Takeover (10 page)

This became particularly relevant after President Jimmy Carter was conspicuously late with the annual proclamation of “Captive Nations Week” in 1977. Captive Nations Week was an annual proclamation expressing solidarity with Eastern Europeans and other peoples who were behind the “Iron Curtain” or otherwise under Communist domination. Carter didn’t issue the proclamation until mid-week—which raised much ire within the National Captive Nations Committee. Reagan, on the other hand, was actively supported by anti-Communist intellectuals, such as Dr. Lev Dobriansky, chairman of the National Captive Nations Committee.

Because of the weakness of the Republican National Committee and the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill, plenty of conservatives then, as now, were inclined to leave the Republican Party, at least for a while. Every time the establishment GOP would “me-too” the Democrats, or strong-arm conservatives in Congress or Republican Party politics, some conservatives would contemplate forming a third party.

This conservative disillusionment with the GOP wasn’t new, as I’ve mentioned before; it went back at least to the 1950s and early 1960s, when a vehement group of libertarian-minded thinkers, such as author Ayn Rand, argued for a separate movement, while William F. Buckley Jr. argued for a conservative takeover of the Republican Party.

Goldwater had to swat down the idea of a third party, telling conservatives at the 1960 Republican National Convention to grow up and concentrate on taking over the Republican Party.

Some conservatives had even urged Ronald Reagan to run as a third-party conservative candidate. During the 1970s I found plenty of reason to support these efforts, and I was certainly fed up enough with the failures of the Republican establishment to bolt
the Republican Party myself.

This effort gathered so much steam that a group of conservatives convened a meeting in Washington to urge Reagan to leave the Republican Party, launch “a full-blown national conservative movement,” and run as a third-party candidate.

To his great credit, Reagan chose not to pursue that path.

Reagan’s answer to those, including some of his good political supporters, who wanted him to head this new conservative party, was to tell them “they were out of their minds.”

As Reagan saw it then (and he was right) the bulk of conservative voters in America are Republicans—and they won’t desert the Republican Party for a third party.
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Reagan understood that if he was ever going to make progress in accomplishing the things he believed in, it would have to be within the Republican Party. This is why, while I considered myself to be first and foremost a limited-government constitutional conservative, I operate, then and now, within the Republican Party.

Although dealing with the “dime store Democrat” leadership of the national Republican Party was often a hard pill for those associated with the New Right to swallow, we concluded that the path to electing conservative candidates was not to form a third party; it was to become a “third force” to conceive and advance conservative ideas, and elect conservative candidates
through
the Republican Party.

We thought of ourselves—not the establishment Republican Party—as the alternative to the Left and the Democrats. Today the Tea Party does a good job of this on some issues, but we conservatives need to focus more on starting and operating thousands of new “third force” organizations.

The Left has long been far better at this than we are. If President Obama called a meeting in the White House of all the specialized environmental organizations, there would probably be over three hundred represented, each with its own area of expertise, agenda, supporters, and donor base.

There are probably between ten and twenty thousand left-wing
single-issue third-force groups. Think of the thousands of unions just at the local level (teachers, college professors, public-sector unions, service employees, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, pipe fitters, auto workers, teamsters, coal miners, nurses, etc.). Those are just a sampling of the unions, but the Left also has thousands of race-based organizations, antitraditional family organizations, radical feminists and pro-abortion advocates, and of course radical environmentalists.

The only right-of-center organizations that come close to this are the right-to-life organizations. They are among the most successful conservative third-force organizations at the local, state, and national level. They work tirelessly to get more people involved in the right-to-life cause through measures like staffing pregnancy crisis centers, holding vigils and protests, and in the process, creating more opportunities for leaders to rise to the top.

The influence of third-force groups on individuals cannot be overestimated. Hillary Rodham Clinton moved from being a Goldwater girl in 1964 to being a hard-core liberal by the late 1960s by becoming involved in a single-issue cause: opposition to the Vietnam War.

It is important to recognize that there are a relatively small number of people in your community who are interested in politics and will join and work in a political campaign or committee.

However, almost everyone you know is interested in one, two, or three local issues. Maybe it is schools, taxes, overregulation of land use and property rights, immigration, crime and public safety, or something else. By getting your family, friends, neighbors, church members, and others in your circle of influence involved in dealing with one of these causes, at some point you can help them see that the problem is caused by, or made worse by, the heavy hand of government. That is a proven way to get people to become politically active, including becoming educated and informed by focusing on a single issue of personal importance to them.

Not only that, but for each new organization that is started,
new leadership positions open up; a president; vice president; secretary; treasurer; membership, media relations, and Internet coordinators; and a fund-raising chairman are needed for every organization. It greatly expands the leadership inventory of the conservative movement when new organizations are formed and people become leaders by assuming leadership duties and fulfilling the responsibilities of those jobs.

To those naysayers who still argue for a third party instead of a third force, let me say simply that I’ve been there out of the same frustration you have, and with that experience I can prove that what I’m advocating can work—and did work—to elect Ronald Reagan.

We of the New Right shared the conservative ideas of the “Old Right,” but, as I’ve described, we were operationally different.

We began by having a new attitude toward politics. We understood the premise that “successful politicians do not bore the voters.”

We used the new and alternative media to bypass the establishment media, get our message out, and excite voters with our ideas.

Gone was the notion that conservative ideas were or should be self-evident to voters.

Gone, too, was the perennial losers’ attitude held by many old-time conservatives, and especially by Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the state capitols.

We got up every morning thinking,
What are the two, three, or four things we can do today to defeat the Democrats and put liberals out of business?

Newt Gingrich was a key but controversial figure in our efforts, and he remains one today. However you may see Newt today, his great redeeming quality is that he is an excellent strategist and a fierce partisan, even if he does not always subscribe to limited-government constitutional conservative principles.

Unlike the old-establishment Capitol Hill Republicans, like then House minority leader Bob Michel, Newt was prepared to work tirelessly to defeat the Democrats and bring Republicans to power.

After two failed attempts, Newt Gingrich was first elected to
Congress in 1978; in early 1979 Gingrich went to the House leadership and asked, “Who is in charge of making us the majority in the House?” The response from the House Republican leadership was, “Majority?”

When Gingrich found out no one was in charge of making Republicans the majority in the House, his response was, “Okay, then I’ll be in charge.”

In addition to being one of the key “inside” leaders of the New Right, Newt also became a leader in the House Republican Conference, and eventually Speaker of the House, in large measure because he didn’t wait around for someone else to tell him what to do—he showed leadership and put himself in charge of making Republicans the majority in the House.

Subscribing to the theory that even important and busy people will show up for good food, we began to meet regularly at my home for breakfast and dinner to develop new ways of promoting our conservative ideas and causes. I had already successfully pioneered political direct mail—and had a successful direct marketing company with more than 250 employees to communicate with conservatives, raise money, and to bypass the establishment media to get our message out. It was here that we began to refine and target our message.

We received a good bit of criticism from the Old Right, who operated on the assumption that the pot of donors was limited, and that the more we segmented the marketplace of ideas, the less there would be to go around.

In the summer of 1975, I received a visit from a friend, a conservative stalwart who shall remain unnamed—coming as the spokesman for a group of Old Right leaders—who suggested that there were only 100,000 to 125,000 conservative donors in America, and all I was doing by helping start all these new conservative organizations and publications was slicing the pie thinner and thinner, and that I should cease and desist because I was hurting the
established
conservative organizations with my efforts.

Some of this angst was simply misguided, and some came from
individuals who had grown comfortable with the way things were and didn’t really want to put in the hard work to make their organizations more appealing and effective than other conservative organizations.

I listened politely, but thought to myself that if there were only 125,000 people in America that would contribute to conservative causes, then the cause of liberty didn’t have long to survive, and maybe I should take what time was left to spend more time with my family and play more golf. What’s more, I knew it wasn’t true and far from ceasing and desisting, we redoubled our efforts.

As if to prove that I was right, two of our company’s executives, Wyatt Stewart and Steve Winchell, left the company in 1977–1978 and started working for the Republican Congressional Committee, which at that time had only about 20,000 donors. By the time of Ronald Reagan’s election as president in November 1980, the major GOP national committees, under Wyatt and Steve’s leadership, had some two million donors. This was just another example of the Old Right’s thinking proven wrong.

A good bit of the discomfort was, as I noted earlier, because the Old Right was very defeatist. They were fully invested in the “Sir Galahad” way of expressing conservative ideas, and when logic and the pureness of their hearts didn’t win elections, they blamed everything but their own poor communication and organizational skills.

We didn’t stop trying to broaden the New Right coalition, because we believed right down to the soles of our shoes that conservative ideas were—and are—the majority opinion in this country. All we had to do was punch through the establishment’s filter to let voters know there were organizations and candidates who shared their views, values, and principles, and the support would be there.

We were not so much interested in the short-term “optics” or how things look that obsess establishment politicians—we were building a movement and were willing to fight on every street corner and invest in the movement for the long term.

One success story this strategic thinking engendered was a campaign we conducted on “common situs picketing” for the National
Right to Work Committee.

Common situs picketing, which was and is illegal, would allow a disagreement with a small union to shut down an entire construction site—it was a long-sought goal of Big Labor.

In 1975 establishment Republican president Gerald R. Ford promised George Usery, his secretary of labor, and George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, that if Congress sent him the bill, he would sign it. The National Right to Work Committee resolved to fight the bill and pressure President Ford to reverse course on signing the bill.

They hired our company to mount the campaign, and at $0.25 each, we mailed four million letters for $1 million.

National Right to Work got back $700,000 in contributions—which meant that they lost $300,000 on the mailing, which was, and is, a substantial sum of money—but a friend of mine, John Carlson, who worked in President Ford’s press operation, later told me Ford got seven hundred thousand–plus cards, letters, and phone calls demanding that he veto the common situs picketing bill.

In a move that shocked Big Labor to its core, Ford broke his promise and vetoed the bill.

Reed Larson, who headed National Right to Work at the time, understood he was building and leading a movement, not just trying to raise money for next quarter’s budget. National Right to Work also added ninety thousand new donors to their file that, over time, probably gave tens of millions of dollars to the organization and more than repaid the $300,000 investment in the common situs mailing.

I received a lot of establishment media criticism back in the 1970s by those who saw political direct mail as having only one purpose—to raise money. I was regularly attacked in the national media if a mailing didn’t make a profit for the client. What these critics didn’t understand was that direct mail is advertising, and that it is a form of alternative media that educates voters, organizes activists to pass or defeat legislation, and identifies favorable voters and supporters—and raises money too.

However, all of the criticism I was subjected to stopped in a few
hours on Election Night November 1980. I could almost hear our critics in the political community and the media collectively saying, “Aha! That’s what Viguerie and his friends have been up to.”