‘Conservative’ GOP governors forget principles when their state involved

By David McElroy · March 9, 2012

In an effort to cut costs, the U.S. Air Force reportedly plans to move eight giant C-130 cargo planes from their current base in Texas. During hurricane evacuations in the U.S. Gulf Coast states, those eight planes are used to ferry people out and bring supplies in — and the governors of those five states are complaining about the potential loss of the planes to the area.

The governors of the five Gulf Coast states sent a letter to Barack Obama opposing the plan to pull the planes out of Texas and move them to Montana. (The entire Texas congressional delegation signed the letter, too.) They say that the planes would be too far away in the future to provide quick and effective help in case of hurricane disasters, so they want to planes to keep sitting there — waiting for the next time they need them. Without paying for them, of course.

And here’s the key. All five of those governors are Republicans. All five claim to be conservatives at election time. They speak of cutting taxes and slashing budgets. When it’s not election time, though, they’re more interested in what goodies they can get that are funded by national taxpayers. They’re opposed to any cuts that might affect their states. Why is there such a disconnect between their campaign rhetoric and what they work for once they’re in office?

People running for office will say whatever voters want to hear, but once they’re elected, they’ll say whatever voters want to hear then, too — even if those things contradict one another. Voters who call themselves conservatives say they want lower taxes and cuts in government spending, so candidates promise that. But those same folks who call themselves conservatives want to be able to count on Uncle Sam coming to the rescue when they’re in trouble, so the “conservatives” they elected will demand federal spending once they’re in office.

Many people contradict themselves politically and don’t even realize it. This is an issue about which conservative Republican voters are blind and conservative Republicans politicians can’t pretend not to be blind about. Ultimately, they repeat the word “conservative” without ever understanding what it means in the fiscal sense. That’s true of both voters and candidates.

I’ve told this story before, but these governors remind me of one of my very first political clients. She had no idea what she believed in, but she knew she was a conservative. It was about 20 years ago and I was new enough in political consulting that I’d take whatever clients I could get. The woman was a first-time candidate running for an office with enough prominence that she was going to be interviewed by a local TV news crew. She was terrified, and she became my client because she needed someone to help her prepare and then to run her campaign.

I did a mock interview in front of a video camera and tried tossing her softballs in the beginning just to get her comfortable. I just asked her to tell me what she was in favor of — what she believed in.

“Well, I’m a conservative,” she said confidently.

“What does that mean? What do you believe in?” I asked.

“Well … I’m a conservative. I believe in … well … conservative things. … So I’m … conservative.”

Things went downhill from there. She had no idea what she believed. The only thing she was sure of was that she was a conservative. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that most people are in the same boat. They know what label they apply to themselves, but they have little idea what it means. (The same is true for people who use other labels, such as “liberal,” too.)

Taxpayers all over the country have no business paying for the cost of evacuations and supply for people who choose to live in the path of hurricanes. If the people of those states need aircraft, they should pay for them. Better yet, the individuals who choose to live in those places should pay for their own needs. People in California and Michigan and Rhode Island have no business paying the cost for those on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi.

If the governors of these five states were truly fiscal conservatives, they would be happy for the Air Force to save money and they’d take care of their own needs. But because of the strange system we have today — where people don’t want to pay for something with state taxes, but think they’re getting something for free when it’s “federal money” — politicians have every incentive to talk out of both sides of their mouths.

Our political system is full of such contradictions. Until people have to pay the price for the things they demand of politicians, we’re always going to have people demanding a free lunch. When the bill comes due, everybody is going to pay a very big price.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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