Why there’s chocolate ice cream
Do you know why there’s chocolate ice cream? It’s because some people don’t like vanilla! That might seem obvious, but it’s a lesson that the leaders of the Republican Party have apparently never learned.
People who don’t like vanilla ice cream don’t want “Vanilla Bean” or “French Vanilla” or “Etruscan Vanilla” or “Vanilla Lite”; if they want ice cream at all, what they want is something completely different: Maybe chocolate or maybe not, but definitely NOT any kind of vanilla.
The same thing applies to politics, too: When people are upset with, or distrustful of, or even outright scared of the Democrat party and are voicing their feelings openly and joining “Tea Parties” and gathering in their tens or hundreds of thousands to protest the Democrats’ intended “fundamental transformation’ of this country, what Republicans need to offer them is something completely different — definitely NOT “Democrat Lite.”
Republican leaders, though, don’t seem to have figured that out yet, and, perhaps in hopes of “broadening their tent” and appealing to the greatest possible number of voters they keep on pushing more and more to the center, where, to continue the metaphor, the ice cream has no flavor at all.
In fact, if voters want Democrat candidates or Democrat policies, they’re smart enough to know that they should vote Democrat and get the real thing, instead of some “me too” ersatz Democrat wannabe. And if voters DON’T want what the Democrats have to offer, why on earth would any sane Republican ever even consider offering them just another version of the very same thing that they’ve already clearly and obviously rejected?
When people don’t want “vanilla”, the smart thing to offer is “chocolate”, and the more chocolaty, the better: That way those who hate “vanilla” have an alternative and those who want “chocolate” get exactly what they want. It’s even good for those who don’t like either one: At least if there’s a real choice, they can pick the one they dislike less, instead of having to choose from two of the same thing.
Creating real choices is easy: All you have to do is the opposite of what the other guys are doing. It’s just like chocolate and vanilla; if they’re for big government, you can be for small; if they want more taxes, you push for less; if they want socialism, you can, and should advocate a return to the capitalism that made ours the greatest economy in the world.
Doing it is really just as easy as saying it, but – at least until the Tea Parties – the great majority of Republican Party leaders wouldn’t even say it. Maybe, since the great debacle of 2006, they’ve been so cowed by Democrat successes at the voting booth and by the gushy sentimentality of the “nanny-state” liberals that they’re afraid that voicing real Republican principles will sound “too Republican” and turn people against them.
That’s not only a capitulation to Progressive idiocy, but it also indicates a total failure to understand that this is a “center-right” country, with by far the largest single bloc of voters regarding themselves as “conservative” (Gallup poll June 25, 2010), whether or not they identify with the Republican Party.
There can be no doubt that the American people are fed up with Obama and the Democrats, and that November, 2010 can be the time for a major Republican resurgence. There is considerable doubt, though, that the leadership of the Republican Party will be smart enough, savvy enough, or perhaps willing enough to abandon its progressive, spendthrift, “the-government-knows-all-and-the-Party-knows-best” attitude and, by offering a real alternative to the Democrat takeover already well in process, capitalize on the growing conservative sentiments of the American people to seize the great victory that can so easily be available.
In August 1968, at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, in one of the very most famous televised political exchanges in American history, Gore Vidal called his arch-nemesis William F. Buckley a “pro-crypto- Nazi” He later explained that this was just a temporary verbal flailing about while he searched for the temporarily lost (brain frozen) word “fascist” to nail Buckley with. Even so, the meaning was still there: He was saying that Buckley, while not really a Nazi, was sort of thinking and acting like one.
We’ve already seen examples of the Republican Party working in the primaries to support middle-of-the-road “pro-crypto-Democrats” over true conservatives. If we are to win back our Congress in 2010 and our Country in 2012, Republican leaders have to learn that when the American people say that they want something different, it’s because they want something that really IS different.
It’s not possible to be too chocolaty; it’s not possible to be too conservative; and at least in 2010 and 2012, it’s not possible to be too Republican.
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Posted by Roger E. Skoff on September 14, 2010 11:51 am
» Filed Under Congress, Conservatives, Democrat Lite, Democrats, Elections, GOP, Government, News, Politics As Usual, President, RINOS, RNC, Republicans, Senate, Tea Parties, liberalism
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One Response to “Why there’s chocolate ice cream”
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Nicely put. It was refreshing to see O’Donnell win the Delaware GOP primary against proto-crypto-Dem Mike Castle, despite the last-minute GOP-sponsored robo calls against her.
Of course they say she can’t win the general, too conservative for Delaware. We’ll see about that. If the national GOP actually backs her now, maybe she’ll have a fighting chance.