Now here’s the sort of talk we like to hear from a Republican governor…

“Common sense dictates that when you’re in a hole it’s vital you stop digging. Requiring our state to spend beyond its means for the next 24 months to be eligible for all the stimulus moneys guarantees that (our state) will dig itself a $740 million financial hole. Who helps us then? Do we raise taxes, and thereby weaken our competitiveness relative to other states and countries — or do we just summarily end programs for some of the neediest of our state?
 
“Or are we to plan on yet another round of stimulus windfall from Washington in two years — again, with money we don’t have? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do know the $740 million budget hole created would be the largest such hole in (our) state financial history.”

Unfortunately, that’s not Nevada’s tax-hiking Republican governor talking.  It’s a true conservative Republican governor talking:  South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. 

Wish there were more like him.  Wish he was our governor.

Richard Viguerie is known as the “Funding Father” of the modern-day conservative movement for his pioneering success in harnessing the power of direct mail fundraising from millions of small-dollar donors in the 1970s and 1980s.  So his thoughts on the current predicament conservatives find themselves in should be taken strongly into consideration.

“It’s obvious that conservatives have a GOP problem,” Viguerie writes in his 2006 book Conservatives Betrayed.  “On the one hand, we have to work within the two-party framework of American democracy in order to be effective and not be marginalized. . . . On the other hand, putting all of our marbles on the Republican side hasn’t worked either, as we’ve seen since 2000. . . . Republican lawmakers talk conservative, but vote for bigger and more intrusive government.  They’ve been getting away with this – so far – because they think conservatives have nowhere else to go.”

Gee, sounds an awful lot like Nevada, doesn’t it?

“Instead of creating a new party,” Viguerie continues, “we conservatives need to think of ourselves as a Third Force – an independent outside force that holds both parties accountable for their actions.  This is not a pipe dream – we’ve done it before.

“In the 1970s, the ‘New Right’ was becoming so successful precisely because its leaders thought of themselves – not the Republican Party – as the alternative to the Left and the Democrats.  And during the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, this alternative New Right leadership planned strategy every Wednesday at my McLean, Virginia home.

“For six or seven years, the New Right independent operatives would meet for a breakfast session.  For a couple of years, those sessions were followed by evening gatherings where we would be joined by six or seven key Republican congressmen, with Newt Gingrich as their leader.  The organizational leaders thought of themselves as the ‘outside’ leadership group, with the congressmen as the movement’s ‘inside’ leadership.

“For another example, some of the greatest conservative successes over the years have come with independent single-issue groups that have managed to take liberal issues off the table – perhaps the ultimate in political success.  Phyllis Schlafly’s ‘Stop ERA’ took the proposed Equal Rights Amendment off the table in the 1980s, and more recently, the National Rifle Association took the ‘gun control’  issue off the table.

“The critical strategic point is that they battled for bipartisan support of their aims, and held politicians of both parties responsible for their votes.  The fact that the conservative cause triumphed on these issues is my interest, and I say it’s time to let 1,000 new conservative single-issue organizations bloom.”

Hmmm.  Breakfast at my house next week?

In short, the Republican party became undisciplined, greedy, weak and ineffective.  This dirtied and eroded the Republican brand such that it became unrecognizable and uninspiring. 

We need new leadership.  We need new voices and/or the renewing and rejuvination of existing voices.  Our elected officials need to stop concerning themselves with power grabs, pandering, and placating.  We must unapologetically and unashamedly stand on True Conservative values.

We need to get back to basics and get on message, recognizing that effective and persuasive communication matters.  As Laura Ingraham said today, “We must cultivate a new generation of leaders who are both proud of their conservative beliefs and comfortable articulating them with vision, clarify and optimism.” 

I hereby invoke part of Russell Kirk’s introduction to Ten Conservative Principles:

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.

I have always loved Kirk’s Ten and that intro.  Not an ideology but ”a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the social order.”

Conservatives are skeptical of change for its own sake and will always pause to ask, “but what are the unintended consequences?”  Conservatives value that which has been good, and is good, and are not eager to dismiss that good in favor of untested new ideas.  Conservatives are open minded but cautious.  Social experiments are looked upon with great skepticism.  As Kirk later writes:

Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.

Just so.

This past Saturday I did a double take upon glimpsing a bright yellow billboard (on the corner of Ann and Durango) adorned with large radiation danger symbols and accusing Nevada State Senator Bob Beers of being “In Bed with the Southern Nevada Porn King,” a quote the billboard attributed to the LV Mercury.  I was so doubtful about the billboard’s credibility and so curious to find out the “real story,” I spent this morning doing some digging.

FACT #1:  The Bob Beers campaign team did accept a $10,000 contribution from one Raymond Pistol, owner of one of Las Vegas’ many topless bars, in Beers’ 2006 run for governor.  He returned half the contribution after losing in the primary.  According to Beers, “Suggesting that campaign contributions from a legal business (licensed by elected officials of both parties) come with “obligations” is an erroneous conclusion at best.”

FACT #2:  The Mercury, which is no longer in print, never linked Bob Beers and Raymond Pistol in any way, shape, or form.  So says Geoff Schumacher, publisher of the alternative newsweekly Las Vegas CityLife and former editor of the Las Vegas Mercury, in his LVRJ piece yesterday. 

Schumacher wrote (the following quotes are excerpts from his column), “I’m no fan of Beers’ conservative views, but as a journalist taught in the old school, I’m even less enamored of misleading and blatantly false campaign charges.

“I just so happen to have been the first and only editor of the Las Vegas Mercury during its existence from 2001 to 2005, and when I saw the billboard, I could not recall publishing an article describing Beers as being “in bed with the ‘Southern Nevada Porn King.’ “

FACT #3:  That billboard is shameful and ought to be taken down.

“Carl Bunce claims Gestapo tactics were used to coerce him into voting for McCain, but I found Lisa Mascaro’s article in yesterday’s Sun to be particularly revealing:

“Dyer said he and Bunce, who ran recently failed in congressional primary elections, want to run for office again. So they had motivation to play nice.

“When the roll call vote came, Bunce and Dyer forfeited their seats so two McCain supporters could fill the slots.

“Not all of Paul’s supporters are pleased. Wayne Terhune, the Sparks dentist who had helped lead the fight, said ‘they should have at least abstained’

“As party Chairwoman Sue Lowden announced Nevada’s 34 unanimous votes for McCain, Bunce and Dyer were at a concert a few blocks away.

“They were listening to Rage Against the Machine, the 1990s rock band that once offered a soundtrack for a generation of politically disaffected young fans.”

After all of the nonsense over the last 4 months to get these guys there, and when the vote finally goes down, two of the four delegates weren’t even in the building.

That’s frigging sad.”

(Mike Davis is the state chair of the Nevada Republican Liberty Caucus, a grassroots org for libertarian-leaning members of the NV Republican Party who are committed to advancing the Republican majority by recruiting and electing candidates dedicated to constitutional government, economic opportunity, and individual liberty.)

Seems the RNC committee decided that the Nevada GOP violated rules in its delegate election/appointment process.  I remember wondering about all this after the whole Ron Paul Rebellion thing and its aftermath…but I assumed GOP leaders knew what the rules were and that appointing delegates was ok.

Anyway, the committed has recommended a compromise, as I posted earlier this morning.

Two states are quietly seizing on the disarray with the Nevada delegation. I’m told quite reliably that if McCain picks a liberal Vice Presidential nominee the majority of delegates in two states plan to force a vote on the convention floor.

From how it was explained to me, five states must support a motion to vote on the nominee. Two states just might do it and they are calculating on Nevada going along with it, which would necessitate only two other states needed.