The Way Back

November 20, 2008
8:48 AM CST

From SCGov Mark Sanford:

“Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty. But [Election Day 2008] was not in fact a rejection of those principles—it was a rejection of Republicans’ failure to live up to those principles.” [my emphasis]

In looking at the WSJ’s assessment of the three Republican front-runners for party leadership, I’m struck by a couple of thoughts.

I don’t know much about Mark Sanford (and my SC Readers may feel free to enlighten me), but from what I’ve seen of him, he’s got the right stuff. Certainly, the privatization of South Carolina’s state pension program is a worthy achievement.

I don’t mind Sarah Palin as much as others (for example, The Mrs.) might. I think that she was absolutely the most qualified candidate for President, of the four offerings in this past election—but that doesn’t mean much, because Urkel is a vacuous blowhard with slight credentials and no executive capability (and are we ever going to find that out in the next few years), McCain is an erratic, unpredictable man with, likewise, no executive experience, and Biden is all the above, except he’s also dishonest to a fault.

But I also know that Palin is a big fish in an extremely small pond—and I mean no disprespect to Alaska or Alaskans—but I have to wonder whether she would have risen as far as she did had she been a resident of a larger state like, say, Colorado or Texas. Somehow, I doubt it, and therein lie my misgivings about her. But, as with Sanford, her conservatism is not jarring, other than perhaps that teeny bit of discomfort with her strong religious principles. Certainly, she is a better candidate than Mike Huckabee, if we’re going to talk religious conservatives, because unlike Palin, Huckabee is really an old-style Southern Democrat.

Which brings us, finally, to LAGov Bobby Jindal. Of all the candidates, Jindal has a towering intellect—truly, his IQ is off the charts by comparison to any senior politician in living memory—and his record is already impressive, his conservative credentials beyond reproach. Most of all, his no-nonsense attitude towards business and the economy is highly impressive, and I cannot help but think that he, and not McCain (and certainly not Urkel) would have been able to find a way to alleviate our current financial recession.

A slight aside: none of the 2008 candidates had (or have) a clue about how to handle a recession, by the way: all had that “deer in the headlights” look, because they were either economic ignoramuses (McCain), lawyer-politicians (Urkel and Biden) or woefully inexperienced in that area (all, including Palin, whose governorship was made easier by booming oil revenues and a hardly-populous state). It’s instructive to see that Urkel is planning an FDR-style interventionist policy to deal with the recession, even though it’s obvious that FDR’s actions were completely wrong and actually prolonged the Depression of the 1930s. I have no idea what McCain would have done about the recession—he’d fired Phil Gramm from his campaign for some nonsensical and trivial reason, and Gramm was the only man there, of either of the campaigns, who might have had a clue—and McCain’s unpredictability and recklessness would have done us no favors, either.

I have no doubts that any solution set from Jindal would be crafted from wisdom coupled with conservative principle. Sadly, he was too young for 2008—the U.S. presidency is not really a job for a wunderkind—but I have no doubt that he would be the right choice, so far, to lead the Stupid Party out of the swamp of its own, well, stupidity and become a decent governing party again, instead of the hopelessly-muddled bunch of fools, knaves and poltroons that comprise its current state.

But it’s early days, yet, and I’m loath to hitch my hopes to anyone. I am, however, determined that whatever the future holds, that future is best entrusted to the bedrock principles of this republic: limited government, ordered liberty of the people, and the free market of capitalism.

Whichever candidate can best execute and support those principles will have my vote.