A pretty good review of Hugh Hewitt's new book by another Zell democrat

[dude1394]

Pretty good review of Hugh's book. As I'm reading it now, it's pretty spot on. Even nicer that it's another Zell democrat. Also a pretty good skewering of the whining that kedwards is doing these days.

rhino
----------------------------
Election Guidebook, Kerry’s Conscience, and Doomsayers II

Hugh Hewitt has a nationally syndicated radio show that I’ve never heard. He’s an unabashed Republican partisan, and he’s written a book called If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends On It.

Hewitt doesn’t hate Democrats. He just hates it when Democrats are in office. At least now.

As he points out: During the doldrums of the ’90s, after the Soviet Union fell and before anybody believed that Islamist terrorists really meant it, we could afford to have an empty presidency like the Clinton years and muddle through with nothing more than embarrassment and annoyance.

But in 2000, though we didn’t realize it, we were in a nontrivial election. It mattered who was at the helm in 2001, and it matters all the more in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

Hewitt believes that not only must we have George W. Bush in the presidency for the next four years, but the Democratic Party seems poised to go on, for the foreseeable future, choosing presidential candidates who would be disastrous to our defense against people who want our civilization in ashes and us dead.

He also does a thorough job of pointing out that the Democratic Party has a proud tradition of rather openly stealing elections, like the 1960 election (which Nixon, like a mensch, refused to contest even though it was glaringly obvious that Illinois and Texas probably really voted Republican if you counted only existing, living, eligible voters once each) and the attempt in Florida in 2000 and the attempt in California’s recall election last year.

Hence the title of his book.

Those who think that what we need right now is a president who takes war to our enemies instead of letting them bring it to us can’t afford to sit back and let others do the voting. Because when the vote is a landslide, cheating doesn’t work. It only works when it’s close.

If that were all this book was about, I wouldn’t waste time on it in this column.

However, Hewitt offers something much more important. This book, despite its being partisan and disparaging of Democrats, is absolutely accurate about the way American politics function, and what individual voters can and must do to help influence the outcome.

Even if you’re a Democrat so loyal that you think Al Franken is sane enough to operate heavy machinery and John Kerry knows how to make facial expressions but merely chooses not to, this book nails exactly what the strengths and weaknesses of both major parties are in coming years; why third-party votes are wasted and harmful; how Democrats have finally succeeded in rigging election funding to benefit them and hurt Republicans; and how Republicans can counter it.

Here’s the key point he makes, however – the point his subtitle is all about.

It’s not enough, he says, to reelect President Bush if you don’t vote for Republicans in every national race – Senate and House of Representatives.

His warning is especially to conservative purists who would like to throw out proven vote-getters, like Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania because he’s “too liberal.”

Hewitt’s point is this: When the Senate organizes itself at the beginning of each session, there’s a head count. People line up as Republicans or Democrats. Whoever has the most, gets to appoint the chairpeople of all the committees, and gets to have a majority on all the committees, and gets to set the calendar and decide which bills make it to the floor.

When that count is taken, Arlen Specter is a Republican. You may not like how he votes on abortion or what-all, but when the key decision about legislative power is made, he’s one vote on the side of the aisle that can organize a Senate that will advance President Bush’s agenda, instead of one that will obstruct him at every turn.

The time for idealogical purity, in other words, says Hewitt, is not during election season.

The Democrats know this; the Republicans keep forgetting.

Thus Hewitt calls for Americans – not just Republicans, but all Americans who recognize that only the Republican Party shows the will or the wit to combat our terrorist enemies abroad – to vote for Republicans all the way up and down the ballot.

Now, as a Democrat, what can I say to that except that, because my party has been taken over by an astonishingly self-destructive bunch of lunatics who are so dazzled by Hollywood that they think their ideas make sense, I have to agree that, right now, any president but Bush and any Congress but a Republican-dominated one would be disastrous.

As a Democrat, I would hope that a solid trouncing of our fanatic-ruled party at the polls this November would serve as a wake-up call and remind Democrats that they only get to do the things that the Democrat Party exists to do if they get enough votes to control the White House and Congress. Which requires that you have serious candidates and embrace serious issues that most Americans, not just tiny pressure groups, care about.

And on that day, Democratic moderates can take the party back. And yes, Democratic moderates actually exist. They’re all voting for Bush this year, but they’d rather have had a Democratic candidate to vote for.

Here’s where I think Hewitt is dead wrong. Voting a straight ticket below the national level makes no sense at all.

For instance, here in Guilford County, I’m casting my vote for any candidate who is running against Sheriff BJ Barnes and any of the Republican cabal that he supported in the primary elections.

Why? Because Barnes went after and defeated one of the best people in local government, Mary Rakestraw, and the reason he did it was because she refused to go along with his plan for extra-legally increasing the budget of the sheriff’s department.

It’s not just that he’s a sore loser. It’s that he has figured out a way to create machine politics in Guilford County.

Not party politics, machine politics, where you do what the boss says, or you lose your office, even if you’re in his party. No room for anyone else to have a conscience. No room for anyone else to respect the law more than they respect the boss’s authority.

And the only way to get rid of a tinhorn dictator like that is to vote against him and everybody he nominates, until the regular, honest party takes back control of their candidate selection process.

BJ Barnes is the most dangerous man in Guilford County, because he thinks he’s above the law, and he thinks that all Republicans need to obey him, and the Republican Party should be working as hard as they can to get rid of this man and restore democracy within the Guilford County Republican Party.

But since they won’t, it’s up to Democrats like me, and independents who care about things like freedom and conscience, to show him that he can’t carry a general election using the same tactics that won the primaries for him and his minions.

Read Hewitt’s book... learn the civics lessons he teaches... and then make sure you’re well-enough informed to make smart decisions in every contest you vote in.