The Case for Michele Bachmann

[Sandra]

Michele Bachmann is the clearest conservative voice in the primaries. She is the most legitimate representative of the Tea Party in this process

The Case for Michele Bachmann

Daren Jonescu  Wednesday, December 7, 2011


The Republican Establishment long ago settled on Mitt Romney as its preferred representative. Endless commentary and polling was expended trying to create the broad impression that he was the inevitable choice anyway, so conservatives should just get on board. The effort was wasted. The early stages of the primary process established only one thing with absolute certainty: Tea Party conservatives, the most serious and motivated faction in the process, will not support Romney.

What was described as “strong and steady” polling early on has revealed itself for what it really was all along: a flat-lining campaign. No amount of money and organization was able to will Romney past that twenty-five percent barrier. The “flavor of the week” challengers, as some have tried to dismiss them, are not going away. That is to say, the names may change, but the impetus to seek alternatives will not.

Recognizing this, even some Establishment types are beginning to look for a Plan B. Some believe they have found it in Newt Gingrich. They have a point: He is a clever enough politician to have understood better than Romney which way the wind was blowing, and he has found his way into, if not the hearts, then at least the frightened calculation, of some conservatives. The problem with Gingrich, however, is that his career reveals him to be a man for whom “which way the wind is blowing” is more than just a tactical consideration: it is his core. He does not want to save his country as much as he wants to be world-famous for doing so. Newt is for Newt. Part of his method is to find a trend, and then leap onto it with such gusto that he almost appears to be the leader of the movement. One recent example of this was his big Social Security proposal, delivered with the typical Gingrich white paper brio–and which, at its essence, was merely a reiteration of the plan, modelled on the Chilean system, which Herman Cain had been pitching for months.

On the subject of Gingrich the political animal, George Will makes the point succinctly in his Dec. 4 column:

“[He] embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.”

Gingrich is what is sometimes euphemistically called a “big government conservative.” He differs from Obama and the leftists in his goals and strategies, but he agrees with them on a principle more fundamental and dangerous than any particular plan or policy: He believes the government can know how to correct society’s problems, and that the role of statesmen is to implement the kinds of policies and regulations that will solve those problems. The true conservative does not believe in big plans, big ideas, and big systems (Gingrich’s bread and butter). The conservative believes that the “role” of government is to reduce the role of government­to stop having grand visions, and seeking to implement them. The conservative does not believe compassion is a governmental function. The conservative does not believe government can provide happy endings.

The conservative believes that the way a constitutional republic “improves” its citizens is negatively: Leave them to their own devices, let them make their own decisions, protect their rights to life, liberty and property, and allow the resulting need for individual responsibility to inculcate self-reliance, initiative and pride in each citizen, along with mutual good faith and respect among them. If the government will not “take care of” your elderly parents, then you must be there for them. If the government will not “educate” your children, then you must provide for their education. The childish self-absorption which passes itself off as freedom today, and which leads to so many societal ills, will quickly dissipate as people are forced­not by government, but by reality­to think and act for themselves, and to take full responsibility for the results of their choices.

Many conservatives, who are opposed on principle to the Gingrich-style “big ideas” Republican, like to talk about Calvin Coolidge as their ideal: the man who simply walks into the job, manages things around the office for a while, and then resumes his private life, leaving as few fingerprints on the country as possible. The problem, however, is that Western civilization is now so far away from the model of a free and morally healthy society of self-supporting and self-regulating individuals that a new Coolidge will not do. America needs someone who can lead­not in the manner of a grand planner, but in the manner of an effective spokesman for radical change.

For that is the secret of this moment. The radicals are not Obama and the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Those people are merely an extension of the trend of the age. They are trying to accelerate the nation’s progress down an errant path, to be sure, but they are proposing no new path. That is why so many people are unable to see the nightmare future that the Tea Partiers see when they look at America’s trajectory: In truth, Obama’s “transformative” agenda is simply the path of least resistance. The challenge for conservatives, and for the next Republican president, if the next presidency is to be about anything better than a slight change of speed, is to accept that, in the current moral and political climate, they, the conservatives, are the true radicals. They are the ones calling for genuine “transformation,” insofar as they are seeking to unravel almost a century’s progressive defilement of the law and culture of the United States.

The first challenge, then, is to choose a spokesman who understands the dire state of the economy as something bigger than another fiscal bullet to be dodged, or problem to be finessed, but rather as a big red warning sign for civilization: Road Ends.

Secondly, this person must be prepared to stand firm against extraordinary opposition. This is not about thick skin, or clever comeback lines. The President who does what absolutely must be done at this moment must be someone who says, “No, there can be no compromise on basic principles. What’s necessary is necessary. I won’t budge. Go ahead­hate me, call me a failure, accuse me of having no heart, accuse me of being facile and simplistic, produce polls showing that support for my goals is shrinking. The country and the free world cannot afford another leader who worries about appearing out of touch with the academic class, the pundit class, or the popular culture. Politically correct applicants need not apply. Judge me on Election Day.”

Third, this person should have a track record that shows the kind of backbone required to follow through on the first two points. That is to say, as much as Tea Partiers crave an anti-Washington voice in the White House, anti-Washington need not mean a complete Washington outsider. The reason it might appear so is that, in practice, even the brightest hopes of conservatives past have usually shown a weakness for the peer pressure and arm-twisting that passes for collegiality and compromise in Washington. But this is all the more reason to be wary of even the most impressive-seeming outsider: You never know for sure what will happen when he or she becomes an “insider,” and conservatives have been disappointed so many times. No, enough Washington experience to have proven one’s mettle in real fights­not just against Democrats, but against fellow Republicans, the media, everyone­is, if not a necessity, certainly an attractive feature for a Republican presidential candidate to have this time around.

Fourth, the candidate the Tea Partiers seek must be someone who understands the moral underpinnings of the crisis facing America, and have practical­and conservative­suggestions for dealing with it. It must be someone capable of re-instilling in citizens of all backgrounds the (small-r) republican idea of citizenship, of belonging to the community as a proud dues-paying member, rather than as a benefit-seeking dependent. This is the surest way, in the long run, to undermine the Left’s class warfare stratagems, and to peel away the ugly layer of class envy that is so antithetical to the American spirit. Children often resent the authority their parents have over them because they know they are ultimately dependent and unable to support themselves. To create a non-tax-paying “underclass” is to approximate that resentment scenario on a large scale. (Which is why Democrats favor it.) If everyone is contributing, no one need feel indebted to­or resentful of­anyone else.

Is there anyone in this primary race who clearly exemplifies all four of the requirements I have just enumerated? To ask the question is immediately to see the answer: There is Michele Bachmann.

On the debt ceiling, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and on and on, others in the race are talking big, or gradually calibrating their positions to find the right tone for the Tea Party voter, whereas Bachmann has been solidly on the mark all along. What’s more, she has stood her ground on these issues, not only against Nancy Pelosi, but also against the Boehner House’s bullying tactics and ostracism. She has clearly been marginalized and lost opportunities for advancement within Congress as a result of some of her positions. And yet she has stood firm. She has been mocked as a crank, a doomsayer, and an extremist for being so principled. And yet she has stood up to it.

Unapologetic conservative, in spite of having been specifically targeted by the Democrat machine

She has won three congressional elections as an unapologetic conservative, in spite of having been specifically targeted by the Democrat machine, especially in 2010. She has proven herself willing and able to fight, and to do so without pulling punches (as McCain did against Obama in ‘08).

If Tea Party conservatives are serious this year, as they were in 2010, then they desire three things out of their candidate:

1. Someone willing to fight for the U.S. Constitution, not just rhetorically, but with a defense of the Constitution’s limits on presidential authority that directly corresponds to his or her actual policy proposals (i.e. no “big government conservatism”).
2. Someone prepared to look the nation in the eye and say, “Our current path is suicidal. This is not a policy crisis; it is a principle crisis. America will not survive on this path. This is the fork-in-the-road moment.”
3. Someone who can prove that he or she is not merely saying what is fashionable during the Republican primaries, but was on the right side of this fight even before there was a Tea Party.

Michele Bachmann is the candidate who most consistently answers to these desires. That is why she seemed to be the Tea Party voters’ choice during the summer. Clever manipulation of the process and the perceptions of this campaign by the media and the Republican Establishment have pushed her voice to the background, and then created a premature sense of inevitability around other candidates that may have scared some conservatives out of their wits and their better judgment. It is time for those conservatives to come back to their senses, take stock of the options one more time, stop panicking about Romney, or listening to the mainstreamers’ nonsense about electability­and come home to the only candidate in this race who was widely identified as a leading voice within the Tea Party right from its beginnings.

And consider this: The lament of serious constitutionalists for years now is that even when, ever so rarely, one of their own gets elected to the House or Senate, he is typically treated as a pariah, even within his own party apparatus, or is forced to yield somewhat to the party establishment in order to be at all effective as a legislator. For every Jim DeMint or Paul Ryan, there are a dozen or more McConnells, Boehners, and the like, who talk like conservatives when the occasion calls for such talk, while allowing the United States to drift sleepily towards the cliff. Imagine the effect of a President Bachmann on that dynamic within the House and Senate. Think of the fresh constitutionalist air that might blow through that intellectually dank Capitol building were the tone-setter in the White House neither a Leftist ideologue nor a business-as-usual career politician.

The Establishment has tried to frighten the Tea Party with the idea that, for all their useful support, “they” (i.e. their truest elected representatives) are not ready to govern. The tactic seems to have enjoyed partial success. Conservatives seem to be falling back on the long-term “plan” of putting off till tomorrow what they could have done today. The problem is that, ready or not, there is no tomorrow for the Tea Party and its dreams of individual liberty, budget sanity, and constitutionally limited government.

Michele Bachmann is the clearest conservative voice in the primaries. She is the most legitimate representative of the Tea Party in this process. This election has real historic significance well beyond the superficially “historic” dimension that played a role in 2008. On the other hand, as it can’t hurt to use every tool at one’s disposal, there is no denying that for those who like superficially “historic” elections, there is something interesting about the sound of President Michele….

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