From Across the Pond - Palin & Thatcher, McCain, Reagan and Obama By Constitutional Conservative

Source: http://constitutionalconservative.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/from-across-the-pond-palin-thatcher-mccain-reagan-and-obama/

September 9, 2008

It would seem that it is only sexist to trash a woman candidate if she is a Woman Candidate, which is to say a liberal.

The London Telegraph notes what liberals in the US state openly — Palin doesn’t represent women because she’s not a liberal. It seems only liberals can represent womens issues, and women only care about liberal issues. Anyone daring to utter a thought against the pro-abortion, all the time position becomes anathema to “womens issues”.

The Telegraph compares Governor Palin to Margaret Thatcher in that the elites simply don’t understand either one — those in the “flyover” states liberal elites have such contempt for represent mainstream America, Republican and Democrat. Sure, some differences on policy exist, but love of country, family values, duty, and personal responsibility are the same for southern Democrats and conservatives alike — and it’s that foundation people want, in spite of the elites wishes.

The Republican party began losing when they abandoned small-town values and teamed with the big-government big-spending control-your-life elites of the Democratic party, casting true conservatives over the edge of the cliff (while asking for donations before citizens hit the rocky cliffs below), and even worse attempting to purge conservatives from the party which founded it — don’t make the mistake the Republican party bears any resemblance to its conservative roots. Conservatives are in the Republican party, but not all Republicans are conservatives.

If Republicans want to make a comeback, they need to move back to the values which made them popular in the first place. It’s interesting after Sarah Palin was introduced as the VP, fundraising sky-rocketed. Why? It’s an admission Republicans lost their way over the last years, and it’s time for a change in direction — back to middle-American values (the “flyover” states) as those voters (Republican AND Democratic) look for someone who relates to them, and doesn’t treat them like mindless sheep needing direction from the One.

But allow the Telegraph to continue:

They hunt with guns from childhood. They talk about sin (and redemption) in ways that embarrass the urban elite, and they regard patriotism as a fundamental part of their moral code. (It is the liberals’ ambivalence about patriotism that they detest most.)

Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs. Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a “grocer’s daughter” by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent “ordinary people”.

What the metropolitan sophisticates failed to understand in the 1980s when Thatcher won election after election is even more the case in the US: most (and I do mean most) ordinary people actually believe in the basic decencies, the “small-town values”, of family, marital fidelity, and personal responsibility. They believe in and honour them — even if they do not manage to uphold them.

Middle America — of which Alaska is spiritually, if not geographically, a part — builds its life around those ideals and regards commonplace moral lapses as part of the eternal struggle to be good.

The life of small-town USA is based on the principles of those Protestant colonial settlers who founded the nation: hard work, self-improvement, personal faith and family devotion. Mrs Palin speaks to and for them in a way that patronising “liberal” elitists find infuriating.

For the last few years the Republican party attempted to eliminate all vestiges of conservatism from its platform and ranks. Yet no matter how hard they worked, a small spark of true conservatism remained which stubbornly refused to go along with the big-government big-spending in-your-face elites.

Many “Republicans” attempt to wrap themselves in the mantle of Reagan, and then switch personality upon election, remove the mask, and act just like any member of the elites. Republicans keep looking for the next Reagan, but allow the guy who would know (Michael Reagan) to weigh in:

I’ve been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we’d never see his like again because he was one of a kind.

I was wrong!

Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he’s a she.

And what a she!

In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad’s indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media’s assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven’t heard since my Dad left the scene.

Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them — and all her fellow Americans — on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as our nation’s real destination.

In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are — a pair of old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an all-powerful government.

Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live because that’s the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors.

Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.

Sarah Palin didn’t go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of the nation’s most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack Obama.

Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she served in on her way up the ladder.

McCain/Palin — the Maverick ticket.

These aren’t the Republicans you thought you knew. And it’s about time — we’ve been waiting.

Conservatives have waited for a change in direction in the Republican party for quite some time. President Bush may be a Republican, but he’s no conservative. Instead, President Bush and like-minded Republicans took for granted conservatives as they joined forces with elites. But no more.

McCain has always been known to go against the party, and the more information coming out on Palin shows she’s just as much an in-your-face to the Republican party as he is (an 80% approval rating for the Palinator doesn’t hurt either). Neither is perfect, but at least they’re willing to take on the establishment and go against party loyalty when required. Conservatism is coming back, and that’s what has the left running so scared.

As Lanny Davis (Former White House Counsel who worked for the Clintons) says about McCain:

But I have changed my mind about one thing: His decision reinforces the most effective theme he can run on — his sometimes persona as a maverick, a tough leader with a stubborn mind of his own, and with a thick skin to take the heat to pursue the beat of his own internal drummer. And given his POW experience and incredible courage during that ordeal, that is some internal drummer he has.

It’s time for conservatives and mainstream America to have their voice heard; the leftist elites never understand the average American, and Republicans for too long have ignored the middle American values which gave them power in the first place. But McCain/Palin have a chance to bring back main street values to politics, as McCain’s speech ended:

I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.

My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.

My friends, if you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you’re disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed.

Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier, because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

I’m going to fight for my cause every day as your president. I’m going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank him, that I’m an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on Earth. And with hard work — with hard work, strong faith, and a little courage, great things are always within our reach.

Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all.

Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other, for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight.

Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up.

Country first, not elites. We can make our own decisions, thank you. We can decide how best to spend our money. We can decide what’s best for our children — without help from the nanny government.

Perhaps the most overused line is “this election is the most important in history”. Yes, it’s important, but the Union won’t end if the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter (Obama) takes over for four years. We lived though the Carter Administration’s bumbling of foreign policy (Iran hostage crisis), bizarrely strange economic policy (windfall profits tax, wage and price controls), and even more bizarre crazy energy policy (”wear a sweater”).

Is it possible that America really wants to return to those depressing days of gas lines and leisure suits? Of malaise and shock over the aggressiveness of America’s enemies? The days when the policies Obama is advocating raised unemployment rates, interest rates and inflation rates into the double digits? When America’s enemies looked the President of the United States in the eye — and found he really wanted to kiss them on the cheek?

Obama’s windfall profits tax idea? A Jimmy Carter biggie. “Unless we tax the oil companies, they will reap huge and undeserved windfall profits,” fumed Carter on national television in 1980. The New York Times agreed, warning darkly that “legislators who sit by idly while oil profits soar will have to answer to the voters.”

With Democrats controlling Congress they got their way. As if on cue, oil production — fell. To the tune of 1.6 billion fewer barrels. America’s dependence on foreign oil rose. Eventually even the Times was agreeing the tax had to be repealed, and by 1988 Reagan, who campaigned against it, signed the repeal (by a Democrat Congress no less) into law. And Obama wants to do this all over again? Yes. It’s not only not a new idea, it’s not a better idea. Yet in terms of Obama, most tellingly it was a Carter idea.

The Union will survive another Carter administration. Perhaps not thrive, but survive. The country lived through Jimmy Carter I, it can live through Jimmy Carter II, the sequel.

The failing fledging flopping Carter Administration lead to the Reagan Revolution and staggering economic prosperity and growth. But before Reagan took office, remember how bleak it was? Gas lines and shortages, increasing energy costs, wage and price controls, “wear a sweater”, hostage crisis, and so on — those living through it will never forget the dark years. And now a group (many of whom didn’t live through Carter I) desire to live through Carter II? Been there, done that. It didn’t work the first time, and wrapping failed polices in “change” banners won’t make it work this time around either. Those failing to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Unfortunately the memory of people is short-lived, and many weren’t even alive during the Carter Administration’s failures. It’s for that reason those mistakes are brought to the surface again, denying the failures of the past, and attempting to try the same old failed polices yet again.

However, history demonstrates after a failure of liberal policies, people remember why past generations voted conservative. Thus, win or lose in November, McCain/Palin have already won — and that’s what has the liberal elites scared, and why the mean and nasty attacks will continue as they attempt to destroy them. It’s not just due to policy differences, they know if conservatism makes a comeback the liberal elites will be out of power for years — maybe decades.

Sarah Palin is under 50 and could influence politics for 30 or more years. That’s the reason they’re trying to dig up any dirt they can, no matter if it’s true or not — the Palinator is quite a threat to the left and since they can’t compete on ideas (which appeal to the vast majority of mainstream America), they’re left with nothing but mean attacks.

But we’re on the verge of reliving past mistakes — by all accounts Jimmy Carter was a nice guy, with basically a good heart. Unfortunately, he was completely overwhelmed by the Presidency, with the country paying the price for his flopping and attempts at on-the-job training. Even though Carter’s mistakes led to the Reagan Revolution, must we relive the failures to heed the lessons? We hope not.

Will history repeat itself again? Or will the lessons learned from the past be heeded? We’ll know in a few months.