Flying the Flag

My girlfriend and I were discussing how the CPMN has but one statewide candidate this year. They’ve lost the “major party” status they won in 1998 when Patricia Becker, the CPMN candidate for state auditor, received more than 5% of the vote. She won 116,624 votes, totaling 5.9%. But that was a fluke. That was the year Jesse Ventura won as a Reform candidate, and I suspect when some of those pissed off independent voters didn’t see a Reformer in the auditor race, they figured anybody was better than a Republicrat.

For comparison, two years later, CPMN candidate David Swan won 8,915 votes, or 0.37%, in his race for governor. Two years after that, the CPMN ran two statewide candidates: former Croatian Statesman Miro Drago Kovatchevich received 2254 votes (0.1%) and Lawrence Aeshliman did slightly better with 2437 votes for governor (and 0.11%).

Even the combined 2000 presidential Minnesota vote totals of Pat Buchanan from the Reform Party (22,166) and Howard Phillips from the Constitution Party (3,272) total only, err, 25,438 votes!!! One percent!!!

Wikipedia was right; Paleoconservatism is an intellectual movement, not a political one. The CPMN isn’t even paleocon, to be precise.

Running a single statewide candidate with an Angelfire campaign website and a meandering list of issues isn’t exactly a roadmap for success. The lesson of Bill Clinton’s campaign was “stay on message.” In his case it was the economy. In our case it could be immigration, or the conservative case against the war, or even “fair trade” issues. I thought any idiot could figure that out.

And the opposite side of the coin is saying nothing at all. Taking the brave position of strongly favoring good things happening to people is almost as bad. I think the Independence Party’s “centrist” strategy of deliberately not taking any position on anything divisive is not the way forward.

No, the day belongs to the party that can contradict the Democrats and Republicans on the issues where the two major parties agree. Immigration, the war, and trade. That would be a real alternative. Perhaps those 5 percent numbers could be reached again, perhaps not. But winning isn’t everything in electoral politics, is it?

Comments

[Jeff Taylor]

Hi, Patriotlog guy. I completely agree with your statement: "No, the day belongs to the party that can contradict the Democrats and Republicans on the issues where the two major parties agree. Immigration, the war, and trade. That would be a real alternative." I was intending to send you a promo e-mail about a new book I've written from precisely this point of view, but I can't find your e-mail address on your site. I hope you don't mind me cutting and pasting the info here. Like you, I'm a Minnesotan (Rochester).

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FYI: New book about Dem Party

Announcing a provocative new book about the Democratic Party by political scientist Jeff Taylor.

Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy has been released by University of Missouri Press. Here's a link to the author's website: http://www.popcorn78.blogspot.com. The book is available in paperback ($19.95) or hardcover ($44.95) and may be purchased at your local bookstore or through the Internet.

During the past three decades, the inherent hypocrisy and unpopularity of "limousine liberalism" has caught up with the Democratic Party. It has become increasingly difficult to sell itself as the "party of the people" to the middle class and working class when it promotes an agenda of high spending, high taxing, global meddling, and hostility to traditional religion and morality...while being led by the likes of Edward Kennedy, John D. Rockefeller IV, Pamela Harriman, and John Forbes Kerry. Lyndon Johnson's desire to create a Great Society in Vietnam, Bill Clinton's respect for those who play by the rules, Barbra Streisand's love for the poor, and Jacques Chirac's concern for American security are widely seen as suspect by Middle America voters so they have turned from a compromised Democratic Party to the Republican Party by default.

Dr. Taylor, the author of this book, became a conservative populist as a junior high school student in the mid 1970s. He supported Ronald Reagan's campaigns for the 1976 and 1980 GOP nominations. An opponent of big government, communism, and internationalism, Taylor was an admirer of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). During the 1988-2000 period, he favored the presidential candidacies of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan despite disagreement on some specific issues and emphases. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a fellow Reagan '76 supporter, remains Taylor's favorite member of the U.S. House.

Today, Taylor is a political Independent who identifies himself as a Jeffersonian populist in terms of ideology. The author was never wedded to the GOP. Principle has always trumped party. This critique of Democratic Party ideology is scholarly but written from a perspective congenial to the principles of the Taft-Goldwater-Reagan tradition. The conclusion of the book includes a description of how the G.W. Bush administration has become, ironically enough, a part of the Humphrey legacy through its emphasis on unchecked federal power at home and neoconservative-inspired nation-building abroad.

Thank you for your consideration.

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“Taylor’s book, rich in detail, forensically forceful, is no routine exercise in comparative politics. Where Did the Party Go? amounts to a populist reinterpretation of the 20th-century Democratic Party. The author is both an exhaustively thorough researcher and a pleasingly partisan writer: he is on the side of the old America of ‘puritans and populists, of anabaptists and anarchists.’”

-- Bill Kauffman, The American Conservative, July 31, 2006
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_31/review.html