Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

Where is it now?  Five years ago CNBC’s Rick Santelli, God love him, went off on an on-air rant and started a movement.  Only in America.  Where are all the people who organized and worked  and helped take the House of Representatives from Nancy Pelosi?  Some of these organizations are still around, but I don’t think the movement is anything near to what they used to be.  Where is the energy, the determination to do something, to try and take the country back from the statists who are so disdainful of the Constitution and the tradition of American liberty?  Are these people discouraged, worn out, disillusioned, or what?

I didn’t follow the Tea Party that closely.  But I never heard them talk about Article V.  Like most professional politicians, they had no idea what it was, and what it was for.  It’s too bad.  Article V and the Tea Party were made for each other, a match made in heaven.  Article V is where the Framers gave power to the people. But that power must be exercised through their state legislatures.

These legislators, with few exceptions, have their finger on the public pulse.  They spend some time every year, or every other year, in their Capitol, but the vast majority are not professional politicians, or even lawyers.  They’re ranchers and teachers and real estate agents.  They have normal lives and are members of their communities just like everybody else.  They go to church, PTA meetings, and ball games.  They’re close to the people they represent. They listen.

Biddulph and the rest of the Task Force want the Tea Party to turn out on April 15th at the South Carolina and Oklahoma Capitols.  Those legislatures are balking at passing our bill, and need to know it has the support of their voters.  Think of all the work the Tea Party has done.  Some of it paid off, a lot of it didn’t.  Now they have a chance to do something really big, change the direction of the country not with laws, or elections, but with the Constitution that they all love.

It’s a matter of communication, of course.  If they knew, and understood, how this all worked I have no doubt they would rejuvenate themselves and join the fray.  I’m convinced this will happen, and soon.  It makes too much sense not to.  Perhaps the Reagan Project has a role to play.  We’re working on it.

Apropos of nothing, here’s story for you.  I’m a freshman at Cal in 1962, and a big conservative.  I ordered a Barry Goldwater sweatshirt from National Review and wore it a lot to class.  I’d sit in the middle of the front row of Wheeler Hall looking at this socialist lecture me in Political Science 101.  There were like 600 students in the class.  It was a complete waste of time.  I learned nothing.

I wore it to my Speech class too, but it only had about 30 students.  I didn’t quite understand what I was supposed to learn in it when I signed up for it.  At the end of the semester I still didn’t know.  It was all horseshit.  The Professor was a twitty little bastard, and I could tell he didn’t like my sweatshirt.  So one day, as an exercise in the art of speech that he was teaching us, he goes off on Goldwater.  He said, “What do we really know about anybody?  Take Barry Goldwater.  What do we really know about him?  We know he’s from Arizona, where he’s the senior United States Senator…..”  At this point I interrupt him, and say, “Actually, he’s the junior Senator from Arizona.”  I was probably smirking at him when I said it. I was kind of a cocky kid.  He really didn’t like that.

The son of a bitch gave me a “D”.  I never was much of a student.

According to Fox News First, a daily racing form on the presidential derby, today the R’s are ranked:

Bush, Walker, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Kasich, Fiorina, Perry, Huckabee and Christie.

Biddulph is going full steam ahead on Tax Day rallies on the steps of the Capitol in Columbia and Oklahoma City.  We want a presidential candidate at  both of them.  Bush and Christie are bad choices, mainly because they’re not popular with state legislators in these states.  Everybody else is fine.  We need to give Kasich first dibs.  He’s earned that.  If he declines we want Perry in South Carolina.  Sponsor Sen. Larry Grooms will do the invite.  John  Steinberger is the main man in South Carolina, and he thinks Grooms supported Perry in 2012.  Perry does have the remnant of an organization there, and is probably trying to rebuild it.

In Oklahoma sponsor Rep. Gary Banz will make the call.  We’ll see who he wants.  They’re all fine.

Looking forward, we should be able to get presidential candidates at all our major functions, including the Reagan Amendment Rally in Seattle on August 3rd.  Leaving out Bush and Christie, which I believe we should do, we’ve got at least eight to choose from.  They will all  be looking for venues to campaign in, an issue to embrace, and allies on the ground.  We’ve got it all.  Of course, the way I look at it the first candidate to wrap his arms around the Reagan Amendment will be the one to watch.

That’ll be the smart one.

It’s a word that doesn’t belong in politics.  Any time somebody starts talking about Manifest Destiny, or “demography is destiny” they’re just making a prediction, and trying to make it sound important.  Nobody has a rendezvous with destiny.  It’s bunk.

A destiny is doom, something preordained, inevitable.  It’s for those who don’t believe in free will.  Some forms of Protestantism, such as Calvinism, preach it, call it predestination.  You are either destined to be part of the elect, or you are damned.  These people don’t have much faith in the Lord.  They don’t think He is capable of giving us free will, making us masters of our own fate.  I was taught that God was omnipotent.  That he gave us the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden, and left us free to fall, or be saved.

That’s my version of Christianity.  150 years ago it was called muscular.  It’s a fighting faith.  The Lord’s not going to save us.  We have to do that on our own.  My wife and I went to see “American Sniper” a while ago.  Chris Kyle was a Christian warrior.  This country’s going to be fine.  There aren’t a lot of Chris Kyle’s out there.  But there’s enough.  We just can’t let them die in political projects, like nation building.  No American blood should be shed building another nation.  I get very angry when I think about it.

Those of us on the civilian side have work to do of our own.  Things like the Reagan Amendment don’t just happen, in acts of spontaneous combustion.  That’s not how politics works.  Things happen when people make them happen.  This new website is a platform for, among other things, asking for help.

Follow along, and contribute if you can.

Doug Sosnik is a designated Deep Thinker in the Clinton Machine.  He’s a big picture guy, and is taken seriously by some.  He’s got a thumbsucker up at Politico saying, essentially, that in the long term Hispanics are going to bury the Republicans.  Some day soon, but definitely by 2040, we’re doomed.  Yawn.  The only interesting thing in his piece is his admission that this might not happen in 2016.  To me it sounds like he’s making excuses in advance for a campaign he’s afraid is going to lose.

Reading this thing put me in a good mood.  I try and keep up with everybody’s thinking on the left and right.  The Reagan Project is a political movement that operates in today’s political environment.  It’s all about politics, and it’s good to know what the other side is thinking.  If Sosnik is any indication, it’s not much.  When you start making political predictions 25 years out, based on the continuation of current demographic trends, and an unvarying continuation of the political effect of those trends, you’re nervous about today.  It’s something you’d rather avoid discussing.

We’re running with the tide.  They’re fighting it.  The playing ground has tilted.  I see evidence of it almost every day.  It’s almost as though I can feel it.  I could be wrong, and I’m well aware of that.  So I’m constantly looking for counter indications, something that doesn’t fit my narrative.  What could I be missing?  Not much, according to Dr. Sosnik.

Like yesterday, I can remember the wave that brought Reagan in.  Once the Iranian hostage crisis happened, the wave began to build.  Some old guy from Montana, I think his name was Ralph Winterood, the Reagan campaign’s western states coordinator, came up to Anchorage in the summer of 1979 to figure out who he wanted running the campaign in Alaska.  The people who ran it in ’76 screwed up.  I was involved, and I watched it happen.  These guys were real amateurs.

I’d done my part, as a district chairman.  In fact, I’d kicked ass.  My wife and I were living in some dumpy house in Spenard back then, in low rent District Nine.  Solid Democrat district, with the Republican District leadership firmly held by the Ted Stevens people.  Stevens supported Ford.  So I did a little community organizing, took over the district, and sent eight  out of eight Reagan delegates to the state convention.

I guess Ralph heard about that.  He had me up to his room at the Captain Cook and asked me to be state chairman.  I asked him if Reagan was too old, and he said you ought to be around him.  He’s raring to go.  So I accepted, and was involved a little with the national campaign.  Not much, really.  We had Alaska in the bag.  But I watched what was going on like a hawk, and  I saw it coming.  I felt it coming.

Just like I do today.

A year ago my wife and I were having a drink on the riverfront in Savannah.  It’s an open town, and you can take your drinks down to the benches close to the water.  It was cocktail time, and my wife reserved a bench while I got the drinks from a bar.  I was getting ready to join her, and claim the bench, when a very heavyset couple beat me to it.  They allowed as we should join them, so we all squeezed together.

They were Keith and Darlene, from right outside Macon.  Keith said he made his living bowling peanuts and selling them at a roadside stand.  Some days he’d take in up to 300 dollars.  Cash.  I asked him what you do when you bowl a peanut, and he said I bowl ’em for two days in salt water.  You use fifteen pounds of salt with a hundred pound bag of peanuts.  I still didn’t get it, and Darlene explained he meant boil.

We got to know Keith and Darlene pretty well.  We kind of hit it off.  They told us a lot about their lives.  They both struggled with their weight. Keith had lost sixty pounds, and was down to 260.  Darlene was still up there at 290, but she was making progress. They’d sworn off boiled peanuts.  They were nice people.  Keith was a big NRA guy, and I told him a couple Alaska stories, which he liked.

We went on to Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville, Gatlinburg, across North Carolina to the Outer Banks, and down to Charleston.  Three weeks.  We met and mingled with a lot of people, black and white.  It was all very pleasant, and we learned a lot.  We’d never spent any time in the South.  This was the first time we got to know these people.  We’re westerners.

I don’t mean to say I understand the South.  By no means.  But I got a feel for the place.  To understand politics you have to understand people, and I got to know the people of the South a little bit.

Which brings me, of course, to the Reagan Amendment.  What would Keith and Darlene, and all the other people, Southerners, that we met, think of it?  It’s an important question.

I think they’d buy in.  The South and the West have been allied against the East forever.  You’re pretty close to 26 right there.  The Midwest has to go along as well.  I haven’t spent much time there, but I’ve met a lot of these people.  You’ll have to make the case that they, personally, will benefit from the Reagan Amendment.  It’s politics.  What’s in it for me?  We can make that case.

To get to 38 you’ll need Maine, Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota.  These are the people who will decide.

Nationally the fight would be with the environmental left, and their allies in government, the media, entertainment, the lawyers and lobbyists, the academy, the trust funds and foundations, and all those who put their faith in government.  And all those who live off it.  It will be a battle royal.  The stakes would be enormous.  I think we win it.

They’ll be fighting the tide.