NY23: Conservatives, RINOS and the Antonym of 'Leadership'

This article is focused on social issues -- abortion and gay marriage -- but the basic point is important:

The Hill reports that 17 House Republicans have written checks to Dede Scozzafava's campaign. They include House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio), Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Virginia), National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas), and Representative Kevin McCarthy (California), who is in charge of recruiting GOP candidates to run next year.
Connie Mackey, president of the Family Research Council Action Political Action Committee, believes those 17 House Republicans are abandoning conservative values.
"The very idea that someone of that liberal stripe would have the backing of the leadership frankly I think fires a shot across the bow for the future," she states, "and we felt it was very important to send a message right back."
Mackey takes particular offense to comments in The Hill attributed to an "unnamed GOP congressman" who suggested that Republicans who don't back Scozzafava, including House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence, are "anti-women." She is calling on that unnamed congressman to identify himself and apologize to his colleagues for "maligning" them. . . . (Emphasis added.)

Read the whole thing. It is always the representatives of the RINO/Rockefeller wing of the party, and not conservatives, who habitually violate the 11th Commandment with those kinds of comments. Statements like that tend to reinforce and echo the liberal attack on the GOP.

The Olympia Snowe/John McCain/Dede Scozzafava types are always badmouthing their party to reporters, and they hire liberal staffers who do the same thing. By derogating their party's own base, which has always been traditionalist, they imply that "values voters" are benighted bigots.

This is why I felt that my conservative friends who supported John McCain in 2008 were so sadly mistaken. You have got no idea what kind of foul and insulting things "Maverick" would utter to his buddies in the press corps regarding the GOP grassroots during his 2000 presidential campaign. In those off-the-record remarks, he routinely depicted the average Republican voter as a dimwit, a rube, a hick.

Here's what the so-called "leaders" have got to get through their heads: The people are the party. Their votes, their volunteer efforts, and their small contributions of campaign cash are the very lifeblood of the party.

Now, my friend Cynthia Yockey disagrees with me on gay-rights issues, and we disagree forthrightly. There may be others who disagree just as forthrightly on abortion. OK, it's an honest disagreement among people who are united in their support of basic common principles -- and especially by our opposition to the voracious power-appetite of the Democratic Part8y's modern progressivism.

Though I am a social conservative, I don't like it when my family-values criticize those gays who agree with us on basic principles of limited government. If there was a coalition called Flaming Queers for the 10th Amendment, I'd be OK with that. Drag Queens for Concealed Carry, Leather Lesbians for School Choice -- the more the merrier, OK?

You cannot build a winning coalition by a processs of subtraction, and you don't win elections by campaign against your own party's strongest supporters. If the GOP is to build a solid majority, it must find ways to appeal beyond its hard-core base, but you can't do that by trumpeting to the press that your hard-core base is a bunch of hateful ignoramuses.

Among my staunchest social-conservative friends are people with advanced degrees and high-status professional careers. They share the same traditionalist values with a lot of beer-and-a-shot blue-collar types. They are part of conservative coalition is large and diverse. And they need leaders who understand and respect them, who will not badmouth them behind their backs.

The kind of "leadership" that supports a Scozzafava -- in a district that can and, I believe, will elect a solid Reagan Republican like Doug Hoffman -- is not leadership at all.

The national GOP has in recent years mistakenly elevated to positions of prestige people who are in fact the antonym of leadership. And how shall we reply?

NOT ONE RED CENT!