John Hawkins, responding to a post by Jon Henke, writes about his ideas for a Rightroots movement to help conservatives in the coming years. If I can be Allahpundit for a moment, I’d like to pour some cold water on these big plans because I think any big effort to organize conservatives will run into trouble because of the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals:
Conservatives have jobs.
Real jobs that produce goods and services and add to the economy. Jobs that gives conservative real satisfaction at the end of the day so they don’t have this hole that needs to be filled with political activism.
I wrote a little bit ago about what occupations appeal to liberals, and if you think about it, I think you’ll realize the big problem for conservatives in politics: Politics is not conservative. Politics is about dicking around with rules and stuff while other people do actual work, so being a politician doesn’t generally appeal to a conservative the same way being a journalist doesn’t. Also, most true conservatives aren’t obsessing over politics as much as someone like me because they have much more important things to worry about. Sure, they vote, but they don’t follow politics more than watching a little news each day and maybe listening to talk radio. Why do you think talk radio has such an appeal to conservatives? Because radio is something you listen to while doing something else — probably something useful. In the end, blogs can’t compete with that (and don’t expect these people to download podcasts).
I think Ace is on the right track of trying to search out and find conservative candidates. As much organization as we can do, it won’t ever do as much good as one good personality. Look how far Obama has gotten when 95% of his appeal is, as Biden would say, that’s he’s clean and articulate. Still, it’s going to be hard to find good conservatives. If I may confess one thing about Sarah Palin that never settled with me right, it’s that one day she woke up and decided to become a politician. She had actual jobs; why would she resort to something like that? The best conservative candidate would be someone who is accomplished in the real world — probably combination military service and businessman — who we’d have to drag kicking and screaming into politics. A guy who would pay for political ads saying, “Please don’t vote for me. I don’t want to be in the House of Representatives; I have a business to run. And if I find who put me on the ballot, I will smash your face in with the butt of my shotgun, you little freak!”
Now that’s a conservative.
Joe the Plumber is kinda promising, as he just fell into politics by asking a question. He seems reasonably informed (but not too informed; be wary of anyone too informed because then he’s spending more time worry about politics than a conservative should). Only problem is that if he gets elected to be a Representative then eventually he’ll become a wonk and have his conservatism all ruined. Eh, I guess we can’t ever really win in the end. The real conservative strategy shouldn’t be to elect politicians but to instead make sure there’s less of them in the world.
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