Political Gimmickry

“A ONE-TRICK PONY”

by Paul R. Hollrah, ©2013

(May 17, 2013) — I hear many conservatives these days talking about following the example of their forbears who escaped tyranny in Europe by fleeing to America.  They’re reading books about a quieter, more stress-free life in Costa Rica, Ecuador, or Panama.  At the other end of the spectrum we have those who’ve given up on the idea that Republicans will ever have the guts to go toe-to-toe with Obama and his criminal gang.  They’re in a stand-and-fight mode, hoping either for secession or a second American civil war.  I tend to find myself in both camps, depending on what day it is, but allow me to offer a heretofore overlooked theory that may cause us all to reconsider.

As political pundits speculate about the possibility of a Hillary Clinton run for the White House in 2016, it becomes clearer and clearer that, beginning sometime prior to 2008, Democrats made a critical strategic decision.  Since they were unlikely to ever again elect a president based on ideology… because it simply is not possible to ram a blatantly liberal agenda down the throats of a population that is largely conservative… they concluded that the only way they could win back the White House was by engaging in political “gimmickry.”

But first some history.  Looking back to the Vietnam era… the first major pivot point in U.S. political history since the end of World War II… they found that Republicans had occupied the White House for 28 years, while they had controlled the White House for only 12… and those were not particularly satisfying years for rank-and-file Democrats or for liberal ideologues.    

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), was not a “big picture” leader.  Unlike Nixon or Reagan, Carter was a micro-manager, and although he was the “cream of the crop” among the eight who sought the nomination in 1976, he turned out to be the sort of man who would dole out the paper, pencils, and paperclips from the White House supply closet.  And when he failed to take decisive action to rescue the fifty-two Americans held hostage for 444 days by radical Islamists in Tehran, he caused major damage to the Democrat brand and was defeated for reelection in 1980. 

Bill Clinton (1993-2001), owed the greatest success of his presidency to Newt Gingrich and a Republican-controlled Congress.  However, welfare reform was not popular among Democrats who’d spent more than four decades creating a permanent underclass of poor and disadvantaged who populated the Democrats’ welfare plantation and who were all reliable Democrat voters.  To the extent that millions of Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum discovered that the “pursuit of happiness” in America was all about becoming independent and self-supporting, the ranks of the Democrat Party shrunk proportionately.  A simple cause-and-effect analysis proves that, as more people realize the American Dream, the fewer Democrats there are.

Coupled with the fact that Clinton was only the second president in American history to be impeached, the failure of his healthcare reform effort in his first two years in office, and the success of his Republican-sponsored welfare reform program in the last two years of his first term, his presidency was put in a less than favorable light among many rank-and-file Democrats. 

With all of these things in mind, and with George W. Bush nearing the end of his second term, Democrats apparently concluded that the only way they could guarantee a return to power in the White House was by engaging in political “gimmickry.”  They would have to nominate either an electable black man or an electable white woman.    

The black male “gimmick” Democrats chose was Barack Obama, an inexperienced and totally unprincipled “community organizer.”  It was irrelevant to Democrats that, had they hired an executive search firm to evaluate the eligibility, experience, and leadership capacity of the 1,000 most able black men in America, Obama’s name would not have appeared on that list. 

Not only was he ineligible to serve as president… he is not a natural born citizen… he couldn’t produce a valid birth certificate, he used a stolen Social Security number, his draft registration card was forged, and he couldn’t pass a simple Social Security E-Verify test.  However, he was an attractive man with an engaging smile… Joe Biden once described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”… and although he is incapable of delivering a simple declaratory sentence, extemporaneously, he has been trained to read a speech from a teleprompter with such conviction that low-information voters will swear he knows exactly what he’s talking about.              

In short, Democrats didn’t care that Obama was ineligible to serve or that he had no relevant experience.  What the Obama gimmick was all about was his ability to charm low-information voters into voting for him.  No other black male Democrat in America had a snowball’s chance of being nominated or elected.  Obama was, and is, a one-of-a-kind political “gimmick.” 

The white female “gimmick” Democrats offered up was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the carpet-bagging U.S. senator from New York.  To enumerate the many shady escapades of Rodham-Clinton’s adult life would require a book.  However, to recall just a few, we can begin with her highly questionable commodity futures trading experience.  In 1978, while serving as first lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was able to turn an initial investment of $5,000 into a $100,000 windfall in just ten months, relying on the cattle futures trading advice of an attorney for Tyson Foods, Inc., one of Arkansas’s largest corporations.  

In late 1998, with more than two years remaining in her husband’s second term, New York Democrats were not confident that they could defeat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the likely Republican candidate, for the open U.S. Senate seat.  Unable to recruit a New Yorker with real star power, they began to focus on potential carpetbaggers.  Several top Democrats urged first lady Hillary Clinton to move to New York to run for the Democratic nomination.

After winning the senate nomination unopposed, Clinton campaigned heavily in the large and influential New York Jewish community.  Six weeks after the 2000 election she participated in a 45-minute meeting with her husband and Rabbi David Twersky, of New Square, New York, a Hasidic community that had given Hillary 1,400 votes to only 12 for her Republican opponent. The Rabbi pleaded the case of four New Square men who had been convicted of bilking the federal government out of some $30 million in federal housing subsidies.  In one of the most controversial decisions of his last day in office, Clinton granted clemency to all four of the men.

Another major constituency Hillary needed was the New York Puerto Rican community.  So it was quite fortuitous that, on August 11, 1999, her husband commuted the sentences of sixteen members of FALN, a violent Puerto Rican terror group that set off 120 bombs, mostly in New York and Chicago, killing six and maiming dozens more, many of them police officers.  The sixteen men were convicted of conspiracy and sedition and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 35 to 105 years.  During her campaign, Hillary initially supported the commutation but when the commutations backfired on her husband she withdrew her support.

But now, as Hillary ponders a second run in 2016, and as Democrats, generally, feel that Hillary is still owed something big because of her courage in standing by her philandering husband, she is once again embroiled in controversy.  Apparently as a means of assuaging any bitterness that remained after her loss to Obama in 2008, she agreed to serve as Obama’s secretary of state. And although liberals and Democrats are fond of proclaiming her to be “one of the greatest secretaries in history,” the fact is that she had little or no impact on U.S. foreign policy during her four-year tenure. During her four years at the State Department she was given a large staff, an airplane, and an unlimited expense account and told to just travel.

And while she visited most capitols on the globe and participated in thousands of photo-ops… exactly what Obama wanted her to do… he and his pro-Islamic aides conducted U.S. foreign policy out of the Oval Office. And when a U.S. ambassador and three others were murdered by Islamic terrorists… all on her watch… Clinton insisted to the surviving families that the attack was in response to an obscure Internet video, promising that she and Obama would bring the murderers to justice. The fact is, she was such a non-entity as Secretary of State that her own Benghazi Accountability Review Board didn’t even bother to interview her.

The thing that conservatives and Republicans need to recognize is that Obama and Hillary are nothing more than political “gimmicks.” Democrats reasoned that whichever one lost in 2008 would be all but a shoo-in for the 2016 nomination. But that’s not the way things are turning out. All Hillary has accomplished in four years at the State Department is to further damage her already shaky credibility. As the Benghazi cover-up continues to unravel and more and more whistleblowers step forward, her political prospects grow dimmer and dimmer.

Since George W. Bush left the White House in January 2009, the Democrat Party has been a “one-trick pony.” The American people have now seen that trick and they’re not likely to want to sit through an encore, with Hillary as the star performer. So, take heart, patriots, take a long hard look at the Democrat Party. What you’ll likely find is that they only had two political “gimmicks” worthy of mention; they don’t have a third waiting in the wings. And if they should try to create a Hispanic “gimmick” between now and 2016, they’ll soon find that Republicans now have Hispanics who can easily top theirs. Unlike Hillary and Obama, Hispanic Republicans are true patriots, men and women of real quality. They are not “gimmicks.”

phollrah@yahoo.com