I’ve come to a cross roads, and I believe many of you are with me. I no longer have faith that members of the Grand Old Party can represent me as a classical liberal or more specifically as a Conservative-Libertarian, and neither do I believe the majority of the members of the party share true forms of those ideologies.

This feeling began developing after the 2010 election when several friends and colleagues of mine and I developed ConservativeCongress.com to assess every single candidate self-proclaimed to be running as a conservative in the entire country. Thousands of unpaid and thankless hours were put into the project by myself and my friends. I myself put in roughly 2,000 to 3,000 hours alone. Then I watched as various state Tea Party groups and supposedly conservative minding groups signed off on the status quo. I became sick as state after state sent D.C. main stays and beltway insiders back to flap their gums about conservative principles while we all watched continuous compromise and a lack of any leadership with the House at their disposal.

The final blow personally for me was when I watched a man take my home district who had not lived in his home state in 18 years and also did not even own property in the state in which he was running for office. I’ve had the great privilege in my lifetime to travel extensively and live in various areas of our great nation. I remember very clearly living abroad in Australia some seven years ago and then upon returning spending the next four years moving around for graduate school and work. When I made it back home I hardly recognized the place in which I grew up. Everything had changed.

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Forty seven years ago this week, Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the biggest landslide since 1936. Today, both left and right see in Goldwater’s defeat the beginnings of the conservative revolution that would bring Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. Missed in this thesis, though, is how 1964 was a prime example of modern Democratic campaigning with its allies — the mainstream media — that we suffer under today. It was also a historic turning point that might have been avoided.

It is fashionable for the Left to co-opt Barry Goldwater as they have Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton called him a “patriot” and James Carville characterized him a “principled conservative,” at odds with today’s “loony right.” But this was not so in 1964. The mainstream media, not called that then, labeled him a fascist. Walter Cronkite said of him that “Goldwater was going places, among them Nazi Germany.” Psychiatrists lined up behind the Johnson campaign, declaring Goldwater “emotionally unstable.” Reporters were aware that LBJ was heightening the conflict in Vietnam, but said nothing while LBJ promised not to send “American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

Journalists on the campaign trail saw Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. Luckily, by the grace of God, they did not go off. None of this was reported, while newspapers editors worked in overdrive to portray Goldwater as eager to push the button. Today, pundits argue that dirty tricks by Carville and Begalia were something new on the horizon for Democrats and were borrowed from decades of Republican campaigns. But Johnson was a pioneer of the Clinton War Room. He used the FBI to wiretap the candidate, bought political information from Goldwater defectors, and in an eerie foretaste of Watergate, put domestic CIA chief Howard Hunt on the White House payroll to infiltrate, even burglarize, Goldwater headquarters (with Democratic blessing, Hunt filtered his findings and received cash through a dummy corporation called National Press). What is striking about these tactics was how unnecessary they were. Johnson beforehand knew he was going to win, but he wanted “to crucify” Goldwater nonetheless.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Michael Bowen to discuss how the split between Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft led to the transformation of the Republican party as a party of conservatives, which began with Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Chilling thought for the day.  Recall the election of 1948, when the  Republican Party’s heavily-favored, moderate and uninspiring nominee lost to Truman in a race in which he was heavily favored to win.  The tragedy is not that the Chicago Tribune got the headline wrong, but that the American people lost either way given the choice between a left-leaning Republican and a slightly right-leaning Democrat.  To see how much we have learned from history, here is a pop quiz.

If you cannot answer any of the following questions, you are ill-prepared for 2012.

Leading up to the 1996 Presidential election, anytime Republicans were gathered, from Young Republicans to State Committees, anywhere in the Country, including Kansas, one candidate was the hands down favorite, usually with double the votes of the second pick.

Who was the darling of the Republican Party in 1996?

(hint: Pat Buchanan was usually second)

In 1964, Barry Goldwater won a primary victory defeating among others, Governor George Romney.

What book is credited with helping the Conservative Goldwater break the grip of the moderate wing that opposed him?

Who was the second, and only other Republican in the last century to defy the statist wing of the Republican Party and wrest the Presidential nomination?

In her book A Choice Not an Echo (1964), Phyllis Schlafly names the dates, places and attendees of the meetings as she details how the Republican Presidential nominees are always hand-picked by a small, elite cadre’ thus relegating loyal Republican activists to “echoing” the pre-selection rather than exercising their birthright “choice”.   The housewife-turned-activist Schlafly, was horrified to see the kingmakers actively manipulating the process in an attempt to steal the nomination away from the legitimate Republican popular candidate, Barry Goldwater.  She rushed tens of thousands of copies of her book to Convention delegates who then stood with Goldwater to win the battle, if not the war.

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David Brooks is the very embodiment of a New York Times editor’s picture of a “responsible” conservative.

He supported Obama in 2008 and dismisses Sarah Palin as an ignoramus without table manners. He considers Glenn Beck a clown and disdains the traditional conservative desire for limited government, lower taxes and fiscal responsibilities.  Perhaps most outrageously, however, Brooks last week managed to equate the tea party movement with the Weather Underground, SDS and the radicals who crawled out of leftist fever swamps in the sixties dedicated to destroying the America the tea partiers profess to love.

After the GOP electoral losses in 2006 and 2008, Brooks dismissed the notion that Republicans lost mainly because they had performed poorly in office and instead warned that the basic values of conservatives had destroyed the Republican brand. In BrooksWorld, Republicans lost because conservatives just hadn’t come to grips with modernity. Goldwater and Reagan, he hinted, spoke for a different time, to a different electorate in a different voice. The country and politics had changed and the time had come for conservatives to grow up.

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The prospect of CNBC analyst Larry Kudlow seeking the Republican and Conservative Party nominations to oppose Sen. Chuck Schumer has become a cause among Tea Party folks, Conservatives, Republicans and many on Wall Street. Not since James L. Buckley won a US Senate seat in 1970 have New York Conservatives been so excited about a statewide political race.

Pick Up the Mantle

I don’t know Kudlow well. We met several times during the Reagan years but it was at Buffalo Congressman Jack Kemp’s 2009 memorial service that I got reacquainted with the pro-growth enthusiast. Kudlow has been on on my STONEzone TEN BESTED DRESSED LISTtm since 2008. I admire him as an unabashed apostle of hope and optimism and opportunity on television and radio. His are the politics of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, who Kudlow calls his mentor.

It goes without saying that Chuck Schumer needs a vigorous challenger; he is perhaps the most odious, pushy, abrasive and self-absorbed jerk in Congress today. His pork-fests are legendary, and he narrowly escaped indictment for corruption as an Assemblyman before becoming the master of the “pay to play” game in Washington.

But Kudlow’s potential candidacy is about something even more important than sending Schumer packing.

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A group made up of some of the biggest names in contemporary conservatism got together a few days ago and crafted what they are calling the “Mount Vernon Statement,” a manifesto of sorts meant to give direction to today’s conservative movement. Put succinctly, it fails to fill the bill.

Taken as a whole this statement is fine as a short history lesson. It explains pretty clearly what the founders had wrought when their basic work was done with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But as a statement of principles that might guide today’s discussion, I do not think the letter works.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that this effort is harmful. In fact, I think every young person should read it for its explication of our historically conservative American principles. The problem is that this thing doesn’t seem to speak directly to what we are facing today like a statement that perhaps aims to become boilerplate should.

Some of those involved with the statement said that the 1960 “Sharon Statement” served as their inspiration. The Sharon Statement, intended to give some ideological umph to Goldwater conservatives, is an effort that works much better as a rallying cry to action. Sadly, the Mount Vernon Statement falls a little flat in this respect.

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As the Tea Party movement approaches its first “birthday”, the leadership is taking it to new levels.  The metamorphosis, which has been deliciously organic, has seen it go from street protests, to active demonstrations to serious political action.  All along the way, Big Media and Big Political Parties have failed to truly grasp what it is all about.  As Missouri lawmaker, Chris Kelly once famously said to another during Floor debate, “I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you”.

At the end of the month, Richard Viguerie — legendary conservative activist, direct response fundraising pioneer, and currently chairman of ConservativeHQ.com — will deliver the keynote speech at the inaugural Leadership Tea Party training event to be held at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Westin Hotel.  In addition to Mr. Viguerie’s keynote speech delivered on Friday night January 29, the event will consist of 11 sessions of grassroots leadership training over 14 hours on Saturday and Sunday, January 30-31. Mr. Viguerie’s speech is free and open to both the press and the public, though a limited number of seats are available. (You can request a ticket online here .)

Viguerie, who was hired by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1962 as the director of Young Americans for Freedom, worked for the Goldwater campaign in 1964, pioneered the direct response fund raising techniques that financed the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and has been a key leader in the movement for limited government for decades.  Tea Party activists of varying levels of political experience, most rigorously eschewing party labels, are hungry to learn the tactics to win on the political battlefield.  Like latter day militia men, the Tea Party activists have seen the whites of the eyes of the red coats reds, and they are trading their microsoft office suite applications for html and eblogger and are training in the dark political arts for the battle that will shape their Country for the sake of their children.

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Today, in 1964, Ronald Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” speech in support of Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was broadcast on the nation’s airwaves. Just 16 years later, Reagan righted our listing ship. Enjoy…