Takeover (39 page)

d. Those state GOP committees run by the Republican establishment

12. Use small dollar events to expand your base and open up the campaign to supporters of all means; not everyone can be persuaded to go door-to-door, but most everyone likes good food, and the person who buys a ticket to your barbecue or bake sale is a donor, voter, and a potential volunteer.

13. Never accept the questions or scenarios presented by the establishment media. Don’t get sucked in to their warped view of reality. Be armed with the facts and ideas to push back and explain why liberty and freedom under God’s laws is always preferable to the “safety” provided by Big Government and the state.

14. Develop conservative solutions to the problems facing the area in which you are seeking office. Don’t accept the idea that government is the best or only solution; propose solutions to problems that empower individuals and save the taxpayers money.

15. Don’t work in isolation. Connect with other limited-government constitutional conservatives and organizations to strategize, grow your base, expand your knowledge, and build your brand.

16. Go to
www.goptakeover.org
and review the plans submitted by Liberty Prize winners Michael Patrick Leahy and Lorie Medina of the Real Conservatives National Committee, and read
Taking Back Your Government: The Neighborhood Precinct Committeeman Strategy
by Liberty Prize winner Dan Schultz, available through Amazon for just 99 cents.

17. Learn to present your arguments with a smile. The establishment, especially the media, wants to convince others that conservatives are angry “haters.” In reality we conservatives are happier than liberals according to social scientists, and the reason why should be clear; we have our families, our homes, our churches, and our faith to inspire our efforts, and we rely upon ourselves for our success. When you are out campaigning or going door-to-door, just remember you are doing this for your children and grandchildren, and smile.
¹

F
or all of my entrepreneurial life, I’ve been blessed with many talented people without whose help I would have achieved very little. And that’s certainly true for this book. Most published authors devote almost full time to writing their books. However, in my case, I’m engaged in dozens of important projects, including helping run a seventy-five person national direct-marketing agency. Therefore this book would not have been possible without the active involvement of many people.

My coauthor of
America’s Right Turn
, David Franke, and I had dinner in the summer of 2012 at Carmelo’s, an excellent Portuguese-Italian restaurant, in Old Town Manassas, Virginia. As I was outlining my ideas for the book, David said, “Takeover,” and I quickly agreed that was the obvious title.

David and I worked on the first part of the book for a few months until health issues prevented him from continuing. At that point I enlisted George Rasley, the editor of Conservative HQ.com, to help me with the book, and George and I spent most of 2013 writing
TAKEOVER
.

As a veteran of over three hundred political campaigns, who served in elected and appointed positions from city hall to the White
House, George’s experience and advice were invaluable to me in translating the history of the over one hundred years of civil war in the Republican Party (and my fifty-plus years of experience on the front lines of it) into a practical guide for conservatives to finally win that civil war and take over the GOP.

David and George weighed in with excellent ideas and advice; however, I alone am responsible for the contents of
TAKEOVER
.

In addition to David and George, I received invaluable help from Mark Fitzgibbons, my friend, attorney, and president of legal affairs at American Target Advertising, Inc. In addition to being an outstanding constitutional lawyer, Mark volunteers many hours of his time and talent to local and national Tea Party leaders and individuals fighting for their property rights.

Others who have helped prepare and promote this book include Joseph and Elizabeth Farah, Geoff Stone, and the highly professional support team at WND.

Diana Banister and Craig Shirley at Shirley and Banister Public Affairs are heavily involved in the marketing of
TAKEOVER
, and finally, a big shout-out to my executive assistant, Bob Sturm, and the rest of my talented team at ATA, and to Art Kelly and Rick Buchanan.

Adopted by the Young Americans for Freedom Conference at Sharon, Conn., September 11, 1960

IN THIS TIME
of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths

WE
, as young conservatives believe:

THAT
foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

THAT
liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

THAT
the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

THAT
when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

THAT
the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

THAT
the genius of the Constitution—the division of powers—is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

THAT
the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

THAT
when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation, that when it takes from one to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

THAT
we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;

THAT
the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

THAT
the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with this menace; and

THAT
American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?”

“The Speech” on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater delivered to a national television audience by Ronald Reagan on October 27, 1964

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We’ve never had it so good.”

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We’ve raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don’t own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars.
And we’ve just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.

As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down: [up] man’s old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the “Great Society,” or
as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they’ve been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, “The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.” Another voice says, “The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.” Or, “Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.” Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as “our moral teacher and our leader,” and he says he is “hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.” He must “be freed,” so that he “can do for us” what he knows “is best.” And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.”

Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as “the masses.” This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, “the full power of centralized government”—this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.

Now, we have no better example of this than government’s involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85 percent of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21 percent increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming -- that’s regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we’ve spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don’t grow.

Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as
President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he’ll find out that we’ve had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He’ll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He’ll find that they’ve also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn’t keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.