Programing note: This blog is about two months old. In that period, I've often felt I was a lone voice crying in the wilderness. However, as of now, there's two voices crying in the wilderness. Please join me in welcoming Archer, a man with definitely a lot to say!
I had originally hoped that my first post here would be
lighter and/or more humorous, but inspiration is a funny thing, and we have to
work with what we're given. So here
goes.
We hear constantly - in the mainstream media, in online and
face-to-face discussions,
everywhere about
"The Left" and "The Right," and what each side wants.
And we hear each side demonizing and
ridiculing the opposing side in a desperate race-to-the-bottom to out "
Other" the opposition.
It makes my brain do a fingernails-on-a-blackboard cringe.
"But, wait" - in the words of the late Billy Mays “there's more!" Not only does The Left try to portray The
Right as the "Other" - and vice versa - but The Right tries and generally
succeeds at doing it to themselves.
Perhaps these
Gallup poll
findings should come as no surprise; the number of claimed Independents is
at nearly unprecedented levels, as both the "major" parties succeed
in alienating the fence-sitting moderates.
And that brings us around to the topic of this post, and the
unexpected events that inspired it.
We were at our County Fair recently, and stopped by the
local Republican Party kiosk to chat with the folks working the tent.
Oregon recently held its primary elections, and
the strongest Republican contenders were Tea-Party-favorite and
Oregon-Firearms-Federation endorsed Jason
Conger and GOP-establishment-darling Dr. Monica Wehby -- Wehby won on an
entirely anti-Affordable-Care-Act
campaign and will face our current sitting Democratic Senator in November.
What surprised me, though, was how incensed the people at
the tent got when we hit the topic of who would have been a better candidate,
based on their respective platforms.
Everyone working the tent seemed to
reflexively oppose Conger and support Wehby, even though
nobody could seem to agree where either candidate stood on any non-ACA
issue.
(Don't get me wrong, I'd like the ACA repealed as much as
the next person, but there are other issues I care about, too. As you might have noticed, this is a gun
blog, and Jason Conger is strongly pro-gun; Wehby hasn't formally taken any
position on firearms, but her affiliations in the Portland-area
["gun-control"-central in Oregon] and her active membership/support
of the AMA [which sees guns as a "public health issue"] make her
views somewhat suspect.)
My final remark before we left the tent was this: "The
fact that we're even having a discussion like this means a
lot of the message is being lost."
And it is, to our detriment.
Conger -- like most primary challengers -- had already been successfully
"Othered" by the GOP establishment long before any primary ballots
were cast.
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| Circular Firing Squad |
And that, I
think, is why the GOP doesn't seem to win any big elections outside their
strongholds. The Left comes in two main
varieties -- we'll call them "Liberal" and "Progressive" --
which march in ideological lock-step, differing mostly in degree and
method. The Right, on the other hand, is
more like Baskin Robbins' 31 flavors -- moderates, big-L and small-l
libertarians, Constitutionalists, Tea Partiers, generic
"conservatives," and the Liberal-Lite variety known as
"RINOs" (did I miss anyone?) -- and the differences are anything but
subtle. Like a double-scoop of orange
sherbert and mint chocolate chip, yeah, we'll mix, but it'll leave an
unpleasant taste in your mouth.
Why would we do this?
Why would we waste so much political and monetary capital fighting
amongst ourselves that there's nothing left for the main event?
It's no longer any wonder that every election feels like
choosing the lesser of two evils. It's
even less wonder why more Independents lean toward Democratic principles. The Left presents both a unified front and a
synchronized message; The Right is too divided against itself to do either.
