Jim Gilcrest, the Founder of the Minutemen, will run for President on the Constitution Party ticket in a move that is sure to implode the Republican Party. By so doing, Gilcrest plans to create an unholy alliance between fundamentalists, Minutemen, Neo-Nazis, Lou Dobbs followers, and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the article linked to was written by Jerome Corsi. Doing so would be known as the Nuclear Option for the potential that it has to implode the Republican Party.
This splintering of the GOP is already starting to take place. Gilcrest, running for Congress in a recent special election, took 25% of the vote. And in last night’s special election in California’s 50th District, William Griffith, got almost 4% of the vote. Griffith was endorsed by the San Diego Minutemen. Griffith’s presence on the ballot made this election much closer than it would have been otherwise.
Gilcrest could get a significant percentage of the vote in the 2008 Presidential election. There are two people whose decisions could significantly impact Gilcrest’s fortunes. The first is Emperor Dobson.
Emperor Dobson has repeatedly threatened to leave the Republican Party if they refuse to give him everything he wants — a ban on gay marriage, no judges who support abortion, more vouchers, and drastic cutbacks in social services. Although the anti-gay amendment seems to have mollified him recently, there are no guarantees of Dobson’s loyalty.
If the SCOTUS merely waters down Roe by adding more permissible restrictions to it but keep it as settled law, or John McCain fails to distance himself sufficently from the Moderates and the pro-choice wing, Dobson could bolt the Republican Party.
Even if he doesn’t, there are plenty of others who might. The hype behind such games as the Left Behind Series’ Eternal Forces will reinforce the notion for fundies that they must be purists and purify themselves as much as possible in anticipation of the impending apocalypse. This could mean them seeing John McCain as too milquetoast and Jim Gilcrest as the man who will restore the Bible to this country.
The other significant player here is Lou Dobbs. Lou has already done several programs highlighting the Minutemen as patriotic Americans merely concerned with following the law — conveniently ignoring the fact that many of the people joining their group are Neo-Nazis.
There are plenty of people even on the left who see Dobbs’ criticisms of Bush as a breath of fresh air and who uncritically hang on every word he says. Thus, they believe him when he refers to the Minutemen as “civilian border patrols” and believe that our borders are broken and that hordes of immigrants are trying to take away our jobs.
However, a Gilcrest candidacy will put Dobbs in a dilemma — recently, in response to the Bush speech, he ripped the Bush administration for his anti-gay attitudes. Dobbs called the DOMA Amendment sheer nonsense, a stance that will put him squarely at odds with Gilcrest and his alliance.
The million-dollar question for Dobbs is, will he swallow the homophobic attitudes of Gilcrest and the Minutemen in the name of following some kind of “greater good” of somehow “protecting working families” against hordes of immigrants that are supposedly taking our jobs away?
If so, Gilcrest could very well peel off votes from the left from people who think Gilcrest may be a jerk, but that he is the only man who will stand up to the evil Republican corporations plotting to screw American workers.
This could very well mean that the fight for the Democratic Presidential Nomination might very well be a fight for the White House. There is no need to fear polls that show McCain winning by double digits over Hillary; a significant number of Republicans will peel away and vote for Gilcrest, believing that Bush did not properly follow Conservative principles and restore the Bible to its proper place.
But we cannot take victory for granted — otherwise, we might as well not have the 2008 Presidential election. One of the most common complaints against the Democrats this year is that they don’t stand for anything. There is truth in that — compare and contrast the fortunes against Christine Busby and Jon Tester.
Busby ran a safe campaign based on the notion that she would be much more competent than the Republicans. Don’t get me wrong — she did much better in 2004, and she nearly won in a heavily-red district. But she did not sufficently articulate where she stood for on the issues that mattered to people. After all, if voters have a choice between Republicans and the imitation Republican, the Republican will win every time.
On the other hand, Jon Tester ran as an unapologetic liberal who wanted us out of Iraq. He was absolutely fearless when it came to putting his views on the table and talking about what he believed and why he believed it. Nobody expected him to win, but not only did he win, he won by a landslide.
This is the real lesson of the recent elections — if you state where you stand on the issues and why you believe them, you will get votes — I suggest even an extremist like Jim Gilcrest did as well as he did because he was unapologetic about putting his views on the table.
Therefore, merely playing Commander in Chief Radio as your campaign theme song and ranting about the Culture of Corruption and the hate and extremism of the right will not win you votes — you have to say what you believe and why you believe it. We operate at a fundamental disadvantage as challengers — people’s default votes are for the incumbent. Therefore, if you do not explain what you would do differently than the incumbent, people will filter it out as mere mudslinging. And if your plans are not different enough from the incumbent, Bush will simply smirk and say, “Well, I recognize that plan — that’s because it’s the Bush plan!”
And John McCain may very well try to distance himself from Gilcrest and his allies, present himself as a reasonable alternative, and say that these extremists do not reflect the values of the GOP. We cannot let him get away with this.
The Republican Party is directly responsible for the rise in extremism in this country and the mainstreaming of hate groups such as the Neo-Nazis through their Minutemen allies. They have routinely pandered to them by creating a climate of fear.
It was Karl Rove who mastered the idea of scaremongering through intimidation, racist push polling, smear campaigns, and discrediting political opponents. Gilcrest and his allies are the logical cumulation of Rove’s plot to build a permanent GOP majority — a plot that is threatening to spiral completely out of his control. If you appeal to the worst in voters, you will get the ugliest types of voters — the militia movement, racists, skinheads, Minutemen, end-times prophets, Christian dominionists, and other such people.
For McCain to distance himself from these people would be a Pandora act — he would be wringing his hands at them after the vices of racism, homophobia, and vigilantism have been let out of the box. He could have been a true maverick and distanced himself from the Bush administration as much as possible. But instead, he chose to embrace the very man who claimed he fathered an illegitimate child.
