Diane Alden
Sunday, Dec. 8, 2002

I am sick of hearing the pundit class taking credit for Republican wins in November. I am tired of the arrogant tone and the back-patting which has gotten so bad I am surprised hospital emergency rooms aren't full of radio and TV talkers with dislocated shoulders.

The grassroots had their own issues in three battleground states that had nothing to do with the agenda of the Republican National Committee and its coterie of Beltway "experts."

One must remember that talk radio, Fox News Cable, the Washington Times and Republican-sympathizing punditry did not get out the numbers of voters in 2000 that came out in 2002. Yes, 9/11 and the "war on terror" had something to do with it. Increased patriotism had a great deal to do with it.

Unfortunately, establishment Republicans in the RNC and their sympathizers in the conservative media are so busy congratulating themselves that, by and large, they are failing to interpret what made the difference in 2002. Because of that blindness, I am on the record to say they will lose seats in 2004 as they did in 2000 if they don't understand the real reasons for their success.

If they do lose seats in 2004, they will say it is because they were not "moderate" enough rather than that they failed to energize their base. Wait and see. President Bush may win in 2004, but don't count on Republicans holding both houses of congress.

Pollster and election analyst Scott Rasmussen says that his data tells him that Republicans may be in control of both houses of Congress for some time to come. Forget it. The odds are against it, and a lot of it has to do with the fact the establishment Republicans refuse to promote the issues important to their base.

Plus, the arrogance is already beginning and it cost them in '96 and '98 elections and it will cost them in 2004. That arrogance has nothing to do with standing on principle; it has a lot to do with running away from the issues dear to their base and caving to leftist media hype about the federal government shutdown in '95.

The Unfree Market and Speaking the Unspeakable

Republicans win when white folks vote. White folks are still 81 percent of the voting population. Out of that number it is white Anglo-Saxon males who make the biggest Republican supporters and voting bloc. Married women, those people living in Intermountain states as well as Southern single moms and good old boys making less than $30,000 a year are also part of the Republican conservative base.

Establishment Republicans have a blind spot and refuse to admit that changing demographics driven by overwhelming immigration from the Third World are going to stop a Republican triumphal march dead in its tracks.

Karl Rove, the Cato Institute, Michael Barone, Linda Chavez, the Wall Street Journal, George W. Bush and now feckless analysts at the National Review are blindly on the pro-immigration bandwagon. It is suicidal establishment beltway thinking. It is also the thinking of those who sit on boards of directors of corporations or are sympathetic with the agenda of those who do.

These interests, both corporate and governmental, depend on cheap unskilled labor at one end of the spectrum and high-technology immigrants from India and Pakistan, Russia and the Pacific Rim on the other. A third of the techies in Silicon Valley in its heyday were imported from other countries, specifically India and Pakistan.

The usual reason for this importation of labor is that America does not educate enough engineers and computer programmers. Well, hey, we sure do produce a plentiful number of highly paid trial lawyers, doctors and financial market gurus. Could it be that low salaries have something to do with why we have more native-born American lawyers than engineers and computer programmers? Could it be they don't have the political clout of the aforementioned groups?

Does the economy benefit from cheap labor? Harvard economist George Borjas writes: "[T]he net economic benefits from immigration are small, probably less than $10 billion a year. This estimate comes from a simple application of the widely used textbook model of a competitive labor market. This is the same model that is typically used to analyze the economic consequences of such government policies as minimum wages and payroll taxes. The market for ideas provides what is perhaps the most convincing argument in favor of my estimate. The immigration area, after all, is highly contentious. If it were that simple to show that the gains from immigration are huge, there is an audience ready and willing to buy such numbers."

If immigration policies and tighter controls on our borders had kept massive illegal immigration in check and modified the importation of high-tech immigrants with HB-1 visas, those long-neglected white male Reagan Democrats, as well as their white collar computer programming soccer dad counterparts, would not be in a phony "free market" unemployed death dance at this very moment.

In addition, as long as American education is less than mediocre, that death dance will continue the destruction of the American political and economic experiment. School-to-Work nostrums suggested by corporate America merely train people for low-paying jobs; they do not educate them for citizenship in a highly advanced representative republic.

School-to-Work is the modern version of what Massachusetts public education did for Irish immigrant children in the 1850s. That education failed to educate but gave immigrants the skills to run the machines of the Northeast mills and factories.

In addition, as long as American citizenship no longer has any value except as a political or economic football tossed between the two dimwitted political parties, America will continue in a slow but sure decline.

Both political parties have a stake in continued high levels of immigration. They do so at their own risk. The record and the polls show that 70 percent of the American people want immigration reform and our borders to be secure. Going after Saddam won't mean a thing unless those borders are secure.

Open Borders

Now we hear the Bush White House returning to the suicidal notion of "open borders." Meanwhile, rural folks on the borders are trying to form groups to protect their farms, ranches and families from the invasion from the South. These people are getting NO discernable help from the White House. Rather, there are veiled threats about "not taking the law into their own hands."

Arizona's new Governor-elect Napolitano has indicated that vigilantism is criminal. Hopefully, she does not have a house or ranch on the border with drug dealers and uncaring aliens destroying property and impacting real human beings.

The new American ambassador to Mexico recently made a statement which indicates that the Bush administration is still seeking open borders between Mexico and the U.S. as well as amnesty for illegal aliens. Constitutionalists and conservatives have a legitimate concern that the political needs of Mexican President Vicente Fox and corporate America take precedence over the integrity of U.S. borders.

What is worse is that the rule of law is being flouted in a vain attempt to chase votes or provide cheap labor. The entire establishment Republican effort is geared toward getting a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote, a vote that never exceeds 35 percent for most Republican candidates locally or nationally.

A comparison with the Hispanic vote is the vote in the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) stronghold of northern Minnesota. In the last 80 years, the vote has always been 70 percent Democrat and 30 percent Republican.

The November election showed no changes; even though Republicans won gains statewide, they did not move above 30 percent on the Iron Range. The same holds true with the Hispanic vote. Republicans are not going to get more than 35 percent in some ethnic or political groups no matter what Karl Rove says.

What is really sad is how establishment Republicans pay back loyalty given to them by their conservative base. With the exception of taxes, Republicans run from conservative issues rather than fight for them. There is always some excuse; there is always pathetic and incompetent "bipartisanship" from Republicans while no quid pro quo is forthcoming from Democrats.

Even with tax cuts there is no revolutionary or visionary thinking or hope for tax system changing anytime soon, if ever. Russia now has a 13 percent flat tax and is doing better than the U.S. in tax collections, which are up 62 percent.

The Republican conservative base begs for recognition and appreciation and what is the Republican response?

Pick a state. Karl Rove's choice to run against Gray Davis in California was not Bill Simon but Richard Riordan. Riordan, who is in no way, shape or form a conservative. But Rove, the Beltway Buzz Lightyear, believes that "moderate" Republicans are more acceptable to the electorate than conservative Republicans are.

In Minnesota, for example, Beltway Buzz and his space cadets ran over the senatorial candidacy of longtime Republican conservative candidate Tim Pawlenty. Rove and the rest, including Dick Cheney, demanded that former Democrat Norm Coleman run against Wellstone and basically told Pawlenty to "wait" or run for governor instead.

The handpicked Rove-Bush candidate, former Democratic St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, did not carry the same St. Paul districts when he ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican.

Coleman will be better than Wellstone or Mondale, but he is not a conservative's dream come true. Conservative Republicans were not given a choice but a Democratic echo.

Wiseguys like Rove seem to have an interesting interpretation of the polling data on the election results in places like Georgia. They think they won the Hispanic vote in ultra-white-bread Gwinnett County. Come on, Karl! Georgia became Republican because white guys came out to vote in record numbers and most of that vote was about the Confederate flag issue. Don't count on that vote in 2004.

That interpretation is going to lead to Republican losses in 2004. It includes distancing themselves from their conservative base. As it is, conservatives have given them one last chance. Contrary to what Rove and the radio and TV punditry believe, Republicans are not going to be the party of the future unless they keep their conservative base, and there is no guarantee they will do that.

Democrats should be comforted. Especially old-time Democrats who have nothing to worry about from the current Republican Party even if they do remain in power for decades. The present Republican Party is nothing more than the old Harry Truman Democratic Party that included a dash of patriotism, nominal social welfare and social justice concerns, and nominal tax reforms. Meanwhile, the Republicans pander to the old Democratic constituencies, hoping their conservative base does not notice.

In case after case, establishment Republicans are more interested in their "moderate" wing than in their conservative base.

A recent story out of the Associated Press relates that "moderates" in the Republican Congress believe that they are now in control. Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., head of the Republican Main Street Partnership, said he hoped his moderate group could move the House GOP leadership to ''pay more attention to the middle of the road, to moderate issues that I believe a substantial part of the country believes in.''

Issues like the environment. Furthermore, he says, his group was ready to sit down with like-minded Democratic moderates and ''find our common ground and figure out how to move the country forward.'' Forward means to the left and toward increased collectivism and high taxation in anyone's language, especially the language of Beltway politics.

Republicans for Pork

When a "moderate" Republican talks about "protecting the environment," that in turn means passage of gosh-awful pork-laden Republican-sponsored legislation called S. 990.

I prefer to call it the spawn from hell, or CARA (Conservation and Reinvestment Act) returns from the dead. CARA Lite was nearly jammed down conservative throats in the middle of the night in the 107th Congress this past November by REPUBLICANS. The Senate version passed in the middle of the night last year.

Sponsored by a coalition of Republicans and the midnight property bandito himself – Democrat Senator Harry Reid of Nevada –CARA is a hooker-type legislation sneaking in through a back door in the dead of night. Always done in secret because the conservative base hates it, as do property rights groups, constitutionalists and those who think the feds already have too much land and spend too much money.

CARA Lite – or, as it is referred to in the boonies, the "condemnation and relocation" act – is a stinking feudal pork-laden piece of bad legislation. It represents even worse public policy. However, thanks to GRASSROOTS activists it was defeated in the House at the last minute.

Nonetheless, you can count on it; CARA or a clone will raise its ugly head again in the next Congress or the one after that. Both parties want it. Republicans for the pork it can spread around and so some green groups will be shut up by the millions that will go to their pet projects and "studies" in the form of grants. The Republicans won't fool anyone by buying them off or offering a faux and phony example of Republican concern for the environment.

Democrats want it because they are collectivists and it is a collectivist, nay a feudal piece of legislation. Lots of bucks to spread around, much of it to 501 tax-free organizations and foundations and friends of Democrats.

The Nature Conservancy gets a cut so it can continue to be the best stalking horse the federal government ever had. Buy land cheap from "willing sellers" who get their arm twisted in one way or another, turn around and sell it to the feds for a considerable profit.

Conservatives can forget about a bone being thrown to them. A bone like much-needed reform of the Endangered Species Act or, just as important, getting rid of the Antiquities Act. The latter is the greatest instrument of collectivist federal land grabbing since the Louisiana Purchase.

Conservatives will have to live with CARA and S. 990 or some variation thereof. That is, unless they can convince their dunderhead reps in the Republican Party that they will pay for it if it passes. By the way, after the big fires out West of the last eight years, whatever happened to "healthy forests" legislation?

Rural property right advocates, the rural poor, recreationists, hunters, loggers, miners, all have to plan on a never-ending fight for their agenda or even minor aspects of it. That will be the case no matter who is in office. It will be just as hard to get Republicans to "reform" anything as it is the Democrats.

Don't expect much help from Republicans. They are courting that trophy-wife "swing" or minority voter. Watch them dump on their conservative base and then expect them to come out in significant numbers to vote in 2004.

Finally, when does Republican leadership start making some critical moves to keep its base energized? When do they start asking the right questions? When does a little bit of courage rise from the spineless wussy leadership, like Trent Lott, and begin to address issues like partial-birth abortion and reform of the ESA, the tax system, and education?

Next time: RINO Republicans and Their Conservative Stepchildren

To comment, write alden@newsmax.com or visit my Web site at www.aldenchronicles.com.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
RNC

Editor's note:
"Let Freedom Ring" – Sean Hannity reveals how to triumph over the left