Takeover (11 page)

When I started in 1961, direct mail was the second-largest form of advertising, second only to television. Today in 2014, direct mail is still the second-largest form of advertising.

Of course, the Left quickly began the process of trying to catch up with us conservatives!

I wasn’t initially worried because it had taken me more than fifteen years to do what I had done, and I thought it would take the liberals at least that long—but boy was I wrong.

Within three to four years, the Left had caught up and passed us in terms of using direct mail/direct marketing to advance their political-ideological agenda. It is my opinion today that the Left continues to be far better at using direct mail/direct marketing to advance their agenda than are conservatives.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign had three million donors, and it had over four million donors in 2012; Mitt Romney had only a fraction of that number. As a general rule, the Democratic Committees are now far more professional in their direct-marketing campaigns than are the Republicans.

To fuel the rise of the New Right, we made a conscious effort to market our ideas and to bring new voters and new supporters, such as social conservatives, into the conservative movement. We worked to expand the number of voters who would support the candidates we backed and in particular to reach those conservative voters and potential supporters who were outside of the establishment Republican Party.

Many of the voters who backed New Right candidates and supported New Right organizations didn’t fit into the stereotypical picture of a Republican Party supporter as a white, suburban, or small-town middle-class businessman or corporate-type.

Our recruits were anti-Communist Eastern European immigrants; pro-life Catholic blue-collar workers; Evangelical Christians
concerned about the erosion of values and lack of morality in popular culture—in short, they were the voters who had been ignored and disenfranchised by the Left and its me-too establishment Republican facilitators.

Contrast our efforts to expand the base of support for conservative candidates with today’s Republican Party that seems to go out of its way to exclude potential voters and supporters who don’t agree with the GOP establishment and especially its leadership on Capitol Hill.

Rather than work to bring new voters and supporters into the party, Speaker of the House John Boehner refers to conservatives as “knuckle-draggers” and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus cravenly caved in to demands from the Mitt Romney campaign to strip Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party–leaning delegates of their credentials and exclude them from participating in the 2012 Republican National Convention. The damage done to the Republican brand by the disgraceful and disrespectful treatment conservative and libertarian-leaning delegates received at the 2012 convention will continue to dog the national GOP for a long time.

Of course Romney is now a nonfactor after he gave away the presidency by running a content-free campaign, but the rules changes that his supporters engineered have been maintained to provide an advantage to the next Republican presidential candidate the Republican establishment chooses to anoint.

And there’s the lesson for today’s Tea Partiers and libertarian-leaning conservatives. During the late 1970s and early 1980s we of the New Right weren’t operating as an appendage of the GOP; we were working through it in the spirit of the biblical injunction in the book of Romans to be in the world, but not of the world.

We weren’t even operating as supporters of any individual candidate, even though eventually all of us who were active in the New Right came to support Ronald Reagan for president.

We saw ourselves as separate from the established Republican Party. Our goal was to promote a set of conservative principles and values and to back candidates who would stand for those values and
principles—if that meant opposing the established leaders of the Republican Party, and supporting conservative Democrats such as the late congressman Larry McDonald, former congressman and senator Phil Gramm when he was a Democrat, or Democratic state representative Woody Jenkins in Louisiana, so be it.

As I said earlier, conservative “third force” groups were a key part of Reagan’s victory and the building of the 1980 Reagan coalition.

The individuals associated with the rise of the New Right—Bill Armstrong, Morton Blackwell, Joe Coors, Phil Crane, Terry Dolan, Bob Dornan, Tom Ellis, Jerry Falwell, Ed Feulner, Newt Gingrich, Ron Godwin, Jesse Helms, Gordon Humphrey, Woody Jenkins, Roger Jepson, Tim and Beverley LaHaye, Ed McAteer, Connie Marshner, Larry McDonald, Larry Pratt, Howard Phillips, H. L. “Bill” Richardson, Pat Robertson, James Robison, Phyllis Schlafly, Mike Valerio, Bob Walker (both the congressman and the former Reagan aide), Jim Watt, Vin Weber, Paul Weyrich, Carter Wren, and the groups they developed to educate, activate, and energize voters—weren’t mere appendages of the national Republican Party or the Washington political establishment.

Every time Jimmy Carter proposed a new policy with which we disagreed, such as giving away the Panama Canal, cancelling the B-1 bomber, or expanding the welfare state, even when we lost the fight, it added new supporters to the conservative movement and helped create the Reagan coalition.

However, it is vital to recognize that the conservative voters who opposed giving away the Panama Canal were just as mad at establishment Republican senator Howard Baker for backing the Panama Canal Treaty as they were at Jimmy Carter for signing it.

The strategy of acting as a third force (not a third party!) in politics is still valid today; the problem is that too many conservative coalitions and organizations—including some we created back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—have become captive to the Republican establishment.

During the administration of President George W. Bush, the
leaders of some of these organizations would get all aflutter if they got a call from Karl Rove; however if they got a call that President Bush was on the line, they would wet their pants even as Rove and his boss, President Bush, were betraying them and supporting policies that went against the conservative ideas they supposedly stood for.

The Democrats who long for days when Republicans like Howard Baker and Bob Michael were running the show and the parties could “work together” remind me of the old segregationists who would say, “Don’t get me wrong: I like blacks; some of them, like old Uncle Tom down the road, are like a member of our family. It is these new young radicals, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, and Andrew Young that make me nervous.”

In other words, the segregationist knew his place and old Uncle Tom knew his place, and the discomfort came when the new young activists rightly wanted to change that arrangement. This same concept applies to the civil war for the soul of the Republican Party.

The progressive establishment longs to return to the day when everyone knew their place and the new young radicals of thirty or forty years ago, like Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Newt Gingrich, and now Tony Perkins, Jenny Beth Martin, Tim Huelskamp, Justin Amash, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, were not rocking the boat and effectively opposing the growth of government.

There’s an old saying that the fight starts when someone strikes the second blow—there was no fight as long as establishment Republicans did not oppose the liberals’ Big Government agenda.

Once conservatives started fighting back, the Left began to scream bloody murder, but it was not a fight until conservatives fought back—and it is the same today.

So as long as conservatives didn’t push back against the betrayal of our principles by Republicans, like the two Presidents Bush, there was no fight—Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul have struck the second blow and are fighting back, and as soon as they and their grassroots limited-government constitutional conservative supporters
did
push back, we were accused of starting an intraparty brawl.

Ronald Reagan and his key advisors understood this.

When Reagan ran for president in 1976, he ran against the entire Republican establishment; and when he remarked that we need new leaders, leaders unfettered by old ties and old relationships, he was talking about the establishment Republican Party and its “dime store Democrat” leadership, such as Ford, Nixon, Rockefeller, and their big business supporters.

The Tea Party is now the fourth leg of the conservative stool precisely because it is “unfettered.”

In January 2010 I was the Friday night keynote speaker in Dallas, Texas, for a weekend of training for about 125 Tea Party leaders from around the country. I met with a dozen or so Tea Party leaders before my speech and about the same number after my speech; among them was a lady from Corpus Christi, Texas, who was a leader of a Tea Party group with about three thousand members.

Republican politicians would frequently call, asking to attend their meetings, and she would say they were welcome to attend and would be introduced, but admonished them, “You don’t speak; you listen to us.” I don’t know a conservative leader at the national level who would talk to a Republican politician that way, and that is one reason why I say the Tea Party is a new, separate leg of the conservative coalition, unfettered by old ties and old relationships to the Republican Party.

Reagan’s campaign against the establishment Republicans was every bit as tough, or tougher, than his campaign against Jimmy Carter. Reagan won because he charted a new course and campaigned as a conservative; he did not allow himself to become “fettered” to the old leaders and the old weaknesses of the establishment Republican Party.

The Republican establishment likes to hide behind what they call Reagan’s eleventh commandment—thou shall not speak ill of a fellow Republican. This of course conveniently glosses over the fact that Reagan was a tough campaigner and a vigorous advocate of conservative principles.

In 1976 Reagan had lost several primaries and was in danger of
being knocked out of the presidential race. As the North Carolina primary approached, Senator Jesse Helms and Tom Ellis urged him to stay away from the state and let them handle the campaign unless he would do four things: attack President Ford; attack Henry Kissinger; attack the giveaway of the Panama Canal, and attack détente. Reagan agreed and attacked Ford and Kissinger and their weak foreign policy; he won the North Carolina Republican primary in an upset and kept his campaign alive.

In 1980 Reagan was equally tough on George H. W. Bush, famously reminding him, “I paid for this microphone” in a New Hampshire debate and showing Bush to be thin-skinned and petulant.

The bottom line is that the front-runner always wants a truce on negative ads.

Establishment Republicans also like to quote William F. Buckley Jr.’s dictum about supporting the most conservative candidate “who can be elected.” The problem is that so many establishment Republicans have become addicted to Big Government that they no longer qualify as conservatives. Supporting them as “conservatives” confuses voters and seriously weakens the Republican brand.

Conservatives today face a challenge that has periodically vexed the conservative movement for over fifty years: there are plenty of small-government constitutional conservatives who are ready to bolt the Republican Party for the Libertarian Party.

I sympathize with their frustration, and I share their anger, but in conversations with national Libertarian Party leaders, when I say that I share their anger and frustration with the Republican Party and ask what their strategy and plan is for winning the presidency, or even a House or Senate seat, their answer is always some form of, “Uh, I’ll get back to you on that.”

Too many conservative Republican candidates for senator and governor, particularly out west, have been defeated because Libertarians siphoned off a few percent of the vote and handed the race to the Democrats. Libertarians are very good at tearing down, but they have no serious plan for building a national political majority or plurality.

When Libertarians are operating in think tanks and lobbying for public policy, such as school vouchers, they have much to contribute, but when they try to operate politically, they set back the cause of liberty. They don’t have a practical plan for electing their candidates to take control of the government and implement their ideas as government policy—and let’s face it: that’s what elections are all about.

Reagan, on the other hand, had a practical plan for running as a conservative, winning the Republican nomination for president, winning the general election, and governing.

Naturally, thirty-four years after the fact, everyone in the Republican Party and conservative politics claims they were for Reagan, but in reality, in 1980, there were plenty of conservatives who thought maybe he was too old, and backed young and dynamic congressman Phil Crane of Illinois, as I did initially. Texas governor John Connally had many conservative supporters, particularly among his fellow Texans, and of course Reagan was vehemently opposed by the Republican establishment, just as he had been in 1976.

With six other candidates in the race and others talking about running for president, when the 1980 Republican primary election season began, even though the polls made him look like the odds-on favorite, it wasn’t at all clear that Ronald Reagan would be the nominee or even the horse conservatives would choose to ride in the race.

For decades I’ve heard that the GOP could really do well if they would just forget about the social issues. Let me remind you, as I’ve said before, in Goldwater’s day the conservative movement rested on a two-legged stool—national defense and economic conservatives. It was only when we added the third leg of social conservatives in the late 1970s that we went from getting 40 to 45 percent of the vote, to getting over 50 percent and regularly winning elections. When we had all three legs, we were competitive, but we were not governing America. Now with the addition of the constitutional conservatives of the Tea Party movement, we’ve added a fourth leg to the stool, and our opportunity to build a permanent governing majority has risen
dramatically. What gave Reagan the edge in the Republican primaries and ultimately paved the way for him to defeat Jimmy Carter in the fall was the creation of the “Reagan coalition” of national defense conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives.