Reagan Dinner Speech by
James Buchal
November 10, 2012
I’d
like to begin by thanking all those who have supported me throughout this long
journey. Hundreds of people have
contributed tens of thousands of dollars, in contributions from $5 on up, many
have fed us, or housed us along the way, many have put up our signs and handed
out our flyers. And I owe a
special thanks to my campaign manager Lisa Michaels, a tireless and energetic
advocate for my cause. It is quite
literally true that without her, I would not be standing here today.
So where are we?
I
like to say that as a conservative, I live in the reality-based community. So let’s not sugar coat this. This is a disaster.
We
all know it’s a disaster in Oregon: the Democrats now control the House, the
Senate and the Governor’s Office.
Every business owner in Oregon can look forward to four more years of
agencies acting to put them out of business. And every taxpayer can look forward to more stickups “for
the children”, or whatever.
What
impresses me the most is that I was doomed from the start. I want to confess that throughout the
race, I was jealous of Knute Buehler and his campaign organization. But now I see that with this splendid
effort, and even with his eleven newspaper endorsements, he could only get four
more points than me. And as I
drove down here reading Art Robinson’s signs, I thought, there is a man who is
better than me in almost every way, and he and his family put in so much more
effort than me, and he came out about the same. This is a disaster for Oregon.
But
this is also a national disaster.
It’s not just Romney’s loss.
Of the 23 Democratic Senate seats in play, Republicans won one, and then
lost one of their own seats. Not
one Democratic incumbent lost a seat.
The
first lesson of this election is that Obama’s organization was good enough at
turning people out to make the election day results look like a poll of
registered voters. (Don’t worry, I
will come to the issue of election fraud later.)
Nationally,
you can read up about Romney’s Project ORCA, which turned out to be a total
failure. We worked very hard to
show support with lawn signs, but I
am beginning to think that they are of very little value at all. While we were putting up lawn signs,
somewhere in dark basements Democratic professionals were quietly organizing,
data mining and turning out the vote.
There
seems to be a whole new generation of technology for voter targeting, based on
voter-specific messenging. I bet their technology can tell the
Democratic Party that they are dealing with a 42 year-old lesbian who cares
about saving the whales. I don’t
know much about Merlin, but they told me its innovation is that we could now
distinguish hot, lukewarm, warm, cool and cold voters. I wonder how far behind in this arms
race we really are.
Here
in Oregon, the only data I’ve seen so far suggests that the Republican turnout
was about 2% higher than the Democrats.
This, to me is a shocking number given Obama’s betrayal of his own base,
and what should have been our appreciation of the existential threat Obama
poses to our Nation. We should
have been willing to crawl through broken glass to vote against this guy.
Yet
people are turning away from the Republicans in droves. Mitt Romney got less votes in Oregon
than John McCain did. 2008 McCain
Republican votes in Oregon: 738,000 votes. 2012 Romney Republican votes in Oregon (so far): 717,000 votes
The Question of Voter Fraud
Let’s
turn to the question of voter fraud.
I don’t have any doubt that we have an incompetent, socialist President
put in by fraud. Nationally, it
appears that Pentagon officials hijacked hundreds of thousands of blank ballots
inside the military mail system.
Guess what? They finally
managed to deliver them on November 7th. For those of you who have private dreams that the Army will
be on the right side when the time of troubles comes: forget it. We
have only each other.
We know that in the urban precincts in Pennsylvania, they
illegally expelled Republican poll watchers and then racked up 99.5% Obama
totals. We know they bused people
from Chicago to vote in Wisconsin.
All of these stories are well-documented on the Internet, but we have an
entire generation of criminal prosecutors who are deaf, dumb and blind when
comes to vote fraud.
Here
in Oregon, we can have no confidence in the results either. You all know the story of my lawsuit--no
one can understand the law that says destroy ballots on election night. This, by the way, is a practice around
the world. Even in Russia, they
are supposed to drive a spike through the unused ballots on election night;
other countries burn them. Not
here. Trust us, we’ll take care of
them.
Here
in Oregon we have unofficial ballot drop boxes all over, and sometimes the
ballots wind up in the ditch. Most
people don’t know that each envelope identifies the voter inside, and
sophisticated political operations can scan these envelopes and figure out
which ones to throw away, or maybe even duplicate. The Federal government requires our Secretary of State
to clean up the voter rolls, but there is little evidence that this is
happening.
All
this being said, it is my personal opinion that in Oregon, the outcome of the
statewide races did not turn on fraud.
We would have lost anyway.
Unless and until we can register more a lot more Republicans, we are
going to keep losing.
It’s Not Over
This
seems unfair. We are clearly right
on the issues. A corrupt,
one-party organization has taken control of this State for decades, and is
dumbing down the population. It’s
not that people don’t know the Constitution; they don’t know what a
Constitution is. It’s not just
that people have been trained to love the State; they wouldn’t know an
unalienable right if it hit them in the face.
As
weak sinners, we are always tempted to look at injustice as insurmountable, and
to turn away and to wash our hands with the thought that there is no use of
trying. Some of us may even fall
into apathy, or worse yet, wonder “what is truth?” or “maybe it doesn’t make
any difference”.
We
cannot stop being human. We cannot
give ourselves over to self-absorption and despair. We have to keep our human spirit alive, and keep on
fighting.
“Crowds
have always undergone the influence of illusions,” wrote Gustav Le Bon, one of
the first pioneers of the study of mass psychology. “Whoever can supply them
with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their
illusions is always their victim.”
The Democrats have been the master of illusion for decades now. They think there is such a thing
as a free lunch.
But
we have reality on our side. And
as the Baroness Thatcher said:
“the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other
people’s money”. That time is
almost upon us, and we will have the historic choice of revival and restoration
of Constitutional government, or a revolution that leads to dictatorship,
slavery and misery.
Already
the battle lines are forming. In
Portland, on every telephone pole, I see posters claiming: “Austerity is stealing from the poor.” This is our enemy: those who imagine rights to point the
gun at others and take their property.
Ayn Rand used to call them the “looters”.
So
how do we fight the looters? With
the truth about what Republicans stand for. People have asked me what I want to do next, and what I want
to do next is help spread the truth and destroy the myths about
Republicans. Put another way, I
want to help lead a re-branding exercise, because unless we can repair this
brand, we are doomed. Our brand
has been the subject of a lot of false advertising, and we have got to fix
that.
Rebranding: We’re Not Anti-Government
I
have a lot of sympathy for Libertarians, but I think the core of Republican
ideals is in George Washington’s famous quote that “Government is not reason;
it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a
fearful master.” We have to
persuade people that we are the party of not just less government for the sake
of less government, but less government for the sake of better government. We just want a good servant.
Throughout
the campaign, I pushed what I regarded as straightforward bipartisan virtues of
decentralization, simplification and accountability, but I did so in a partisan
way. This was not entirely fair,
because George Bush, for example, went the wrong way in all these areas, and
Jimmy Carter went the right way on some of them, like airline and trucking
deregulation. I am not going to
make this mistake again. From now
on, I am going to fully and frankly admit that officials in both parties are
constantly screwing up when it comes to decentralization and simplifying
things. And we have to work harder
to hold our Republican leaders accountable on these issues. Unless people see a real difference
between Republicans and Democrats on the fundamental issue of prying power back
from Washington, we are doomed.
The Banking Question
A
primary example is the greatest political issue of our time: the war of the banks against the
people. Andrew Jackson was the
great hero of this war, because when they came to him and say, you have to bail
us out, or 20,000 people will lose
their homes, he said he knew that 50,000 people would lose their homes in the
bigger problem they would make.
“You are a den of vipers,” he told them, “and by God I will root you
out.” But we haven’t done that.
It
was Henry David Thoreau who said that for every thousand citizens hacking at
the tree of evil, only one is hacking at the root. I want to emphasis what the root of our problems is: the notion that the constitution
allows the Federal government to print money and hand it out to buy votes. I won’t go through the Constitutional
argument in detail, but it is painfully obvious to all but the ignorant and the
corrupt that the Constitution absolutely forbids this.
And
it was written to forbid to prevent just what we have now. As I said everywhere along the campaign
trail, we are in the middle of the greatest financial crime in history: the looting of not just the United
States, but the world, by a handful of gigantic banks that made bad bets and
are sucking the life out of our economy to cover those bad bets.
One
of the greatest failures of the Republican party is to line up in opposition to
this crime. We have allowed a
corrupt elite of Democrats and Republicans to tarnish free-market capitalism by
passing off what is really sort of a fascist system as a capitalist system. And I mean that literally, in the
technical sense of an unholy marriage of financial corporations and government.
Immigration Policy
We
have another serious problem: why
are 75% of the Hispanics voting against us? The Democrats are pursuing anti-family policies, and
policies that are destroying the very freedom and opportunity these people came
to enjoy.
For
starters we need full-frontal attacks on organizations like La Raza, and
MALDEF, and NAACP, and all of the other race hustlers. We need to defend the melting pot
ideal, and challenge those who want to turn government in a racial spoils
contest as reactionary frauds, who will turn American into precisely the kind
of country people around the world are trying to escape from. Reaching out is not enough. Only by full frontal attacks on the
race-based hustlers, while pushing for fair immigration procedures, we make
progress. Those who confront the
race-based organizations are going to be called racists, and so doing this is
going to require courage.
What
is fair in this context? Many have
written that we reach out to minorities, and should compromise on issues like
amnesty for illegals, and I am ambivalent about that. Part of me says that if someone is here, and working,
and paying taxes, and not collecting food stamps or other government aid, they
are part of the solution, not part of the problem, and should be allowed to
stay. But only after they pass a
course on the Constitution, and understand what made this country great. There have to be requirements for the
honor of being an American citizen, and we have got to insist upon them.
And
flip side of fairness is that those who are here illegally and not pulling
their weight and not willing to learn the language and the Constitution have
got to go home. And we have got to
get control of our borders. And
this is fair, because citizenship has got to mean something, and there is
nothing wrong with discriminating in favor of citizens. For God’s sake, look what Mexico does
to the Guatemalans.
I
will say that I have personal knowledge of the border control agencies, and I
think they are some of the most screwed up agencies there are. Yet our officials have not fixed them
for years. If we can be the Party
that offers a fair solution here, and sells it to the Hispanic community, we
can get majorities for years to come.
The
rubber meets the road here in Oregon on the question of drivers licenses for
illegal aliens. I’d like to
see our legislators supporting a law that says you get your licenses when Obama
closes the border, and starts to distinguish between the immigrants we want and
the ones we don’t.
The Question of War and Empire
The
American people understand that our foreign policy has also become an out of
control spending program. I have never
been able to understand conservative attacks on Ron Paul because he wanted to
conduct wars in accordance with the Constitution. I see nothing
wrong with saying that we are not going to be at war unless Congress declares
war. I don’t like to see our
presidents making their own decisions on this by consulting with the UN,
whether they are George Bush or Barack Obama.
If
we had invested for real national defense instead of building mosques and
embassies around the Mideast, we would have a space navy now that would make
America invulnerable to earth-based attack for the next 200 years. The communists love to see us making
the same mistake they did in Afghanistan, and the British before them, but just
watch how they shriek when we talk about space defense.
I
think if we become the Republican Party of fortress America rather than
worldwide war, we can attract many more to the Party.
Appealing to Youth
There’s
an old saying that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. We have let the collectivists and the
socialists rock the cradles of our youth institutions for decades. The results are frightening to me. When I was campaigning here in Oregon,
I found 5 Republicans at the University of Oregon, 7 at Lewis & Clark, and
nobody could seem to find any at OSU.
Nationally
youth voting is becoming more and more important: 18-29 turnout was higher than 2008 by some metrics, and helped
Democrats enormously, 18-29 voters went 60% for Obama (unmarried 62%, married
35%). Here’s a California
statistic: Voters between the ages
of 18 and 29 made up 28% of the electorate, up from 22% in 2008 and 15% in
1996. And the California
legislature has tipped 2/3 Democratic, and that’s our future unless we can
engage the young.
The
deep irony is that there is no one who stands to lose more than the young from
Democratic opposition to entitlement reform. Unless, I suppose, we go into hyperinflation and the
pensions are all paid in full at one cent on the dollar.
Most
of the young people I know are cynical about government and just want to be
left alone. Most of the younger Republicans
I met while campaigning were Ron Paul Republicans. I frankly think they got shafted by the Party this summer,
even though it would have made no difference who went to the National
Convention. If these young people
and many more are not in the Party, the Party has not future.
Reorganization
of the Republican Party
Now
I can seem I am running out of time and so I will skip to another difficult
area which I really don’t know that much about. But that won’t stop me from offering my opinions. I am not really sure what the
Republican Party of Oregon is or does.
I think I understand the County parties, but the State-level
organization is a mystery to me.
Let
me start by telling you want I think it should do, and that is help
candidates; a selfish
perspective, I know. Enormous
amounts of my time, and volunteer time, were spent working on things like a
current list of press contacts and talk radio personalities. Or trying to find out who were the
property owners who support Republicans and have good sign locations. Why aren’t these things on lists that
are handed out to all the Republican candidates?
Imagine
a State party that is like a service bureau for candidates and County
offices. Imagine that it was
supported by direct contributions from the County offices.
Imagine
if we just hired some energetic young political scientist, an expert in
political mechanics and technical support, as executive director of the Party. He would have nothing to do with
setting policy. He would not be
running for an office.
What
about the Chairman, and his role in raising money? What if the State party maintains lists of donors, and hands
them to candidates and says, get out there and ask for money. Why is the Party an intermediary
between the candidates and the donors?
Don’t PACs do that? Why is
the Party entangled with PACs at all?
On
a statewide call earlier this week, Fred Thompson accused the Party leadership
of picking candidates that align to what they want, not what the voters want. I don’t know if this is true, but I do
think, consistent with my theme of decentralization, that we have primaries to
select candidates.
And
it is up to the candidates to sell themselves directly to the donors, and make
whatever compromises they may have to make to get the money they think they
need. I think the results
this year show that money alone, and grassroots effort alone, is not going to
do the job. We have got to make
significant changes in all areas.
Again
I don’t know if these are the answers or not. But I know it is time to raise these questions, and it is
time for the Party to raise these questions, and consider them seriously,
because what we have now isn’t working.
What can I say in conclusion?
Many
people ask me, where do I go from here?
My answer is to read a poem by Dylan Thomas. It is about
“Good men, the last wave by, crying
how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced
in a green bay,”
And he tells
them:
“Do not go gentle into that good night . .
. [but]
rage, rage against the dying of the
light.
That’s what I’m going
to keep on doing. Thank you.
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