

·        I may not be what you want, but the other fellow is worse

Fear of the other guy is not a governing philosophy, Senator McCain.

The lesser of two evils…. is evil, Senator McCain.

For the past 60 years every time we conservatives have been unhappy with the Big Government/Country Club/Establishment Republicans, Republicans have tried to win by scaring us and saying conservatives have no place else to go. They tried that in 1948, 1960, 1976, 1992, on and on right up to 2006, and its failed every time conservatives were unhappy with the big-government Republicans.

And it looks like the Republicans are trying to add 2008 to that list.

Here’s a message to faithful and loyal conservative Republican activists: Republican politicians are clueless. 

Think about it. If you were on the board of a company whose leaders had wrecked your brand, blown through your money, lost a huge amount of your market share, and refused to change, no matter how bad things got – wouldn’t you try to get them fired? Not if you’re a Republican politician!

What can you say about a political party whose leaders were silent when a Senator under federal investigation, Ted Stevens from Alaska, threatened to resign if he didn’t get $223 million dollars to build a bridge to nowhere?

The Republican Senators’ silence in the face of Stevens’s threat speaks volumes about the state of the Grand Old Party.

Voters know politicians lie to win office.

Then they write laws to keep themselves in office and hold onto power.

They abuse their power to help themselves and their friends.

So how do we change things?

How do we take charge of our own political future?

How do we reclaim America for ourselves and future generations?

We all know that one definition of insanity is: repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.

In my opinion, the number one mistake conservatives made in the last 25+ years is that they became an arm of the Republican Party. Conservatives became an appendage of the GOP.

Too many conservative leaders drank the Republican Kool-aid.

However, it’s not just Republicans who have failed Americans. Democrats bear even more responsibility than Republicans for the mess we’re in. Everything the Republicans did between 2000 and 2008, they copied from the Democrats, who had held power since the 1930s. And both major parties have worked together to design a rigged, crooked game that keeps them in power, keeps competitors out, and forces the rest of us to play their dishonest game.

Most politicians take our money, use us as volunteers, campaign on issues they know will appeal to us – then, once in office, promptly forget us and ignore us until the next election.

America needs new, principled leadership – mostly younger leadership – leadership uncorrupted by the system, and independent of the system.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to go off defense and on offense. At every level in most of America’s major institutions, it’s time to bring forth new leaders who are unfettered by ties to the people who have created our problems.

America’s current Establishment leaders have failed us.   Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals – whether in politics, Big Business, unions, our colleges and universities (including the so-called best and brightest from Harvard, Yale and Princeton), our churches, financial institutions, the legal profession, the news media – they have all failed America.

Today this country has a major vacuum of principled leadership.

In 2008, Americans are like the Biblical Jews who had to wander the desert for 40 years before they could get to the Promised Land. They had to wait until a whole generation of corrupt or faithless leaders passed from the scene.

And America will continue to wander, to careen from one crisis to another, until our current leaders are replaced.

Power is intoxicating and addictive. These failed leaders will not go quietly or easily.

For three years I’ve called for the replacement of all the Republican leaders in Congress, and of all the top Republican Party leaders. I may have started something: I don’t know if they were inspired by me, or if it’s just that great minds think alike, but recently the Lincoln Club of Orange County, California – a very influential group of Republican supporters – has pledged to cut off funding for the GOP unless the congressional leadership is gone soon after the election… and the Lincoln Club has called on other Republican-oriented groups to make a similar pledge.

I urge conservatives across America to follow the lead of the Lincoln Club of Orange County and pledge to withhold your contributions, and your volunteer time, from all Republican party organizations and establishment Republican candidates, until all Republican leaders in Congress have been replaced by principled conservatives with strong leadership skills.

Power is addictive – so we cannot wait for the failed leaders to resign, for them to leave voluntarily. They will have to be forced out – sometimes by the voters, sometimes by stockholders, by donors, or by consumers. They will have to be forced out by us, our friends, our relatives, our co-workers, and by other angry Americans.

Today, conservatives, and all who love liberty and freedom, have a major opportunity to provide new and principled leadership for America.

But it won’t happen just because we are correct on the issues.

Virtue will not be its own reward in this case.

There is no guarantee America will turn to conservatives for ideas, for new leadership.

People follow those who have energy and passion – those

·        who have a plan,

·        who have ideas,

·        who have a vision that people can believe in, and

·        who communicate their plan, and ideas, and vision in a way that people can understand.

In the summer of 2008, Americans are uneasy. They are looking for new political leadership.

And when I speak of leadership, I’m not talking just about heads of organizations, candidates or political activists.

A few years ago, I co-wrote a book – America’s Right Turn – about how conservatives used new and alternative media to help level the playing field.

In the 1950s, when I started in politics, conservatives were the tree that fell in the forest and NO ONE HEARD US.

But, starting with direct mail in the 1960s and 1970s, we were able to go around the barrier created by the Left’s monopoly on the country’s microphones.

Then in the late 1980s, Talk Radio came on the political scene, and cable TV, and, later, the Internet.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Walter Cronkite could come to his CBS office in the morning, put down his coffee cup and pick up his New York Times… and an hour later he and his counterparts at NBC and ABC, all reading the same newspaper, had decided what the American people would be told was the important news of the day.

Well, never again will the Establishment be able to silence their opposition.

That genie is out of the bottle and it’s never going back in.

Because of the new and alternative media, the average American can become an important force in America – a force outside the so-called “major parties”.

The Left has had enormous success operating as a Third Force.

Liberals have thousands of so-called “environmental,” “consumer,” and “civil rights” organizations, and thousands of labor union locals.

They all operate independently of the Democratic and Republican parties except when they are dictating to the Democratic and Republican parties. They have their own membership, money, and agenda.

They pull the public policy debate to the Left because they are bold and outspoken, but certainly not because they are correct or have better ideas.

Conservatives can do the same, pulling the debate toward freedom and liberty.  

Conservatives have an advantage – our beliefs are consistent with the Founders – but we need to be more like the Left by being bold and outspoken.

We need to start thousands of new organizations at the national, state, and local level, dealing with issues of importance to people. You can blog and e-mail on these issues.

Remember: Only a relatively small number of people are interested in political parties.

But almost all Americans are interested in issues that directly impact their lives and their communities:

·        Property rights

·        Taxes

·        Home school rights and the state of the public schools

·        Healthcare

·        Second Amendment rights

·        Opposition to so-called “nation-building”

There’s a country and a way of life that is under attack.

And if you don’t get fully engaged, you’ll lose. Because the socialists, the elitists, those who want to use Big Government to control your lives – they are fully engaged.

Take up a leadership role… as a candidate, or volunteering to help candidates, contributing, blogging, e-mailing, calling in to talk shows, starting new organizations in your area or on the Internet.

Enlist your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers in this battle for America’s soul and America’s freedom.

We have a country to take back, and the blessings of liberty to defend, to protect, and to pass on to our children, grandchildren, and generations unborn.