To: Certain Mitt Romney Supporters
\nFrom: Mitch Berg, Reagan Disciple
\nRe: \u00a0Your “Ready, Fire, Aim” exhortation.<\/p>\n
All,<\/p>\n
I”m Mitch Berg. \u00a0You may remember me; I was busy caucusing for your guy Romney four years ago. \u00a0Let me refresh your memory; that was the cycle when a fair number of you geniuses insisted John McCain was the only viable option to run against And eight years before that, I was the guy pushing for Steve Forbes, when you all insisted that George W. Bush was the conservative who could win. \u00a0And 12 years before that, when I said Jack Kemp might make a much, much better custodian of the Reagan Revolution than George H. W. Bush – you got your way then, too.<\/p>\n Remember me yet?<\/p>\n Of course not. \u00a0You’re the “establishment”. \u00a0 You rarely remember the dirty ugly lessons of four or eight years back. \u00a0To many of you think “spin” equals fact.<\/p>\n And that’s fine – because you win your fair share of elections. \u00a0You’ve got the money, the oomph, the organization, the experience in power. \u00a0That counts for something.<\/p>\n And with that, I suppose you’re entitled to think of your agenda as “inevitable” in the party. \u00a0The problem is, some of us peasants – the people who are allied to principle first, party second (not that they need be exclusive or in conflict) – keep getting uppity and in the way. \u00a0It happened in 2006, when a knot of “establishment” figures in the Sixth CD GOP here in Minnesota got their undies in a toxic knot because Michele Bachmann flooded the various precinct caucuses with her supporters, making the local “establishment” – including many of you – claim that Bachmann “stole the nomination” when, in fact, she just did democracy and politics better than you did.<\/p>\n Ditto in 2008. \u00a0Maybe the influx of Ron Paul supporters split the conservative vote so finely that Mitt Romney never had a chance, and your guy Mac coasted to the nomination. \u00a0Maybe not – and it doesn’t matter much now, since between dual influences of the Ronulans and the Tea Party, the GOP finally, blessedly moved to the right. \u00a0Far enough to turn the conservative of 2008 into the moderate of 2012.<\/p>\n And all of that grassroots activity has made some of you – you know who you are -profoundly uncomfortable. \u00a0All us \u00a0unwashed Tea Partiers make you nervous, like John Quincy Adams supporters beholding Andrew Jackson’s entourage moving into the White House. \u00a0I’m fine with that, too.<\/p>\n But the reaction some of you are having to the “insurgency” (read: people doing the \u00a0democracy thing) in the GOP is telling us some things that I really would rather not be hearing nine months before an election.<\/p>\n Hugh Hewitt, who is a great friend of the radio show I do with Ed Morrissey, said it loudest on his national talk show – “If Ron Paul gets nominated, I’ll vote for Obama”.<\/p>\n Let’s come back to that in a moment here.<\/p>\n When I interviewed Michael Reagan last summer at the Midwest Leadership Conference, he made a great – and lamentably overlooked – point; his father, Ronald Reagan, didn’t win because he was the purest conservative. \u00a0He didn’t win because he had the most forward-looking economic vision. \u00a0He didn’t win because he promised to end the Cold War with unconditional victory. \u00a0And he didn’t <\/em>win, in those days when people were still wondering what went into that seventeen minute gap in the Watergate tapes, because he was a pure establishment Republican.<\/p>\n He won because he convinced a whooooole lot of people who’d never have ordinarily voted for him, moderates and paleocons and RINOs and unemployed\/patriotic Democrats, even – in the primaries and then in the general election – that he and his ideas were right.<\/p>\n Now, I don’t care<\/em> if you say you’d stay home or even vote Obama if Ron Paul wins the nomination. \u00a0I don’t care in the same sense that “I don’t care if Scarlett Johannson has a chive in her teeth during our first date”, because it’s almost purely academic. \u00a0Neither is likely to ever happen.<\/p>\nHillary<\/del> Obama, and that we should not, could not, nominate a naif <\/em>like Mitt Romney to run for office.<\/p>\n