McCarthy: What Happens to “Conservatives” if the Romney Campaign is Successful?

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – Daniel McCarthy has a very thought-provoking piece at The American Conservative Magazine, he posted it last night, about what happens if the Romney Campaign succeeds?  What does a Romney win do to conservatism?  McCarthy’s conclusion is that Romney may be as Tim Carney described him on this radio show about four weeks ago, maybe five weeks ago, as the ultimate pragmatist about the way he would act as a governor or as a president.  He would not be a doctrinaire neocon and he would not deliver the goods to Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and company and make Bibi Netanyahu one of the happiest men on earth, that maybe he’d be a little bit more practical about it, but then again maybe he wouldn’t. Check out the rest in today’s audio and transcript…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Daniel McCarthy has a very thought-provoking piece at The American Conservative Magazine, he posted it last night, about what happens if Romney wins?  What does a Romney win do to conservatism?  McCarthy’s conclusion is that Romney may be as Tim Carney described him on this radio show about four weeks ago, maybe five weeks ago, as the ultimate pragmatist about the way he would act as a governor or as a president.  He would not be a doctrinaire neocon and he would not deliver the goods to Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and company and make Bibi Netanyahu one of the happiest men on earth, that maybe he’d be a little bit more practical about it, but then again maybe he wouldn’t.

McCarthy surmises that there may be a resurgence within the Republican Party of those souls that are not down with the nation building of George W. Bush.  Then again, there may be that tendency and that urge to just let the Kristol wing run foreign policy because the governor, soon to be president, may not want to be bothered with foreign affairs.  He may want to get in there and look at every economic statistic and treat it as though it’s a takeover and just the next Staples in the career of businessman Mitt Romney.  He may not want to concern himself with it.  He may job it out.  All indications are that he would job it out to the wrong people and we would get the third term of George W. Bush.

I’m going to get into this in greater detail, but just to tease, I would look at it and I would conclude that a Romney presidency, if it goes as I have just described it, would almost guarantee a flight for many to a third party, almost guarantee it.  The Democrat Party as an ideological bastion is done.  There’s nothing there other than the past accomplishments of the welfare state, which by all measures and all accounts have yielded nothing more than public unhappiness and misery.  If you’re a Democrat, what do you hang your hat on, an idea that was hatched by The Heritage Foundation in 1993, ObamaCare?  That’s what ObamaCare basically is here.  There’s nothing new there, socialism, Marxism, communism and all of its various flavors and iterations has been tried.  The results are in and the results have not equaled the playing field.  If anything, they have made the playing field even more unequal than they ever were before.

If you’re a Democrat and you’re a progressive, you now find yourself with a dwindling pile of prospective rights that you’re going to advocate for.  First it was civil rights, then it was sexual rights, then minority rights, immigrant rights.  You’re running out of things to have rights for.  The rights crusades have almost come to a conclusion.  What are you going to do for an encore?  Are you just going to defend the rights that you have accrued yourself?  There is not much work left for the Democrat Party.  The Republican Party hasn’t stood for something other than the light version of the Democrat Party for almost 40 years.  There are those in the Republican Party that stand for different things and have different principles.  As I said, the way is now being cleared and paved for them to go their own way.

For those of us that are [r]epublicans and are still clinging, and I think admirably and wisely, to Jeffersonian ideals and republicanism, by contrast, the future is very bright and optimistic for us.  We’re the ones that don’t have very much to hand our hats on legislatively or in the realm of political accomplishments to speak of.  We’re the ones that have the whole world in front of us again it seems, especially if you’re of the tradcons or paleocon variety.  The country is a canvas.  The two parties have exhausted almost all the oxygen in the room.  They’ve breathed it up, burned it, incinerated it, and from its ashes there now is opportunity.  The opportunity lies in the wisdom of the past, the guidance of the almighty, which is part of the wisdom of the past.  I think the future is very bright, so I might differ from my friend Daniel McCarthy just a bit on that.

End Mike Church Show Transcript