Do you remember your stupid high school government teacher, that insipid left-leaning strange-o in the bad sport jacket who taught you that conservatives don’t want to change and liberals want change and blah blah blah? Good gosh, there’s nothing worse than the unionized hacks infesting our schools and filling empty skulls with nonsense. But enough about public education. The truth is that today’s conservatives do want change, and change is coming to our party. The new Republican Party is, as that desiccated old pervert masquerading as our president likes to say, not your father’s Republican Party. Thank goodness, because my father’s Republican Party was too often a bunch of sissy corporate lackeys who never met a war they didn’t want somebody else’s kids to fight.
Yes, we’re changing, and that’s good. But look at the other party. They’re regressing. They’re the cutting edge of the neo-Bolshevik Revolution, except I will give this to Lenin’s crew – at least they knew which bathroom to use.
The GOP’s changes are illustrated by a couple of Veep candidates who I inexplicably overlooked in last week’s column on Trump’s potential vice presidential picks. Take JD Vance, the senator from Ohio, who is giving traditionalists fits because he dares to ask tough questions about Ukraine – and as a military guy who trained Ukrainians, I agree that we need to ask tough questions. The thing about JD Vance is that he’s from Ohio, like me, so he’s cool. But he’s also a self-identified hillbilly. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his life growing up poor, talks about people who at one time would’ve been Democrats. The Buick dealership owners and the sensible, sober bankers of the old-school Republican Party never saw somebody like JD Vance unless he was fixing or parking their car or caddying for them at Bushwood Country Club. But now JD is a senator, and they are busy setting fire to their money subsidizing Nikki Haley in a desperate attempt to turn back the clock to 2004.
Let’s apply the Schlichter Test to JD Vance. First, does he do any damage to the ticket? While Ohio is red, if he leaves the Senate that sparks an expensive and uncertain fight to keep that seat. That’s sub-optimal, but otherwise, he’s fine. He’s got no known weirdness. The only people who hate him are the elites, who feel this formerly-penniless upstart betrayed them by not being more grateful for being invited to join the ruling class. There’s nothing they hate more than an uppity peasant jumped up into a position of authority. Is he competent to be president? Sure. He’s a Marine, he’s smart, and he is undaunted by airplane stairways. Finally, does he bring anything to the ticket? That’s a little more complicated. Does he secure the working-class demographic? It worked in Ohio, but Ohio has been trending red, so it’s unclear if that aspect mattered much. We don’t need him to bring us Ohio.
The other guy I unforgivably overlooked is my friend, Ric Grenell, the smooth and brilliant diplomat who gave the Europeans fits as our ambassador to Germany when he demanded that the Krauts pay their fair share of NATO. He’s a very smart and cunning guy, and he is definitely competent. The question is whether he would damage the ticket and whether he brings anything tangible to the campaign.
The same people who love Trump already love Ric, so it’s not clear he would bring in any additional new voters. And there is the gay thing. Who would’ve thought one of the most popular figures in the Republican Party would be an out gay man who’s also an evangelical Christian? Probably not a lot ten or so years ago, when the loathsome Mitt Romney cravenly stabbed his friend in the back and made him resign from his campaign team because some people complained that he had a gay guy on his staff. Today, we have a Republican Party that mostly doesn’t care. Right now, most of us would eagerly vote for a differently-abled plus-sized lesbian Hindu of color who’s also a furry if she – or they or xe – voted like Ted Cruz. But there will be some people who do care. Will that be a net loss or a net gain? The fact is, Republicans have learned that choosing candidates by their identities does not translate for Republicans. We don’t get black voters because we pick a black candidate, and we don’t get women voters because we pick a woman-identifying one. It’s doubtful we would get gay voters just because Ric Grenell is gay. But we might get them because Ric Grenell is awesome – I have several books that mention a hypothetical Vice-President Grenell in some context or other, so you know where I stand.
These two guys represent a huge change in the Republican Party, both in terms of its approach to class – we are now a much more working-class accepting party than we were – and in terms of minority groups. Our vice-presidential candidates in 2024 include black people, working people, gay people, and women people, who aren’t a minority, but you know what I mean. The GOP has changed for the better by allowing everyone to support a future of freedom, prosperity, and security instead of being condemned to the Democrat future of oppression, poverty, and anarcho-tyranny.
We saw another big change with the announcement that Mitch McConnell will soon resign. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about Cocaine Mitch, a man who was simultaneously unbelievably frustrating and unbelievably proficient in his prime. Is it time for him to go? Yes, because he’s 82 and he’s in poor health – it’s commonly understood in Washington, DC, that he suffered a debilitating stroke. And yes, his game seems to be slipping with the border fiasco and the obnoxious gun control thing that may very well keep John Cornyn, who is inexplicably a senator from Texas, from taking the Murder Turtle’s job. Conservatives will not miss the old-school aspects of McConnell, who seems to find it an intolerable imposition to have the grassroots offer its input regarding his plans. But love him or hate him, he was the most effective legislative genius of this century and maybe more. If for nothing else, he deserves huge credit for keeping that obnoxious progressive lackey Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court.
Regardless of how you feel about Mitch McConnell and his legacy, the fact is that this is a changing of the guard. Now comes the fight to see who will replace him, and it may well be somebody unexpected. But it has to be someone effective. That’s the priority. Conservatives need to stop thinking with their hearts and think with their minds when they pick the next guy to hold the position. We keep hearing names like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, but that’s all based on ideology. As much as we like what they think, these guys are not team-builders. They are rebels. The kind of senators we really like are polarizers, not unifiers. The right guy to replace Mitch McConnell is not the guy who gets every policy choice exactly right. He’s the guy who gets Josh Hawley and Susan Collins to vote the same way. That’s the job.
We are a coalition, and while our coalition is changing, it’s still a coalition. That’s something we have to understand. In America, the two political parties are going to have just about 50% of the population. Neither is going to have a lot more than that, at least not for long. Each is going to have about half, and that means it’s going to be a big tent whether we like it or not. It means we’re going to have our Lisa Murkowskis as well as our Mike Lees. That’s just how it is.
But we can make conservative progress. We are moving the Republican Party to the right. It’s slow, and it’s painful, and Mitt Romney will still be around for a while, annoying us, but it’s happening, and it’s going to keep happening. It won’t happen overnight. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Insert another cliché here.
There’s no end to this fight. The fight is the end state. We’re always going to be fighting. Accept that. Understand that. And be happy that, at least today, we’re changing in the right direction.
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