Want to beat them? Learn their rules. Play their game.
Back in the day, when I worked on the Hill for Senator Helms, he was practically all by himself battling for the conservative cause. The GOP was a distinct minority in the Senate. Bob Dole and Alan Simpson were the Republican leaders. You get the idea.
But Helms STILL had an amazing amount of success in stopping and / or watering down bad legislation pushed by RINOs and Democrats. How did he do it? He learned the rules of the upper chamber. If you ever watch C-SPAN, you’ll notice the senators tend to lean on the professional staff for guidance on procedure and rules. Not Helms. If something was up that he didn’t like — and the GOP leaders weren’t fighting it — he’d enact some obscure rule that would allow for, say, quorum calls or roll call votes every fifteen minutes. He was prepared to go all day or all week until his concerns were addressed. The leadership was always ticked at him. He was using the rules they put into place, but neglected to learn, AGAINST THEM.
That’s the same mindset we have to adopt in the current grassroots v. GOPe struggle going on statewide and nationally. There are some really bizarre things going on that appear to have Karl Rove and his goons’s fingerprints on them. You have the apparent efforts to drive the presidential race toward an open convention. You have the promotion of Paul Ryan in the driveby media as an alternative to consider in the presidential race. You have the current mutiny against the NCGOP chairman, AND t
he funky math with North Carolina’s delegates. You also have the cancellation of the primary in Colorado and the awarding of those delegates to Cruz. The Trump camp howled about that. But, as Rush said yesterday, it’s not cheating — it’s the rules. The rules have been there. Our side hasn’t been paying attention. Theirs has. In fact, their side put the rules in place. If you’re going to compete in a market, you need to play by the “industry” rules in that market.
You can keep looking in from the outside, pointing your fingers and screaming about the damn establishment, or you can buckle down and prepare to fight by the rules of the battlefield. The LATTER is the only way you’re going to get things to change for the better.
A great simplified handbook of the rules is available here: https://www.uaex.edu/publications/pdf/MP350.pdf
Yes, exactly. The Democrats have done that to us for years. We’re either too lazy or too stupid to fight back in kind. We’d rather than just sit out an election on principle and let Obama (and Hillary) get elected.
Just one problem: Even if you learn their rules and play by them, if things aren’t going their way, they simply change the rules. Case in point: what they did to the Ron Paul campaign in 2012.
Decision are made by people who show up.