What Jed Clampett could teach the GOP

I’m a 35-year-old long-time taxpayer, and if being a member of the first generation of American youth exposed to 24-hour-a-day cable television taught me anything, it was this: there is no situation that cannot be understood if broken down and filtered through “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

“The Beverly Hillbillies” was and remains one of the most popular series in the history of American television. Considering the theme song, I take you to this passage: “…but then one day he was shootin’ at some food/and up from the ground come a bubbl’n crude … oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.”

About as Joycean as it gets for a sitcom about hillibilles, yes?

Hillbilly Jed Clampett took a shot at a rabbit and discovered a patch of oil worth in excess of $60 million, and while that doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind we’re talking about 1960s dollars, a time when businessmen flew the friendly skies with steak knives aplenty and the term “Dollar” meant something to even the people who didn’t actually work for them. I’m guessing there are days when The Powers That Be in the Republican Party feel like Jed Clampett, yet instead of celebrating its newfound wealth, the GOP is doing everything possible to jam that vaulting stream of Texas tea right back into the slug-created spout from which it spewed.

The million-dollar shot that the GOP took was Sen. John McCain’s announcement of Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. As we’re talking hillbilly, let the record show even a blind squirrel finds an acorn ever now and again. Gov. Palin was an unknown, a wild card of the highest order, a Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot selection in a high-stakes game if there ever was one. Yet, as soon as she began speaking on that platform in Ohio, up came the black gold. As hard as this may be to understand, Gov. Palin appeals to a very specific type of American, and that type happens to be what used to be called “The GOP Base.”

Gov. Palin, the million-dollar shot, opened up a vein, and now the GOP leadership probably regrets her selection. “Goodness, wouldn’t life be easier without that pesky Sarah Palin being a household name, what with the inter-tubes and the Facespace and such…” Few Conservatives are as politically talented as Gov. Palin, but millions of us not only identify with her trials and tribulations, we admire her for getting to where she is on hard work and merit – did I mention we damn-sure like her politics?
This is not about Gov. Palin, though. Rather, it’s about the millions of us who identify with her who the GOP now see as pests to be swatted away rather than a base to be courted. Gov. Palin was that first bubble of black gold, and all of us behind her have come rushing out in a tidal wave of good fortune for the GOP, if only the party would recognize it.

To phrase it in words most would understand: Let me be clear, Conservatives, and no one but Conservatives, get Republicans elected.

In the months that followed the announcement of Gov. Palin’s addition to the McCain ticket and her stem-winding, cork-popping, status-gouging speech at the RNC Convention of ’08, thousands, then millions of people quite similar to Gov. Palin in attitude, background and yes, politics, began to get fed up about the direction of this country. Quite suddenly, with the help of a certain CNBC reporter, millions of Americans realized that we don’t have to sit back and take it quietly. Tea Parties started brewing, quietly at first, and then, all the sudden, they were everywhere.

On April 15, my friend Eric and I both took a vacation day from “work” and drove to Oklahoma City, participating in one of the largest Tax Day Tea Parties (“work” – that productive thing that creates wealth, is taxed and funds the various entitlement programs politicians are in love with). It was a genuine expression of First Amendment outrage, and what was the characterization of our efforts? We were promptly branded as “angry mobs,” to use one of the nice invectives of the day. Oh, and let’s not forget the permutation regarding those pesky bags of tea.

As the spring and summer wore on, word started getting out about The Healthcare Bill, a shape-shifting monstrosity code-name Project Beowulf. Instead of plot, though, this bill – like all bills – was larded with governmentese, meta-references to subsections C, L and Q, and sub-bills composing a Where’s Waldo of the Damned. By August, the Tea Parties held outdoors turned into the Town Halls held indoors, and it was as though oldsters hooked to oxygen tanks suddenly had rage pumping through those plastic tubes. People you wouldn’t guess ever willing or able to sit through an interminable zoning board meeting were suddenly citing, chapter and verse, sections of a healthcare bill few politicians had read, and those people, those pesky constituents, were making complex, astute arguments about a Byzantine subject to which even Read’s I, Pencil would defer. No man can make a pencil, but only a party of masochists, nihilists and fools could go along with what the Democrats have planned for American “health.”

With Doug Hoffman, the GOP finally met the first phase of its Waterloo, its Pickett’s Charge, its asinine hubris turned public for all the world to see. Hoffman may not win NY23 – why should he? In any room, GOP hero Newt Gingrich is likely the smartest man, and even he has proclaimed that to support Hoffman is a fool’s errand.

Hoffman’s not a career politician – hell, calling him a novice would be an insult to novices. Yet he happens to be one of those pesky Conservatives, and with the endorsements of Gov. Palin and Fred Thompson (and every aspiring national politician who actually can wrangle the Conservative base), he is gaining momentum. The GOP’s reaction to him is nothing short of absurd – by campaigning against him the GOP may as well wrap an explosive-vest around the torso of your party’s future and detonate it in the public square. NY23 is but one district in one special election, but this is to serve notice: Conservatives will no longer carry water for the GOP, no matter how much doom the party wants to envelope and obfuscate its reasoning.

We do not take talking points, not from Rush Limbaugh and not from Sarah Palin. However, Limbaugh and Palin are two among many who have a far better feel on the pulse of American Conservatism and the American public than your committees, delegations, pollsters, caucuses and ward leaders, and those of us who pay attention are fed up with the GOP’s wishy-washy desire to appease moderates. I don’t know if you anyone else has noticed, but the Democrats in charge care little for moderation or moderates, and while GOPers stand docile with olive branches and hands reached across the aisles, Donkeys come with sabers and have no quandary with chopping off hands and slitting throats.

Our patience, epic as it has been, has grown thin. If the GOP wishes to be Democrat Light 2.0, have at it, but we will no longer be appeased. Go after moderates with gusto and I wish you godspeed – have fun jockeying for position with the lowest common denominator against a lobby whose low has no floor.