A lot of news has happened over the past week, from President Obama's reaction to the Boston Tea Party vote last Tuesday, to "Glaciergate," the latest permutation of Climategate. I promise to catch up on all of that in the coming days. But first, I've had a lot of requests for a report on the Fifth District Tea Parties Candidates Forum, which I moderated in Charlottesville on Friday night.
I thought the event was a great success. An audience of about 400 people filled the auditorium of the Albemarle County Office Building, many people listened on the radio, the local newspaper reported the event on its front page (but, as usual, lowballed the audience count at 200), and I was even told that some higher-ups in the Republican Party in Washington were watching the webcast.
You can see the event for yourself. I haven't been able to find the podcasts that were supposed to be up on the WCHV site, but the whole event is now up on YouTube. The video is broken up into roughly ten-minute increments; the link above is to part one, and that page should have further links that take you to the other segments. Don't get thrown by the host's long pause at the beginning; that was local radio host Joe Thomas (the fellow dressed in full colonial regalia) pausing to get confirmation that the signal was going through to the radio station for the broadcast.
Alas, the video was filmed from below the dais, and it's something of an unflattering angle which makes me look like I'm hunched over the desk. Oh, well. If I wanted glamour, I should have gone to Hollywood instead.
First, a note on the name of the event. We called it a "Forum" rather than a debate because of the number of candidates. With six or seven candidates, you can't have the back-and-forth of a debate; you can just give each candidate a chance to state his views. "Tea Parties" is plural because this event is a joint venture of the tea party groups in Charlottesville and Lynchburg. That's part of organizer Mark Lloyd's effort to get tea party groups to band together on the congressional-district level. Mark is adamant that anyone claiming to be a "national" tea party group is premature at best. I agree. We can't have a national organization until we have local organizations to provide a genuine base for it.
I particularly want to share with my readers my brief opening comments. This was the first opportunity anyone had to address a tea party audience after last Tuesday's vote in Massachusetts, so I thought about what I wanted to say to the tea party supporters in attendance. Here it is:
Since this forum is sponsored by the Jefferson Area Tea Party, I wanted to begin first by saying something to all of the tea party people in attendance—everyone who helped organize the tea party events, who attended the rallies, or who have given this movement their sympathies. What I want to say is: thank you. Thank you for what you have achieved, in such a short period of time, with no organization or infrastructure or national leadership, while being alternately ignored or slandered by much of the mainstream media.
Exactly seven months ago, President Obama launched his push for a government takeover of health care. It was the latest in a string of attacks by this administration, this Congress on our freedom and on American capitalism—and it was intended to be the first of many more. It was supposed to sail through a Congress controlled by the president's party and then be followed by cap-and-trade, by tax increases, by who knows what else.
It is only because of the tea party movement, because of the forums and rallies you sponsored, because you showed up at town hall meetings, because you made your voices heard and persuaded your friends and neighbors—it is because of you that ObamaCare was held up for seven long, suspenseful months. It was held up until it could finally be rejected by the voters in a way so clear and so effective that the bill is now effectively dead, along with the rest of this administration's far-left, anti-liberty agenda.
So on behalf of myself and my family, I want to say: thank you for standing up to preserve our precious liberty.
All of this goes for TIA Daily's readers, too. A fan of my writing recently suggested to me that my articles on the health care bill—many of which were widely published—made a difference in the outcome. I responded that the contest over this bill was so razor-close that anyone who did anything to stop ObamaCare made a difference. If you attended a tea party rally or wrote a letter to the editor or donated to support TIA's efforts—and I know that many of you have done these things and more—then you helped tip the balance. So I want to say to you what I said to the tea partiers Friday night: thank you.
The little speech I gave about what the tea party movement accomplished also had an ulterior motive: to remind the candidates and the viewers of a vital fact about recent political events. Over the past year, it is the tea party movement that has wielded the decisive balance of political power in America. The message to politicians is: you had better take us seriously and stay on our good side. More on that later.
The next purpose of my opening remarks was to briefly argue for why I think that debates or forums like this are the logical next step for the tea party movement.
Tonight's forum is an important and logical next step for the tea party movement. We've been very clear so far about what we're against, and this event allows us to define and promote what we're for. It gives us a chance to make sure that this November, we'll be able to vote for something better than then lesser of two evils.
What we are for, in a word, is liberty—which means: individual rights, economic freedom, and a representative government that answers to the people. So my intention is to keep tonight's questions tightly focused on the issues of central concern to the tea party movement, the issues of free markets and small government.
In the spirit of the tea party movement, the questions I will ask tonight are drawn from suggestions sent in to us by tea party patriots from across the 5th district, though I have added a few questions of my own. And what I'm hoping we will find out is not just the positions of these candidates on specific issues, but also something wider: their core values and their basic philosophy on the proper role of government.
It is customary, when someone is running for office, that they have to run the gamut of various special interests, answering the concerns of each one. Far too often, though, this can degenerate into a process in which the candidate is expected to tell each interest group what government benefits he is going to generously provide to them at our expense. It is high time that the candidates were made to answer to a group that recognizes, over and above any of those special interests, that all of us have a fundamental and overriding interest in liberty.
I have gotten several requests recently from people looking to organize similar events with their own local tea party groups—one in another Virginia congressional district, one in Texas, one in North Carolina. So I am feverishly working right now to put together a packet of information and start up a web page that will give tea party debate organizers a guide to all of the logistics of organizing one of these events, as well as a large set of suggested questions to ask of candidates. I may be moderating at least one of these new forums—the experience of having done it once will really help—and I will be offering my services in that role to anyone who wants it.
If anyone out there is interested in organizing such a debate—and believe me, if you offer to help put it together, your local tea party group will likely be thrilled with the idea—let me know, and I'll include you on the distribution list for this material as we produce it.
The whole idea is to shape the choices we're going to be offered in November. If it looks like Republicans are going to be swept back into power, then we should do what we can to make sure that good Republicans are swept into power. And by that I mean people who are really serious about the cause of individual rights, free markets, and small government.
More broadly, the idea is to make the tea party movement into one of those groups—like the VFW, or the AARP, or Rick Warren's church—before whom political candidates have to genuflect if they want to get into office. They don't have to agree with us on everything, but they have to show us respect, take our concerns seriously, and answer pointed questions from us.
And that leads me to the little bit of controversy about Friday night's event. One of the Republican candidates chose not to show up—and he happens to be the candidate backed by the Republican Party establishment.
When I accepted the invitation to moderate the forum, I didn't realize that I was stepping into a flashpoint of tension between the tea party movement and the Republican establishment. Many tea party people are disillusioned Republicans and independents who have supported Republican candidates before—only to be disappointed when those candidates voted for welfare-state programs and government bailouts once they got to Washington. So we are deeply suspicious that the careerists in the party establishment are trying to co-opt the tea party movement to get their guys elected—after which they will forget about us.
The party establishment, for its part, has the instincts of any establishment: it is afraid of any competing base of power that is too cantankerously independent and unpredictable. That seems to be the attitude of Robert Hurt's campaign. Hurt is a state senator from the southern end of the fifth district. Blessed by an endorsement and campaign money from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor—a big wheel in Virginia Republican politics—Hurt has acted so far as if the only people whose support he needs are the party establishment, while he has ignored and slighted the tea party groups and tried to control the primary process to give himself the advantage.
This has a few people whispering about parallels between VA-5 and NY-23—the New York congressional district where the party leaders nominated a liberal Republican, encouraging a third-party run by a more staunchly conservative candidate. By splitting the vote on the right, they ended up getting the Democratic candidate elected. I'll be writing much more about those parallels soon.
To give you some context here, the forum's main organizer—Lynchburg tea party organizer Mark Lloyd—told me that he originally scheduled the debate specifically to accommodate Senator Hurt's schedule, getting a verbal promise that Hurt would attend. It was only later that Hurt indicated he might back out, and we found out for sure a few days ahead of time. (Where Hurt was and what he was doing that evening instead of addressing the tea party group is an interesting question; more on that as I confirm it.)
In response to Senator Hurt's snub, Charlottesville tea party activist Carole Thorpe, who very ably managed the logistics of the event, came up with the idea of making a cardboard cut-out of Senator Hurt and placing him at one of the seats at the forum as a visual reminder of his absence. Not wanting to put me in an awkward position, she checked with me beforehand, and for a moment I wondered if it was a good idea, if it might be seen as being in poor taste. But then my cantankerous, trouble-making streak took over, and I encouraged Carole to go ahead with it.
We were right. What the Hurt campaign wanted to do was to skip the tea party event and suffer no political repercussions. If we had just left Senator Hurt's seat empty, I suspect that no one but the professional political operatives would have noticed or remembered his absence, and he would have gotten away with it. But the cardboard cutout was such a striking image that the Charlottesville Daily Progress put it on their front page—a big picture on the middle of the front page, above the fold. When I saw it the next morning as I was walking into the post office, I nearly fell over. What this means is that everyone who even glanced at the front page of the local paper knows that Robert Hurt blew off the tea party movement. For a Republican politician running for office in the Year of the Tea Party, that's a political debacle. (It may also explain why I've heard from the local tea party organizers that the Hurt campaign has suddenly become much more conciliatory towards them.)
You can watch the YouTube clips of the debate to hear all of the questions I asked and the candidates' responses. Here are just a few of my favorites. After giving the candidates a brief chance to introduce themselves to the audience, this was the first question:
When we asked for questions from the tea party members, we got several that asked about the 10th Amendment, which has been invoked recently on the state level in an attempt to curb the power of the US Congress over the states. But I'm not going to ask about that, precisely because that's a movement on the state level. What I want to know is: what is Congress going to do to limit itself? My question is: Would you consider opposing a bill for no other reason than because it grants powers to the government that are not specifically authorized in the Constitution—and can you give an example of legislation, either something that has been passed, or something that has been proposed, that meets this description?
One of the answers to this question, from former Navy pilot Mike McPadden, gave me a rare pleasure: hearing something new and interesting about political science from a politician. One of the things I was trying to do with this event was to draw out more from the candidates than just the usual political bromides, something to indicate that they have engaged in some first-hand thinking on political principles. McPadden gave one of the best short summaries of the Tenth Amendment I've ever heard. Here it is, from the third segment on YouTube:
What we have to remember about the Tenth Amendment is that the Tenth Amendment is the last thing our Founding Fathers said to us before they signed off…. The Tenth Amendment has given us an absolute structure of what the Constitution was meant to be, in case we didn't get it the first time. What it means is: if it's not specifically written in the Constitution, you may not do it, federal government. That's it. It says: you can do anything you want, states and the people, unless the Constitution specifically prohibits you from doing it. That is only for the states. To the people, you are free to do anything that you want, there are no restriction upon you in the Constitution. That's the Tenth Amendment in a nutshell. So yes, if it goes against the Constitution, if it's not one of the enumerated powers of the Constitution, indeed, I would definitely vote against it.
As moderator of the debate—and particularly since I may be moderating future debates—I don't think it's appropriate for me to endorse one of the candidates just yet. But I was not alone in the view that McPadden turned in one of the strongest performances of the night.
My main goal in asking the questions was to avoid letting the candidates get by with vague generalities and boilerplate declarations of loyalty to small government. I wanted to ask questions that were broad enough that they would bring out the ideology of the candidates—but concrete enough that they would require the candidates to get specific about what they would really do if they were put in power. In the middle section of the debate, I did a series of questions that called for shorter answers, and one I quite liked was this, from Part 5:
After Tuesday's election in Massachusetts, it seems likely that you will be—if you win the Republican nomination, and then go on to win the election in the fall—that you could be part of a Republican majority. As such, you would not just be responding to President Obama or to Democratic leaders in Congress. You would have a certain degree of latitude to set your own agenda. So if that were to happen: name the one thing that you think should be the first, top priority of a Republican Congress.
What I learned from this question was that you can ask a politician for the "one first top" thing she would do—and still get a list of seven items. But I thought that the answers were revealing, because they indicate the real priorities of the different candidates. It is also a good measure of their effectiveness. What we don't want is a representative whose plan is to show up in Congress and just respond to whatever happens to be going on at the time. The most effective congressmen are those who pick a crusade, a top issue that concerns them, and keep hammering away at that issue year after year.
Ron Ferrin proposed a bill to repeal everything done under the first two years of the Obama administration, while Jim McKelvey named the so-called "FairTax," replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. I think that's an awful idea, and—more to the point, given the purpose of this question—it's an enormous waste of political effort that would be better spent reducing the rates of existing taxes.
My most philosophical question was: "Please name the moral, political, or economic thinkers who have been most influential on your view of the proper role of government." This was inspired by a question asked in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, when the candidates were asked to name their favorite philosopher. The results were revealing. My favorite in that race, Steve Forbes, named John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. George Bush named Jesus. John McCain named Teddy Roosevelt—which, among other things, revealed that McCain hasn't the foggiest idea what "philosophy" is.
Knowing that politicians are not generally deep intellectuals, I decided to broaden the question to "moral, political, or economic thinkers," in the view that I was more likely to engage the candidates' passions and get a revealing response. For this segment, see Part 7 on YouTube.
McPadden bowled me over by naming Cicero as an early defender of individual rights. That man has been doing some reading. Ron Ferrin said "I'm not that deep a thinker" and named Ronald Reagan and "my pastor, Jerry Falwell." You learned something from that one, didn't you? I found it interesting that Laurence Verga named only economists—Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, and Stephen Moore. He very much struck me as a pragmatist pro-free-marketer rather than a "big picture" guy.
In retrospect, the one thing I would change about the debate—or do better next time—would be to ask more questions designed to differentiate the candidates. I found them saying "ditto" to each other a little too often, so I would quiz them more on issues like immigration and the national sales tax (excuse me, "FairTax") in order to find areas of disagreement. But in a way I was impressed with the fact that so many of these candidates were fire-breathing free-marketers. (Don't miss the question, in Part 4, when I ask them what we should do about health care.) Some of the candidates are a lot better than the others, but in a sense, we have an embarrassment of riches here in the Fifth District, which bodes well for what might be possible in the fall.
But as I said, I'm eager to take this show on the road. This was a successful test, and I hope that the Fifth District tea party groups have set an example for tea parties across the nation to follow.—RWT
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
I thought the event was a great success. An audience of about 400 people filled the auditorium of the Albemarle County Office Building, many people listened on the radio, the local newspaper reported the event on its front page (but, as usual, lowballed the audience count at 200), and I was even told that some higher-ups in the Republican Party in Washington were watching the webcast.
You can see the event for yourself. I haven't been able to find the podcasts that were supposed to be up on the WCHV site, but the whole event is now up on YouTube. The video is broken up into roughly ten-minute increments; the link above is to part one, and that page should have further links that take you to the other segments. Don't get thrown by the host's long pause at the beginning; that was local radio host Joe Thomas (the fellow dressed in full colonial regalia) pausing to get confirmation that the signal was going through to the radio station for the broadcast.
Alas, the video was filmed from below the dais, and it's something of an unflattering angle which makes me look like I'm hunched over the desk. Oh, well. If I wanted glamour, I should have gone to Hollywood instead.
First, a note on the name of the event. We called it a "Forum" rather than a debate because of the number of candidates. With six or seven candidates, you can't have the back-and-forth of a debate; you can just give each candidate a chance to state his views. "Tea Parties" is plural because this event is a joint venture of the tea party groups in Charlottesville and Lynchburg. That's part of organizer Mark Lloyd's effort to get tea party groups to band together on the congressional-district level. Mark is adamant that anyone claiming to be a "national" tea party group is premature at best. I agree. We can't have a national organization until we have local organizations to provide a genuine base for it.
I particularly want to share with my readers my brief opening comments. This was the first opportunity anyone had to address a tea party audience after last Tuesday's vote in Massachusetts, so I thought about what I wanted to say to the tea party supporters in attendance. Here it is:
Since this forum is sponsored by the Jefferson Area Tea Party, I wanted to begin first by saying something to all of the tea party people in attendance—everyone who helped organize the tea party events, who attended the rallies, or who have given this movement their sympathies. What I want to say is: thank you. Thank you for what you have achieved, in such a short period of time, with no organization or infrastructure or national leadership, while being alternately ignored or slandered by much of the mainstream media.
Exactly seven months ago, President Obama launched his push for a government takeover of health care. It was the latest in a string of attacks by this administration, this Congress on our freedom and on American capitalism—and it was intended to be the first of many more. It was supposed to sail through a Congress controlled by the president's party and then be followed by cap-and-trade, by tax increases, by who knows what else.
It is only because of the tea party movement, because of the forums and rallies you sponsored, because you showed up at town hall meetings, because you made your voices heard and persuaded your friends and neighbors—it is because of you that ObamaCare was held up for seven long, suspenseful months. It was held up until it could finally be rejected by the voters in a way so clear and so effective that the bill is now effectively dead, along with the rest of this administration's far-left, anti-liberty agenda.
So on behalf of myself and my family, I want to say: thank you for standing up to preserve our precious liberty.
All of this goes for TIA Daily's readers, too. A fan of my writing recently suggested to me that my articles on the health care bill—many of which were widely published—made a difference in the outcome. I responded that the contest over this bill was so razor-close that anyone who did anything to stop ObamaCare made a difference. If you attended a tea party rally or wrote a letter to the editor or donated to support TIA's efforts—and I know that many of you have done these things and more—then you helped tip the balance. So I want to say to you what I said to the tea partiers Friday night: thank you.
The little speech I gave about what the tea party movement accomplished also had an ulterior motive: to remind the candidates and the viewers of a vital fact about recent political events. Over the past year, it is the tea party movement that has wielded the decisive balance of political power in America. The message to politicians is: you had better take us seriously and stay on our good side. More on that later.
The next purpose of my opening remarks was to briefly argue for why I think that debates or forums like this are the logical next step for the tea party movement.
Tonight's forum is an important and logical next step for the tea party movement. We've been very clear so far about what we're against, and this event allows us to define and promote what we're for. It gives us a chance to make sure that this November, we'll be able to vote for something better than then lesser of two evils.
What we are for, in a word, is liberty—which means: individual rights, economic freedom, and a representative government that answers to the people. So my intention is to keep tonight's questions tightly focused on the issues of central concern to the tea party movement, the issues of free markets and small government.
In the spirit of the tea party movement, the questions I will ask tonight are drawn from suggestions sent in to us by tea party patriots from across the 5th district, though I have added a few questions of my own. And what I'm hoping we will find out is not just the positions of these candidates on specific issues, but also something wider: their core values and their basic philosophy on the proper role of government.
It is customary, when someone is running for office, that they have to run the gamut of various special interests, answering the concerns of each one. Far too often, though, this can degenerate into a process in which the candidate is expected to tell each interest group what government benefits he is going to generously provide to them at our expense. It is high time that the candidates were made to answer to a group that recognizes, over and above any of those special interests, that all of us have a fundamental and overriding interest in liberty.
I have gotten several requests recently from people looking to organize similar events with their own local tea party groups—one in another Virginia congressional district, one in Texas, one in North Carolina. So I am feverishly working right now to put together a packet of information and start up a web page that will give tea party debate organizers a guide to all of the logistics of organizing one of these events, as well as a large set of suggested questions to ask of candidates. I may be moderating at least one of these new forums—the experience of having done it once will really help—and I will be offering my services in that role to anyone who wants it.
If anyone out there is interested in organizing such a debate—and believe me, if you offer to help put it together, your local tea party group will likely be thrilled with the idea—let me know, and I'll include you on the distribution list for this material as we produce it.
The whole idea is to shape the choices we're going to be offered in November. If it looks like Republicans are going to be swept back into power, then we should do what we can to make sure that good Republicans are swept into power. And by that I mean people who are really serious about the cause of individual rights, free markets, and small government.
More broadly, the idea is to make the tea party movement into one of those groups—like the VFW, or the AARP, or Rick Warren's church—before whom political candidates have to genuflect if they want to get into office. They don't have to agree with us on everything, but they have to show us respect, take our concerns seriously, and answer pointed questions from us.
And that leads me to the little bit of controversy about Friday night's event. One of the Republican candidates chose not to show up—and he happens to be the candidate backed by the Republican Party establishment.
When I accepted the invitation to moderate the forum, I didn't realize that I was stepping into a flashpoint of tension between the tea party movement and the Republican establishment. Many tea party people are disillusioned Republicans and independents who have supported Republican candidates before—only to be disappointed when those candidates voted for welfare-state programs and government bailouts once they got to Washington. So we are deeply suspicious that the careerists in the party establishment are trying to co-opt the tea party movement to get their guys elected—after which they will forget about us.
The party establishment, for its part, has the instincts of any establishment: it is afraid of any competing base of power that is too cantankerously independent and unpredictable. That seems to be the attitude of Robert Hurt's campaign. Hurt is a state senator from the southern end of the fifth district. Blessed by an endorsement and campaign money from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor—a big wheel in Virginia Republican politics—Hurt has acted so far as if the only people whose support he needs are the party establishment, while he has ignored and slighted the tea party groups and tried to control the primary process to give himself the advantage.
This has a few people whispering about parallels between VA-5 and NY-23—the New York congressional district where the party leaders nominated a liberal Republican, encouraging a third-party run by a more staunchly conservative candidate. By splitting the vote on the right, they ended up getting the Democratic candidate elected. I'll be writing much more about those parallels soon.
To give you some context here, the forum's main organizer—Lynchburg tea party organizer Mark Lloyd—told me that he originally scheduled the debate specifically to accommodate Senator Hurt's schedule, getting a verbal promise that Hurt would attend. It was only later that Hurt indicated he might back out, and we found out for sure a few days ahead of time. (Where Hurt was and what he was doing that evening instead of addressing the tea party group is an interesting question; more on that as I confirm it.)
In response to Senator Hurt's snub, Charlottesville tea party activist Carole Thorpe, who very ably managed the logistics of the event, came up with the idea of making a cardboard cut-out of Senator Hurt and placing him at one of the seats at the forum as a visual reminder of his absence. Not wanting to put me in an awkward position, she checked with me beforehand, and for a moment I wondered if it was a good idea, if it might be seen as being in poor taste. But then my cantankerous, trouble-making streak took over, and I encouraged Carole to go ahead with it.
We were right. What the Hurt campaign wanted to do was to skip the tea party event and suffer no political repercussions. If we had just left Senator Hurt's seat empty, I suspect that no one but the professional political operatives would have noticed or remembered his absence, and he would have gotten away with it. But the cardboard cutout was such a striking image that the Charlottesville Daily Progress put it on their front page—a big picture on the middle of the front page, above the fold. When I saw it the next morning as I was walking into the post office, I nearly fell over. What this means is that everyone who even glanced at the front page of the local paper knows that Robert Hurt blew off the tea party movement. For a Republican politician running for office in the Year of the Tea Party, that's a political debacle. (It may also explain why I've heard from the local tea party organizers that the Hurt campaign has suddenly become much more conciliatory towards them.)
You can watch the YouTube clips of the debate to hear all of the questions I asked and the candidates' responses. Here are just a few of my favorites. After giving the candidates a brief chance to introduce themselves to the audience, this was the first question:
When we asked for questions from the tea party members, we got several that asked about the 10th Amendment, which has been invoked recently on the state level in an attempt to curb the power of the US Congress over the states. But I'm not going to ask about that, precisely because that's a movement on the state level. What I want to know is: what is Congress going to do to limit itself? My question is: Would you consider opposing a bill for no other reason than because it grants powers to the government that are not specifically authorized in the Constitution—and can you give an example of legislation, either something that has been passed, or something that has been proposed, that meets this description?
One of the answers to this question, from former Navy pilot Mike McPadden, gave me a rare pleasure: hearing something new and interesting about political science from a politician. One of the things I was trying to do with this event was to draw out more from the candidates than just the usual political bromides, something to indicate that they have engaged in some first-hand thinking on political principles. McPadden gave one of the best short summaries of the Tenth Amendment I've ever heard. Here it is, from the third segment on YouTube:
What we have to remember about the Tenth Amendment is that the Tenth Amendment is the last thing our Founding Fathers said to us before they signed off…. The Tenth Amendment has given us an absolute structure of what the Constitution was meant to be, in case we didn't get it the first time. What it means is: if it's not specifically written in the Constitution, you may not do it, federal government. That's it. It says: you can do anything you want, states and the people, unless the Constitution specifically prohibits you from doing it. That is only for the states. To the people, you are free to do anything that you want, there are no restriction upon you in the Constitution. That's the Tenth Amendment in a nutshell. So yes, if it goes against the Constitution, if it's not one of the enumerated powers of the Constitution, indeed, I would definitely vote against it.
As moderator of the debate—and particularly since I may be moderating future debates—I don't think it's appropriate for me to endorse one of the candidates just yet. But I was not alone in the view that McPadden turned in one of the strongest performances of the night.
My main goal in asking the questions was to avoid letting the candidates get by with vague generalities and boilerplate declarations of loyalty to small government. I wanted to ask questions that were broad enough that they would bring out the ideology of the candidates—but concrete enough that they would require the candidates to get specific about what they would really do if they were put in power. In the middle section of the debate, I did a series of questions that called for shorter answers, and one I quite liked was this, from Part 5:
After Tuesday's election in Massachusetts, it seems likely that you will be—if you win the Republican nomination, and then go on to win the election in the fall—that you could be part of a Republican majority. As such, you would not just be responding to President Obama or to Democratic leaders in Congress. You would have a certain degree of latitude to set your own agenda. So if that were to happen: name the one thing that you think should be the first, top priority of a Republican Congress.
What I learned from this question was that you can ask a politician for the "one first top" thing she would do—and still get a list of seven items. But I thought that the answers were revealing, because they indicate the real priorities of the different candidates. It is also a good measure of their effectiveness. What we don't want is a representative whose plan is to show up in Congress and just respond to whatever happens to be going on at the time. The most effective congressmen are those who pick a crusade, a top issue that concerns them, and keep hammering away at that issue year after year.
Ron Ferrin proposed a bill to repeal everything done under the first two years of the Obama administration, while Jim McKelvey named the so-called "FairTax," replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. I think that's an awful idea, and—more to the point, given the purpose of this question—it's an enormous waste of political effort that would be better spent reducing the rates of existing taxes.
My most philosophical question was: "Please name the moral, political, or economic thinkers who have been most influential on your view of the proper role of government." This was inspired by a question asked in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, when the candidates were asked to name their favorite philosopher. The results were revealing. My favorite in that race, Steve Forbes, named John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. George Bush named Jesus. John McCain named Teddy Roosevelt—which, among other things, revealed that McCain hasn't the foggiest idea what "philosophy" is.
Knowing that politicians are not generally deep intellectuals, I decided to broaden the question to "moral, political, or economic thinkers," in the view that I was more likely to engage the candidates' passions and get a revealing response. For this segment, see Part 7 on YouTube.
McPadden bowled me over by naming Cicero as an early defender of individual rights. That man has been doing some reading. Ron Ferrin said "I'm not that deep a thinker" and named Ronald Reagan and "my pastor, Jerry Falwell." You learned something from that one, didn't you? I found it interesting that Laurence Verga named only economists—Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, and Stephen Moore. He very much struck me as a pragmatist pro-free-marketer rather than a "big picture" guy.
In retrospect, the one thing I would change about the debate—or do better next time—would be to ask more questions designed to differentiate the candidates. I found them saying "ditto" to each other a little too often, so I would quiz them more on issues like immigration and the national sales tax (excuse me, "FairTax") in order to find areas of disagreement. But in a way I was impressed with the fact that so many of these candidates were fire-breathing free-marketers. (Don't miss the question, in Part 4, when I ask them what we should do about health care.) Some of the candidates are a lot better than the others, but in a sense, we have an embarrassment of riches here in the Fifth District, which bodes well for what might be possible in the fall.
But as I said, I'm eager to take this show on the road. This was a successful test, and I hope that the Fifth District tea party groups have set an example for tea parties across the nation to follow.—RWT
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
1 comments:
I agree - while all the candidates bring strengths and abilities to the political table - Mike McPadden is slowly but surely pulling to the front of the crowd. His explanation of sound money - love the gold coin - is the best I've seen. I hope everyone in the VA. 5th district takes time to research all the candidates' and makes an informed choice.
Donna Cosmato
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