Miscellaneous

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.

This new website is the handiwork of Co-founder Darren Pettyjohn.  It just went up.  I like everything about it.  It’s elegant.  And it’s going to work.  The message of the Reagan Project, and the Reagan Amendment, is going to be heard.

After our second son, Brendan was born (fourteen months after his brother Brook) my wife wanted a break from childbearing, maybe a permanent one.  But after a couple years with her little boys she decided she really wanted a daughter.  I wonder why?  So when we moved into our big house on the Hillside she got pregnant again.  With Sarah.  She thought.  Then out comes Darren.  She said that’s it, I’m giving up, and I got a vasectomy.  I would have liked to have Sarah myself.

But Darren will do.

The Balanced Budget Amendment can do more than just cut spending.  It can be an enormous economic stimulus, sparking a recovery to match the 1980’s.