The Rise of the Invisible Candidate: Why a Third Party Should Happen

© NPR - 1/29/2016

I've noticed something during the last three elections. Every candidate that I like because they are a solid conservative seems almost immediately to disappear from the media's attention and loses the support of the Country Club Republican GOP leadership. Look at NPR's time chart (right) showing who got to talk at the debate last night. Notice who got the least amount of mike time? Ben Carson is being ignored and I believe it's deliberate.

This appears to be a deliberate tactic to eliminate candidates the GOP big shots don't like. I liked Fred Thompson a lot when he ran. He sounded so much like Ronald Reagan. Then, all of a sudden, everywhere it was "Thompson doesn't have the fire in the belly to be president." Then everybody just stopped paying attention to him. Worse, they pretended he wasn't even there. Later I liked Col. Allen West. He got ignored right away even though he was saying things that made conservatives shout, "Hallelujah!" Same thing happened to Herman Cain. They dug something up on him and then made him disappear. Condoleeza Rice, who, I think, would be a fantastic candidate, can't get any traction either. The Republicans won't give her the time of day. Notice anything peculiar about my "lost" candidate list?

I loved Thompson's wit. I'm sure it terrified the GOP leadership.

Except for Fred Thompson every candidate I've liked lately has been of a certain ethnic background. Now the color of one's skin, in my experience, doesn't bother us Tea Party conservatives at all. In fact, self-identified Tea Party conservatives liked every one of these colorful potential presidential candidates and formed a large part of their base. The trouble is that neither the party, nor the media would give them the time of day.

And before you crank up about how racist the Tea Party is, it's balderdash. The Tea Party has a lot of black members and we're proud to have them. The only racism I've ever encountered at a Tea Party gathering has come from Democrat operatives pretending to be us. It's obvious they weren't. All you had to do was to follow them back to their Priuses after we ran them off for causing trouble and saying stupid racist things. It was pretty obvious where these guys were coming from.

Ben Carson is fearless without the bombast.

This time around, my favorite is Ben Carson. The establishment and media did give him some attention at the beginning because of his populist support and it was good press for Republicans to have a black candidate. Unfortunately, for them, Carson jumped into the lead in the polls and gave them a terrible fright. Then the sniping started and the character assassination began and the Grand Old Party most definitely did NOT come to Carson's defense despite the fact that all of it was made up of whole cloth lies by liberal reporters and George Soros supported operatives like "The Young Turks".

To my dismay, I'm beginning to think the country club elites that run the GOP are a bit uncomfortable with an actual descendant of freed slaves taking over as boss of the party. That really reflects badly on the party leadership. Grass roots conservatives of all colors are firmly behind Carson and behind Ted Cruz as well. These two gentlemen are actual conservatives. The only reason that Ted gets the time of day is because he's a senator and the GOP bosses believe they can control "experienced" politicians. They are deluding themselves, of course, because Ted Cruz has shown every indication that he won't dance the Washington shuffle. The GOP is hoping desperately that Trump will drive him off.

Allen West is simply an honorable man.

People like Carson, however, really frighten them. The very idea of an honest man in the Oval Office badly frightens the Washington good old boy network. Shoot, Fred Thompson scared the hell out of them too because he wasn't very good at marching to the party drumbeat when he was in the senate. And they know that an honest man like Carson will be hard to control if he gets into the big chair. Cruz scares them too, but they think they can better handle Cruz by letting Trump pick a fight with him and then sit back and let them destroy each other while they put their boy Marco Rubio forward as a compromise candidate. And really, the only ones compromising in that deal would be the GOP fat cats who wanted Jeb Bush, not Rubio. But they can't have Bush because the conservative base is being obstreperous and they are afraid to lose that many votes.

So what are they doing about Carson? They've decide to give him the "big ig", hoping he'll go away. But there are a lot of us out there who want a nonpolitician in the White House and we can't stand Trump. Why? Because Trump appeals to the worst in all of us. Carson on the other hand appeals to the best.

We need a party Ronald Reagan would be proud of.

Just once before the Apocalypse, wouldn't it be nice to have the best of America in the White House instead of the worst?  Aren't we tired of congenital communists, crooks, liars, traitors and frauds telling us we need to all become part of the obedient collective?  The folks who voted for Reagan and turned down John Kerry and Al Gore are still out there if you can give us a decent man to vote for. You may not have liked George W., but he WAS a good man and I felt good about voting for him and have been proud that he was my president given all that he's done after he left the White House.

I don't know if the GOP leadership has a color problem or not; perhaps, instead, what they have is a character problem. Steely-eyed conservatives and especially steely-eyed conservative black folk seem to make them nervous. Karma is, they say, an angry beast when it visits. I wonder whether Trump is the Republican Party's visitation by karma?

The leadership needs to listen to the conservative base or they're going to cut their own legs out from under them. Like some ponderous fat man, they're busily trying to build up the party from the "moderate" middle and, if they succeed, like some wildly obese senior citizen, their neglected legs are going to buckle beneath them and the party will topple onto its face.  Certainly if Trump becomes the nominee, rock-ribbed conservatives like me will leave the party and go elsewhere. And before the Ron Paul folk get all atwitter, I can tell you we won't go Libertarian - way too tin-foil hat, those people!

Perhaps, we don't have to cling to a dead elephant OR surrender to jackasses! We don't even need to win a majority. Perhaps conservatives can win control another way. If instead of trying to win 51% of the seats of the House and Senate, we could win control of the government by winning just 20-25% of the seats. What we should really do is create a solid, constitutionalist conservative party.  It may take a while to capture 20-25% of the Congress, but it might be the only chance we have to save our country for a few years longer. We could arm-twist the GOP and, for that matter, the Democrats with a relatively small fraction of the votes. Neither of the Big Two parties would have enough votes alone to form a majority. They'd have to suck up to us in order to get anything done. At the very least we could stop them from writing 76,000 page laws that gum up the economy and stifle innovation, kill creativity and discourage risk-taking.

By pulling together all those frustrated, people out there who are being pushed aside and treated as irrelevant and their invisible-to-the-media leaders into a coherent, serious political party of bright-eyed unabashed conservative Americans, we might just thwart the takeover of our nation by crony capitalist, progressive socialists and other "elite" upper class Americans who think they should rule us all by divine right, genetics or how many billions they have in the bank. 

I'm sick of those people, pushing us around. Aren't you?

Just sayin',

Tom King © 2016