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Friday, April 19, 2024

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The Best Two GOP Candidates...


While Donald Trump busies himself sucking every molecule of oxygen out of the GOP presidential nomination race, we have seen two standout candidates emerge from the (grotesquely oversized) pack of candidates. If the GOP settles on these two on the ticket, whatever the order, we will have put forth the finest possible ticket, and will have a solid chance of winning the White House.

Before that, let’s address Donald Trump a little more…

My hope is that Mr. Trump is starting to stick his foot in his mouth, and that it will not be much longer (at this pace) before he swallows his entire leg. My fear is not that Trump will run third party. If he loses the nomination, he won’t throw good money after bad. He did not get his billions (and I won’t debate how many billions he has) by being stupid. My fear is that Mr. Trump will win the nomination. If he does, then his road to the White House is fairly unobstructed – No Democrat candidate is any good. My great fear is that Mr. Trump will be just as terrible a president as the punditocracy predicts. He certainly will not have a governable position, having alienated both the right and the left.

Now that I have bloviated on the Great Bloviator, let’s talk about the excellent people…

Carly Fiorina

I started this season thinking that she was earnest but doomed. She had no name; her base was microscopic; she would not be able to get oxygen in this Trump-dominated part of the Election Cycle. However, Mrs. Fiorina has surprised the pants off of me. She handles the press an order of magnitude better than all others but Trump, who handles the press more horribly than all of the others combined, and Ted Cruz, who is nearly her equal at press management.

Mrs. Fiorina has a solid conservative platform. She supports reducing government size and reducing the tax code to just three pages from over 75,000. She is a solid Second Amendment supporter. Mrs. Fiorina also has the advantage of being both presidential in appearance and temperament, but also an outsider to the Beltway Boogie. If she were to win the nomination, she would be a powerful contender, and would upstage Hillary Clinton and leave the country enthralled.

Mrs. Fiorina has been both a small businessperson and also the head of Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest companies on Earth. Nonetheless, Mrs. Fiorina constantly seeks to do that which benefits the middle class. She proudly notes the truth: “progressive” policies benefit the wealthy and well-connected. Her immigration position is moderate (path to citizenship for children brought to the USA). She is pro-life.

Mrs. Fiorina has a firm grasp on foreign-policy issues, and would debate Hillary Clinton under the table in seconds. Her proposed policies are sound and moderate. She won’t press the red button on Iran on day one, but she won’t take a lousy deal.

Frankly, Mrs. Fiorina has no downside other than her lack of name recognition. Conservativity endorses Carly Fiorina for the 2016 GOP Presidential or Vice-presidential nomination.

Scott Walker

A Midwestern man (Born Iowa, governor of Wisconsin). He has faced three elections as governor, winning a “blue state” with solid numbers, increasing his vote in each of the three elections. He is young, energetic, brilliant, Conservative with a capital “C,” and the darling of the anti-leftists nationwide. He made headlines by fighting with government-employee unions to decrease their bargaining power, correctly noting that such unions were nothing less than a conduit to route taxpayer dollars directly to the Democrat party. He succeeded, besting both the Wisconsin Senate’s leftists fleeing to Illinois to prevent a quorum, and the (occasionally violent) protests of Wisconsin Big Labor.

He won a recall election with more votes than he received when initially elected. He won re-election with even more votes than that. Wisconsin’s healthy better-than-the-rest-of-America employment growth and healthy state finances are the end result of his policies.

Gov. Walker is a seasoned veteran who has been through the political fires of hell. After their spanking in the recall effort, the leftists in the state used semi-terrorist tactics to abuse issue advocacy groups with a “John Doe” investigation, where SWAT teams barged in, armed, refusing to allow the victims of these pre-dawn Gestapo-like raids to contact their own attorneys, and slapping gag orders on them to cover up their evil tactics. When these tactics made it to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, that court put a halt to these tactics. The court found that there was no law against “coordination” for issue advocacy. One Justice, in a concurring opinion questioned the Constitutionality of these searches on the grounds of their harsh tactics, when compared with the minor offenses that were suggested, but never happened, and if they did, would not be illegal. Does the state have the right to crash into someone’s home at 5:00AM at gunpoint, refusing to let them talk to attorneys or anyone else, and take away everything, - because they hold a different political position? Not in Wisconsin!

Governor Walker thrived in the midst of the left throwing everything it has against him. He has had opposition research done on him for five years. There are no hidden skeletons in his closet. He has a track record of excellence that makes him the best government employee running for President.

He is a Harley-riding, second-amendment-loving, pro-life, pro-middle-class, pro-small business Republican with the optimism of Reagan and the vitality of Kennedy. The only thing that the left could throw at him if he is the nominee is that he is a white male, which apparently disqualifies him in the eyes of the rabid radical left (but why not Bernie Sanders)?

Conservativity endorses Governor Scott Walker for the 2016 GOP Presidential or Vice-presidential nomination.

Getting the Circus Under Control

We have way too many candidates. The Conservatives in the room need to huddle and decide on a President and a Vice-President. Those two remain in the race as the designated Presidential and VP candidates, while the others bow out in favor of the chosen two. The race is a circus, and we need to get the field down to a manageable size. I can understand that Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, Rubio and Santorum would not like this idea. Jeb Bush would hate this idea, but would likely not be in the midst of that meeting.

My preferences for the two that should emerge is clear.

But who gets which position? There are solid arguments from both quality and political perspectives for either Mrs. Fiorina or Governor Walker. As a tag team in place before Fall 2015, they would be seasoned and smart and easily able to defeat Bush, Christie and Trump. Hillary Clinton would be put on her heels, because she would be pressured to come up with a solid VP candidate out of the gate. Sanders, Biden and the Democrat clown car lack anyone with the power to boost Mrs. Clinton. She would be hampered in her ability to broker any back room deals at the convention.

In the end, I would say that who is at the top of the ticket; Fiorina-Walker or Walker-Fiorina, is only mildly relevant. If Mrs. Fiorina was atop the ticket, she would blunt Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she would shatter the putative “glass ceiling” at the White House, but leave her open on experience. Governor Walker presents the inverse challenge, highly experienced and successful governor, but he is a white male.

The question is whose vote are we trying to win? The identity-politics types reside on the left. The middle tends to vote conservative when presented with competence, as does the right, leaving the Christian Conservatives as the swing votes in 2016. Scott Walker and Carly Fiorina are both pro-life – very pro-life. That will solidify the vote. Moreover, they’re both Christian and openly so. Fiorina-Walker could provide a landslide to the GOP, and perhaps keep us the Senate, if not increase us by 1-2 seats (The House isn’t really in play).

Conservatives: Get into a room and hack this out. What’s more important: your egos or the Country?