Exclusive: Joseph Farah gives senator a lesson on viability of tea-party movement--WND




Lindsey Graham, you're no Ronald Reagan

Posted: July 15, 2010
1:00 am Eastern
© 2010

It's too bad Sen. Lindsey Graham isn't up for re-election this year.

I would badly like to see him unceremoniously dumped from office by South Carolina voters.

You have to wonder about a state like South Carolina that sends to the U.S. Senate an extraordinary, principled leader like Jim DeMint and also elects – and re-elects in 2008 – a dilettante like Graham.

I could talk for hours about Graham's stands on the issues – a proponent of amnesty for illegal aliens, a believer in the fairy-tale of climate change and an advocate of closing Guantanamo Bay – but I'll let him do the talking about his disgust with the tea-party movement.

"Everything I'm doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the tea-party movement's at," Graham said.

He boasts of having four meetings with tea-party representatives that he termed "very, very contentious." In one meeting he claims to have told the citizen-activists: "'What do you want to do? You take back your country – and do what with it?' … Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent."

Don't miss Joseph Farah's newest book, "The Tea Party Manifesto: A Vision for an American Rebirth," in which he sets out a clear agenda for the movement he predicted would arise in response to Barack Obama.

He also told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post: "The problem with the tea party, I think it's just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out." He added: "We don't have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats. Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today."

What can I say? Lindsey Graham couldn't be more wrong about anything – except for being at odds with the tea-party movement.

Graham talks about "unsustainability" and "coherent visions." What's unsustainable for America is continuing to elect to the House and Senate characters like Graham. What is his "coherent vision" for America? Has anyone ever heard it? He's a U.S. senator. Yet his expectation is that citizen-activists who bother to visit with him should offer one?

He's certainly wrong about Ronald Reagan. Reagan would win today in a cakewalk. He would have won in 2008. But the Republican nominee was Lindsey Graham's political identical twin, John McCain.

What Ronald Reagan knew, and what I believe most tea-party activists know, is that Americans don't need to come up with a coherent vision for governing the country because we already have one. All we have to do is follow the prescription written for us back in the 18th century – the oldest and best constitution in the world.

The coherent vision we need is right there in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Reagan knew that.

Here's Reagan in his own words: "Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years."

Did you catch that last line?

This belief in the Constitution and the founding principles was the underlying basis for everything Reagan tried to do as president for eight years.

That was Reagan's coherent vision.

And it remains the coherent vision of a movement he would embrace – the tea party.

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