Just Lower Your Standards

Posted by Larry Miller on July 6, 2011 under How | Be the First to Comment

I was chatting recently with a friend in the Republican Party about some of the people looking for the presidential nomination. Although I like and respect the gentleman, it was a meeting of the two kinds of Republicans – one a party person and the other an issue person. We both agreed that the pretender to the presidency was taking us in the wrong direction.

Our solutions, though, would take us in two different directions. The traditional Republican approach is to use conflicts with the Democrats to try to work out a compromise. The idea is to get concessions from the other side – for instance, in giving them a debt ceiling increase in exchange for significant cuts in spending. This traditional approach makes the assumption that they are 1) dealing with people you can trust to keep their word and 2) that we, in our already bankrupt condition, can afford to go even further into debt.

This thinking, I believe, is a result of the normalcy bias that prevents people from seeing the real dangers that present themselves, particularly because they never have been present in the past. It is same normalcy bias that led World Trade Center workers to return to their offices to turn off computers and lights rather than get themselves out of the building as quickly as they could. Some died because of this delay.

Those members of the inside-the-beltway club may see the destruction the Obama regime is bringing upon us, but, in their somewhat protected position, away from the distress experienced by many of their constituents, they just don’t seem to comprehend its extent. They are not bad people, but they, on one hand, are just like Charlie Brown when the Democrats go back on their word, in the same way Lucy van Pelt pulls the football away again – one more time.

As the conversation turned to candidates, I expressed my desire for another Patrick Henry and was told Patrick Henry doesn’t exist, in fact Patrick Henry, as we understand him, never existed. We need to look for the best that the party feels can do the job. We just need to lower our standards to what is attainable. Of course we tend to inflate Henry and all of the founders into larger than life characters with no flaws, uncompromising, steel willed and super human abilities. They were not. They were real, flesh and blood, Americans with a vision and a passion for the nation they were struggling to launch.

There are a few in Washington fighting the good fight who may say with Patrick Henry, “give me liberty or give me death”. Who among these men and women in their thousand plus dollar suits and nicely coiffed hair would dare to pledge their life, their fortune and their sacred honor in the pursuit of preserving our land. Every signer of the Declaration did just that, knowing full well that failure would place them at the end of a British hangman’s rope.

Back in the early days of GOPAC, one of the primary principles for those seeking office was – run because you want to DO something, not because you want to BE something. Far too many in the presidential field, I fear, want to BE something, and do not have the vision, passion or stomach to take the necessary steps to undo the calamity that has come upon us.

We cannot afford to lower our standards. Like Paul Revere, we must wake the sleepers up to join us and raise theirs.