Paul Ibrahim, writing for the North Star National has hit upon a disturbing trend. A bunch of former GOP donors are finding more than one reason to not send money to the RNC, republican candidates or their local party.
“No one’s life is a waste,” a colleague wrote me in reaction to Dede Scozzafava’s withdrawal from the NY-23 congressional election. “You can always serve as a bad example.”
While we can certainly agree with this statement, it is about time we ask, how many bad examples does the Republican establishment need before it learns its lesson?
In 2004, strong support from the Republican establishment allowed liberal senator Arlen Specter to survive a Republican primary challenge from conservative congressman Pat Toomey by a minuscule margin.
In 2006, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) wholeheartedly catapulted itself into a Rhode Island Republican primary, where it spent $1.2 million on behalf of left-wing senator Lincoln Chafee and against his conservative opponent, Steve Laffey, while the Republican National Committee (RNC) deployed the 72-hour get-out-the-vote drive it usually saves for general elections against Democrats. At around the same time, conservative Virginia Senator George Allen lost reelection by a razor-thin margin, handing the Senate over to the Democrats. To say that all the resources wasted by the Republican establishment in Rhode Island would not have had a good chance of giving Allen an extra 0.2 percent of the vote in Virginia would be naïve, to say the least.
In incredible irony, conservatives who had contributed money both to Laffey and to the Republican Party (with the assumption that the money would be used to protect conservative policies against liberal ones) were now seeing their hard-earned cash fighting itself on the airwaves of Rhode Island. Chafee won the primary, lost the general election, and when he no longer needed the Republican establishment, he predictably left the Republican Party and endorsed Barack Obama for President.
Of course, this does not mean conservatives should withhold their money from all elections. There are alternatives. They can contribute to individual candidates.
But enough with the blind contributions to the Republican Party, and with the blind voting for establishment-backed candidates. That the establishment attempts to save face every time it loses, at it is doing now by supporting Hoffman two days before the election, should not blind anyone from the fact that only hours ago, it was throwing money at a genuine leftist while trashing Hoffman, and that in the coming months, it will be supporting a decidedly non-conservative Charlie Crist over a perfectly conservative and perfectly electable Marco Rubio in the Florida Republican Senate primary.
Thus, until the Republican establishment truly gets it – and it might take a long time – conservatives must unite in pledging not one more cent to the Republican Party. There is no sense in subsidizing a permanent Republican minority – and one that isn’t even true to its principles.
For a continued discussion of the un-learned lessons of the GOP, this one article is a must read for conservatives who continue to get fund raising letters from the GOP establishment. The upshot of the article? "Not one more cent to the Republican Party"
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