MASON CONSERVATIVE

What Is Going On At FCRC?!?!

Longtime Braddock chairman Larry Krakover has resignd . . . 

Today, I resigned as Braddock District Chairman.  The philosophical differences I have with the Chairman could not be resolved.  I want to thank all of you for your support and hard work over the years.  By any measure, we have been successful.  I want to especially thank John Cook for his support and friendship and will continue to work with and support him.  I don't know who will succeed me, but I wish them well.


LK

Now THIS Is What Romney Should Be Doing

Bollingland Is At It Again

I just cannot understand these guys.  They just don't know to message and frame issues into their favor.  Take today's financial disclosures where the Bolling team has plastered Facebook and their own website with links to the articles that show they have raised more money than Cuccinelli in dollars.  That is something to be proud of.  

The problem is they didn't just leave it there.  They posted the entire article on their website that includes this:

Cuccinelli's campaign highlighted what it termed strong grass-roots support in the commonwealth, noting that of the 3,770 contributors, 3,286 were individual contributions of less than $100.

THIS article sheds even more light onto the numbers:

Bolling had 414 contributors donating more than $100 and 331 who gave $100 or less, according to campaign finance reports filed by this week’s deadline. Cuccinelli, by contrast, had 439 donors who contributed more than $100 and a whopping 3,191 who kicked in $100 or less, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan tracker of money in politics.

That is 745 donors versus 3,630.  One of Bolling's staffers said that Bolling raising more money shows Republicans believe he is the better candidate.  The raw numbers of donors suggest otherwise, and donors who are contributing $100 or less are the people who will go to a convention.  Appalachian Power, Consol Energy, and Altria might think Bolling is a better candidate for govenror, but the 1,352 new Virginia donors that sent small amounts of money to Cuccinelli would argue otherwise.

In this respect, I am glad we switched from a primary to a convention.  This way the dollars of over 3,000 individuals mean more than the big, established business interests of Old Virginia and their money.  

Its clear how this is breaking down:  Old big business money (tobacco, banking, and utilities) versus the regular Republican voter looking to change the way the state does things.  This nomination is the past versus the future.  Bolling has raised a ton of money , but has not done so in a matter that proves he has the support of the majority of true grassroots Republicans.  Ken has proven that.  

Will Texas Show Us The Way?

Texas.  

The land of Lyndon Johnson and Tom Delay.  Where big business has bought so much, there are few states where money has mattered more.  It started with Johnson, as chronicled by Robert Caro, who understood that oil had overtaken ranching and tapped into these young oilmen way back to the 1930s.  Ever since then, both parties have gone running to the trough.  As the 20th Century moved forward, these reactionary oilmen moved to the Republican Party and gave us two different Bush presidencies and the Republican money machine of Tom DeLay.

Yet in this US Senate primary between Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst, there is an actual Republican running against K Street and big business.  The article sums it up best, but perhaps the biggest (and best) influence of the Tea Party in Republican politics is reigniting a conservative populist mistrust of big business.  Oftentimes, as we were rudely reminded during the 2008/2009 bailouts, the biggest of big business rely on the government as any other institution out there.  Take, for example, big Dewhurst backer Chesapeake Energy Corp:

Even the energy companies backing Dewhurst aren’t exactly free-market cowboys. Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s PAC has given Dewhurst the maximum $10,000, while the company’s CEO, Aubrey McClendon, has personally given Dewhurst $5,000.

McClendon and Chesapeake, the nation’s No. 2 natural gas producer, spent $26 million in recent years funding the Sierra Club’s campaign against coal, which is the largest rival of natural gas in electricity generation. Chesapeake also contributed to the American Lung Association’s campaign for stricter regulations on coal-fired power plants.

In Texas, Chesapeake stood to benefit from government intervention in the energy sector — intervention Dewhurst supported. Dewhurst in 2011 pushed an energy bill, SB 15, criticized by the free-market Texas Public Policy Foundation, which likened it to a Colorado bill “evidently intended to increase demand for now-plentiful natural gas by suppressing demand for coal.”

Yeah.

David Dewhurst is not a bad person.  He's one of these politicians who have seen the ground shift underneath them.  Conservatives, especially newer tea party activists who don't care how long you've held office, have woken up to the hypocrisy of our politics throughout the late 1990s up until now.  No longer is it just good enough to be pro-life and rant and rave about gays.  We elected a ton of people who claimed to be conservative but who ended up just looking for power, and the quest for power means expanding government and exploding our debt.

Ted Cruz could be a charlatan, as many are claiming.  But we know what David Dewhurst is, and Ted Cruz is campaigning against everything that Dewhurst and the Old Republicans represent.  This race is showing us the evolution of out movement.  Dewhurst has the support of the professional class in Texas and DC.  Polling indicates Dewhurst has support among much of the old conservative base, especially in rural Texas.  Old versus New.

Let's hope The New can overcome.

Unserious Men

As I was listening to the coverage of Barack Obama’s frankly stunning statement that people who build businesses not actually owning them and I started to think about Steve Jobs.  I’m currently working my way through Walter Isaacson’s biography (it’s excellent) and I’m up to the release of the Apple II.  Jobs’s background is fascinating.  He grew up in the Santa Clara Valley in the shadow of San Francisco during the 1970s.  To say Jobs was a hippie would be an understatement.  He spent his youth searching Eastern mysticism, walking around barefoot, and barely attending hyper-liberal Reed College in Portland.  Frankly, Jobs was a Buddhist tramp.  Yet from the early age, he understood capitalism.  While he worked to find the perfect vegan diet and working at night at Atari (because his hygiene and attitude made working during the day with others impossible), Jobs was always tinkering and always trying to make money.

The most interesting part of the early Jobs story that struck me when I heard Obama’s words was about the first Apple.  It wasn’t so much a computer as it was circuitry and schematics and hardware for hobbyists and techies to put together and run.  Steve Wozniak was a good-hearted son of Santa Clara whose liberal beliefs in fairness gave him the instinct to simply give away his design.  Woz was the main hardware man of this partnership while Jobs was salesman/tinkerer/idea man.  Woz felt everyone should have access to this kind of thing.  Jobs did not.  He understood not only what he had but also what our country is all about.  Jobs understood that to build a business you had to have something of value.  His product was that value and he knew how to build something around it.  It took a lot of people to help, for sure, but would Barack Obama argue that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple?

What is incomprehensible to me is that someone like Jobs, who in the 1970s went to job interviews without shoes on, bathed irregularly, and searched for Zen in India for seven months; understood capitalism and the good that can come from it.  Jobs worked hard to build his company, put his genius towards a positive goal, and created a company that produced products that sustainably helped people.  There is little arguing Jobs is a liberal, yet he understands America’s system.  The President does not.  And for the record, I’m not one of those conservatives who choke on sentences like Obama hates America or he wants to destroy America.  I don’t believe that at all.  I think Barack Obama loves America, but his vision based on his life experience has taught him that America is at its best when the government is at its biggest and most active.  As a community organizer, his organizations relied on federal money, as does professional academia.  When Republicans and conservatives sputter out “he hates America,” Americans who don’t believe that simply roll their eyes.

Even more eye-rolling is the Romney campaign.  They are incapable of telling their story, instead they nit-pick and demand apologies, with countless senatorial and gubernatorial flaks uttering the same plea.  The problem is that Mitt Romney is the exact same as Barack Obama, just the other side of the coin.  Both attended fancy prep schools, both went to Ivy League Schools; both never worked a day in a real job.  Mitt Romney’s problem is his business background is not one like Steve Jobs.  Mitt Romney’s jobs was to takeover companies and do whatever it took to keep them in business or give strategic advice and money to start-ups.  He never created anything; instead he was the gardener who nurtured growing vines.  Some died, some lived, and it was all up to the market.  The Obama campaigns demagoguery of private equity is shocking and repugnant.  Companies would not exist without the Bain Capitals of the world.  Yet Romney and his team, running for political office since 1994, have yet to be able to explain his work.  They are amateurs, greased forward in our politics only by his money.

Everything that is wrong with our politics is represented by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  One is an entitled life-long ward of the state and the other is a hyper-wealthy businessman whom neither had to start anything from scratch in their lives.  We aren’t getting real answers to our real problems because we have two presidential candidates who don’t even understand what our real problems are so they would have no idea what our real answers are.  To make matters worse, Congress has ceased being an independent branch of government.  Instead it’s politically polarized between pro-President and anti-President, reason goes out the door because it’s full of congressmen and senators begging for the money at the President’s disposal and an opposition begging for the money from donors who want that President out.  There is no room for independent thought anymore.  We are a control ruled by unserious men.  And unlike the unserious men of the past, we have descended to an era of unserious men who have no idea what it’s like to be an average American.  I honestly cannot think of any time in modern history when two candidates like this were running against each other.