Why The Buckley Rule Doesn't Apply

With Tea Party Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's primary election victory in Delaware, many Republican and conservative commentators are calling the choice of O'Donnell a bad thing, citing "the Buckley Rule."  Charles Krauthammer came out today with a column criticizing the Tea Party and the O'Donnell pick, citing the Buckley Rule, saying

"Of course Mike Castle is a liberal Republican. What do you expect from Delaware? A DeMint? Castle voted against Obamacare and the stimulus. Yes, he voted for cap-and-trade. That's batting .667. You'd rather have a Democrat who bats .000 and who might give the Democrats the 50th vote to control the Senate?"

But there is a problem with this line of thinking: it ignores the big picture of the Tea party.

The Buckley Rule:
Support the most conservative candidate who is electable.

The Buckley Rule sounds good on the surface, but you just can't apply it to the O'Donnell election because in this case, using the Buckley Rule assumes that the Tea Party has a singular goal of undoing the Democrats' majorities in the House and the Senate.  While that does happen to be one of the Tea Party's short-term goals, the issues that brought about the frustration and angst that resulted in the Tea Party's creation won't be solved in a single election cycle...and in point of fact, electing liberal Republicans just happens to be antithetical to the entire purpose of the Tea Party.

In fact, it was the Buckley Rule and the Republican Party's "big tent" strategy that directly contributed to the creation of the Tea Party - the GOP is supposed to be the conservative party in America, but they have sold their soul in order to win elections, and their base conservative constituency is tired of it.  We're done with seeing our values sold out by Republicans like Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Olympia Snowe and, I dare say, George W. Bush.

Criticizing the Tea Party for not adhering to the Buckley Rule demonstrates the incredibly short-sighted view of the Tea Party held by the party elites and many commentators.  The Tea Party isn't just about winning a few elections in the short term in order to stop Obama's agenda.  While that is one goal of the Tea Party, there are also many in the Tea Party looking to bring the Republican Party back to its conservative roots; bowing to the party's misguided ideas about "electability" is what got the Republican Party relegated back to the minority in 2008.

If the Republicans want to remain a viable force in American politics in the long-term, they would do well to heed this lesson from the Tea Party: getting back to conservatism is the overriding goal.  While there are no guarantees that Christine O'Donnell will lose her Senate race, as most of the commentators are predicting, it's better for the Republicans to lose a few elections than it would be to see conservatives split from the party, because a split in the party would guarantee lost elections for the Republicans for years to come.

Establishment Politics Takes A Hit

The Republican Party establishment is upset today.  It's all over The Drudge Report and conservative talk radio about how the election of Christine O'Donnell in the Delaware Senate primary.  Why?  O'Donnell was endorsed by the Tea Party, and she roundly trounced her Republican establishment opponent, Rep. Mike Castle.

Now, before digging into this, I should make it clear that I know pretty much nothing about Christine O'Donnell or Mike Castle beyond what I've heard & seen in the media over the last couple of days...

But what this essentially boils down to is that change is hard, particularly in the arena of national politics.  After moving much too far toward socialism for far too long, many people in America are coming to their senses and seeing that conservatism actually does offer real solutions.

Of course the Republican establishment isn't going to enjoy seeing their candidate lose a primary - as a political party, they are in the business of winning elections, even their own primaries, and let's face it: the major parties aren't used to losing their own primaries.  This is a big deal.

But what's happening in Delaware isn't a rejection of the Republican party, it's evidence of a continued reformation among Republicans.  These battles aren't "civil wars" within the party as the media suggests, they are attempts by conservatives to bring the party back to a winning strategy and ideology.  For too long, the strategy among Republicans has been to push voters into voting for the best "electable" candidate.  The problem with that strategy is that the definition of electability is determined either by party elites who are completely out-of-touch with the real world, or by the media.  This strategy is, after all, what got John McCain the Republican nomination in the 2008 election: every time the rank-and-file would start to get behind a candidate, the media would drag them down, because they had their eyes on McCain the entire time...and let's face it: McCain was one of the worst choices in the field of Republican candidates, and putting John "Maverick" McCain up against a tabula rasa candidate like Obama was the worst thing the GOP could have possibly done, especially in the race to replace George W. Bush.  In fact, the only thing that gave McCain a fighting chance in '08 was Sarah Palin, who brought some conservatism to the ticket.

For too long, the political establishment and the media have been telling conservatives that we shouldn't vote our ideals.  According to them, winning is more important than ideology - this is what led to the Republican "big tent" philosophy.  But the political winds have shifted.  We've seen what big tent strategies get us: spineless RINOS and "compassionate" conservatism which only ends up taking us down the same road as the socialist Democrats, just at a slightly slower pace.

The truth is that Republicans aren't the only ones facing a potential split and/or transformation.  The Democrats have had their own in-fighting of late; the only major difference is that the Progressive sect of the Left has thus far successfully smashed down the "Blue Dog" revolt.

The Republican Party's attempts to form a big tent party have only ended up marginalizing the GOP, primarily because the media has convinced the party elites that they have to move to the left in order to remain a viable political movement.  But conservatives aren't buying the party line anymore: we can see how today's Republican Party holds to many of the same ideological roots as the Democrats, and we see no reason to allow this ideological takeover of the GOP to continue.

Playing the "electability" game will only hurt the Republican Party and the nation in the long-run.  As much as the Democrats love to whine and cry about the "party of no," it is extremely important to have an opposition party that actually stands in ideological opposition their political opponents.  They way things have been going for the last decade or so, the message of both parties has essentially been "Our big government is better than their big government."  It's about time that we saw some true small-government conservatives elected under the Republican mantle, and if we keep selling out our values in the name of big tents and the liberal media's definition of electability, it will never happen.

So to all of those Republican elites bashing Christine O'Donnell over her so-called "electability," get over it.  It's time to start backing the conservatives, because America has seen where neocons and RINOs will get us, and we have roundly rejected that philosophy.  Eventually, the party elites will have to accept conservatives will not be silenced, or they will either be driven out of the GOP, or see their party split, which will make any Republicans unelectable for years to come.

Religious Fruits & Nuts

The Florida church that is planning to burn copies of the Koran on September 11 has now gained international attention.  Protests have broken out in Afghanistan and Indonesia, and the State Department and General Petraeus, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, along with commentators across the spectrum, have sounded off to condemn the planned actions.

The church's protest has been denied a permit, but the pastor insists that the event will go on anyway.

But here is the question: why is a 50-member church in Florida garnering this kind of attention?

The answer is blindingly obvious: the media latched on to this story right away because it makes Christians and the Right look bad.  Never mind the fact that no reasonable person is defending this pastor or his church - in light of the wide-spread condemnation the Ground Zero mosque has received in recent weeks, the leftist media needs something to use against the opposition to the mosque - something that is completely unrelated to the vast majority of the opposition, but an issue nevertheless that they can generalize to the rest of the mosque's opposition to try and make the Right look bad.

The truth is that this pastor and any of his congregation that is going along with his book-burning are wackos who have been universally condemned.  As far as Christian sects go, they rank right up there with the Westboro Baptists or Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United.  They're stupid extremists and not really worth paying attention to.  But instead of ignoring them like they deserve, the media has sensationalized this story to the point that it has now become an international incident. 

Just like the Westboro Baptists, the best thing the media could do to marginalize these freaks would be to ignore them.  But to the media, this opportunity was just too good to pass up, and as a result, they have given the fringe an international stage and sparked unnecessary conflict in a region just looking for an excuse to demonize the United States.

This is not to say that the media is responsible for this planned act of gargantuan stupidity; only the pastor and his congregation can truly carry the blame.  But the duplicity of a media that tries to pass itself off as unbiased while ignoring the extremism of the church President Obama attended for 20 years and sensationalizing a small fringe group can not and should not be ignored.