Thread: What Chris Christie And Ron Paul Have In Common

What Chris Christie And Ron Paul Have In Common

Posted By Robert Broadus on Dec 19, 2013

Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough thinks that what ails the GOP is not nominating leftist candidates like Chris Christie. Black Republican strategist, Raynard Jackson also wrote an article heralding Christie’s landslide win in a Blue State as the rubric for the GOP, while shaming Cuccinelli’s loss in Virginia as a sign that the party should turn away from conservative & Tea Party values that brought the party back from the dead in 2010. And Anne Coulter warned in 2012 that if the GOP didn’t pick Chris Christie, Mitt Romney would be their nominee, and they would lose. So the message is clear: the GOP needs to nominate leftist Republicans like Christie who drop their lawsuits when rogue judges in their state engage in nullification (unilaterally ignoring state sovereignty by re-defining marriage,) support gun control, and sacrifice their state’s independence in exchange for federal aid money when a “superstorm” comes their way. In other words, the GOP needs a candidate JUST LIKE Mitt Romney.

While on paper, Chris Christie looks just like Mitt Romney (except that he’s not a Mormon,) at the polls, he will be just like Ron Paul. Of his recent runs for the White House, Ron Paul made groundbreaking records and caught plenty of headlines in 2008 and 2012, when he energized a lot of young people who were not involved in the political process to register Republican and vote. I was one of those people, though I don’t qualify too well as “young.” At first, Ron Paul’s problem was name recognition, but after being the only Republican on-stage with an anti-war position, that was problem quickly evaporated. The Libertarian-themed film, “V for Vendetta” also gave a nod to homosexuals, and helped fuel his record-setting November 5^th “Money-Bomb,” a term that has now become part of the mainstream vernacular. Many-a Democrat jokingly remarked that Ron Paul was the only Republican making sense—though most who did so still voted for Obama. As I struggled in vain to support a campaign that was destined never to win an election, I wondered what others saw that made Ron Paul not only the guy to support, but also got them so angry when FOX News passed him over in their coverage, dismissed polls that showed him doing better than other 2^nd-tier candidates, and when he was excluded from Presidential debates. The theory of Ron Paul supporters was that even though his appeal was largely to Libertarians, who usually showed up between 5-10% in the polls, if Ron Paul was able to win the GOP nomination, the party would HAVE TO support him over whomever the Democratic rival would be, and with 30-40% of the populace being Republican, when added to his die-hard Libertarian fans and a few crossover votes from anti-war Democrats, he would certainly win the election.

Well, things didn’t work out that way, but the Libertarian movement made itself so well-known that in the past 8 years, we’ve seen everything from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (both Ron Paul and Justin Amash voting for the repeal,) to mainstream conservative pundits like Sean Hannity proclaiming on repeated occasions that he’s a “Libertarian” on most issues. Suddenly, it’s so popular to be a Libertarian that mainstream shock-and-awe GOP candidates are claiming Libertarianism as their mantle, while at the same time disowning any associations they ever had with the Tea Party. There are some who even claim that Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in the Virginia Governor’s race was due to 8% of the vote going to a Libertarian “spoiler,” although that is easily refuted when you realize that most who vote Libertarian would not have voted for a Republican candidate who believes in traditional family values or would keep Virginia’s moral laws the same rather than working to undermine them. The Libertarian position has always been that “government shouldn’t legislate morality.” What this fails to recognize is that ALL LAWS constitute a legislation of morality—it’s just a question of whose morals you want to be governed by: God’s or man’s.

And so, Chris Christie is presented as the one who will save the GOP from its losing streak if only the mainstream of the party get behind him and join forces with the Libertarians and crossover Democrats. When we look at Christie’s record, however, we have to ask what further portion of our morality will we have to give up simply to have an “R” by the name of the next President? In addition to being for gun control, because “[his] state has a dense population,” and failing to defend marriage when the issue came up a week before the election, Christie believed in bombing Libya and instituting regime change, though they never attacked us. In 2012, Mitt Romney couldn’t effectively attack Barack Obama on his Libya policy and show him to be the soul of incompetence that he really was, because Romney’s foreign policy would not have been any different. Neither will Christie’s. So, as we erect visions in our minds of political ads referencing the “3AM phone call,” overlaid with Hillary shouting, “What difference, at this point, does it make?!” in reference to those dead Americans in the Ben Ghazi massacre on the anniversary of 9/11, we should ask ourselves, “What difference, at this point, will Chris Christie make?!”

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