I witnessed a remarkable political event last night.  The Orange County Republican Central Committee (OCGOP) denied its endorsement of a Republican incumbent, Rep. John Campbell.  To win the local GOP endorsement Campbell needed a 2/3 majority of the elected central committee members.  His effort fell short by just one vote.  

The evening began with roll call, recognition for elected officials and extraordinary volunteers.  Out of all the endorsements given out this evening, Campbell was the only incumbent facing a challenger – Republican candidate John Webb. 

As you may know, John Webb is new to politics.  He served in the United States Marine Corps and has been a California highway patrolman, and a police officer. In the private sector, John was a corporate executive with State Farm Insurance Company and currently owns and operates a successful insurance brokerage.  Locally, John has become a favorite among Tea Party activists.  I was honored, for example, when he asked me to be the keynote speaker at his upcoming fundraising event this Thursday evening. 

Rep. Campbell spoke first.  He stressed his role in warning about California’s budget crisis and the significant role he played nationally in fighting against earmarks.  Campbell looked nervous and a little hyper-active with his edgy, scruffy beard.  Next, John Webb spoke.  Webb came across as calm, friendly, self-deprecating in his humility and honesty.  It quickly became obvious, however, that the most vocal members of the crowd were rooting for Webb to stop Campbell’s effort to win the endorsement of the local Republican party. 

Webb, in particular, contrasted his views with Campbells saying that he would have voted against TARP and against allowing gays to serve openly in the military.  Graciously, Webb said that he did not want to attack Campbell.  He merely said that he offered a different “skill set” that was more appropriate to the new conditions faced by the Republican party and warned that voters would lose faith in the Republicans if we did not offer candidates who held tightly to strong conservative ideology. 

In the end, the OCGOP appeared divided over endorsing Campbell.  A number of speakers, for example, expressed unhappiness that Rep. Cambell had not spent more time in the district and had only conducted one townhall event.  Campbell sort of made things worse by suggesting that since he had more time to focus on issues as a member of Congress that he was the recipient of better and higher quality information than those in the audience who doubted the wisdom of his decisions. 

In the end, OCGOP Chairman Scott Baugh asked the elected central committee members stand to record their votes and Campbell fell short of securing the endorsement.  Campbell got 41 votes for his endorsement, but needed 42 of the 63 total votes cast.  I have no doubt this will be big news around the nation tomorrow and that it will send a signal that plenty of people back home in Orange County are unhappy with Rep. Campbell’s performance in office.

It looks like the pundits on ABC and elsewhere are stirred up about Romney’s idea of making a $10,000 bet, but missing the significance of Gingrich’s survival over the infidelity problem. As you may remember, the challenge of a $10,000 bet was Mitt Romney’s best idea for shutting down Gov. Perry’s attack on his commitment to an individual mandate.

The number did not shock me at all. I saw Bob Beckel make a $10,000 bet on the outcome of the 2012 presidential election with Eric Bolling on The Five just a few days ago. I think it is silly for the ABC pundits to think this is an issue. After all, a tinier bet would have been ridiculous and a much larger bet would have been clearly inappropriate.

To put this issue in context, I should add that Forbes reported that Diane Sawyer made $12 million in 2005. We do not hear the pundits at ABC bringing up that little bit of irony, do we?

I don’t think Bachmann did much to restore her front runner status in Iowa. I think she should have left Herman Cain in his political grave. Sad. Sad. Sad.

As a bit of nostalgia, I remember listening to Gingrich’s GOPAC audio tapes too. I was a young political science professor at Williams College in MA in 1988 who was recruited to run for the state assembly to pin down a guy who might have been a strong Dukakis volunteer in Iowa. I remember listening to those GOPAC tapes. I guess that Rick Santorum brought them up because he is trying to make Newt Gingrich look too old to be president. Rick Santorum was once one of our most precocious citizen politicians rapidly rising from beating a Democrat congressman at age 32 to being a U.S. senator at age 36. Unfortunately, Santorum’s defeat in PA was a big failure. Santorum lost, with 41% of the vote to Casey’s 59% – the largest margin of defeat ever for an incumbent Republican Senator in Pennsylvania.

All in all, I think Gingrich won because he survived that intensive attack on his infidelity. By the end, I was feeling sorry for him even though he made a big mistake. Gingrich is going through a trial by fire and surviving as a stronger candidate according to the recent primary voter polls. Clearly, you do not become president by making yourself into the best candidate. It is much easier to make your opponents the worst candidates.

I expect that the voters will see this as, in part, fitting punishment for the seemingly repentant Gingrich and a necessary ritual for him to endure on his path to the White House and the overthrow of the Marxist socialist Obama regime.

 

What would you do if you knew the top Democrat running for president was lying about his past? 

That is the question I was faced with in 2008. I had met the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College, and I knew that his commitment to socialism was deep, genuine and long-standing.  See, http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html

I had been a leader of the Marxist students at Occidental College myself starting in 1976 when I founded the precursor of the Democrat Socialist Alliance on campus.  The young Obama I knew was a Marxist socialist who would have been quite comfortable with Communist party members like his Hawaii mentor Frank Marshall Davis, retired domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, or active socialist politicians like Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer.

The Obama I knew was nothing like the life-long, pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign. When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. – completely divorced from the profit motive – which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution.  In this context, I saw my report on young Obama as a key piece of evidence suggesting a profound continuity in his belief system. See, http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/obamas_missing_link_1.html

Although I was surprised by Barack Obama’s insistence on his mainstream ideological credentials, I was shocked that my attempts to spread the news about young Obama’s Marxism failed to gain any media traction during the 2008 presidential campaign with reporters, activists, or campaign staffs. 

Once I saw the significance of my face-to-face observations on the young Obama, I went out of my way to get my story on record with the Orange County Register.  I tried to contact, among others, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the folks behind the Swift Boat ads, and the McCain campaign.

I thought I would get a phone call back from Fox News – someone, somewhere – and I still do not understand why no one seemed to catch on to the urgency of the situation.  I understand I did not have audio tape of young Obama. I did not have any photos or home movies.  Nevertheless, I was extremely active in the leftist politics and counter cultural milieu of Occidental College in the 1970s. 

As a younger man, I had earned a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell which, I would think, gave me some credibility in measuring young Obama’s ideological convictions. I quickly saw other people who had known the young Obama were featured in various news articles.  It seemed to me I should have been just another interview for any journalist, producer or campaign consultant interested in checking out my story and testing it against the facts.

In frustration, I was also posting what I knew on The Caucus Blog site at the New York Times.  My expectation was someone from the Times would call me and follow-up on the leads I was sending out.  Here is a sample of what I was doing in October 2008 to get the word out about Obama’s Marxist ideology.  See, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/debate-expectations-talking-up-the-town-hall/?scp=20&sq=Marxist%20occidental%20obama&st=cse

I even thought of scheduling my own press conference on the campus of Occidental College through their campus Republican club. Internally, I was conflicted by the urgency of what I knew and the sense it was best for the story to break out in a manner supportive of the McCain campaign. 

What shocked me about my experience in the summer of 2008 is that I thought my background as a Williams College political science professor, as a small business owner, and as a visible presence in the Orange County community would allow my message to immediately go to the very top of the McCain campaign.  I thought my story would be welcomed by Fox News. 

Since then, things have slowly gotten better.  My story on the young Marxist Obama has appeared in Michael Savage’s Trickle-Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.

Nevertheless, I think there is something broken in our media and campaign system. I do not think most independents or conservatives understand, or fully appreciate, the tremendous advantages the left derives from having the mainstream media serve as the fully paid, completely sympathetic, Dan Rather-level opposition research team of the Democrat party. It is a system that methodically ignores damaging information about flawed candidates like Sen. John Edwards and Rep. Anthony Weiner while routinely elevating minor errors among Republicans to the status of Watergate investigations. 

If Republicans are going to win in 2012, I think they need to make some changes so that they are friendlier to the whistle-blowers bringing them bad news about the Obama administration. Personally, I would like to see Republicans create new ways to collect negative news stories on liberals by 1) including web pages requesting opposition research from leakers, 2) establishing guidelines for leakers that help them give campaign decision makers the confidence to pursue appropriate leads, and 3) instituting feedback mechanisms so leakers have some minimal assurance that they have been heard by top campaign managers and that their information has been discarded for technical or strategic reasons and not simply because it was overlooked by a careless staff member.

I think recognition of this problem should be the first step in taking systematic action to prevent flawed Democrat candidates from winning office. In the meantime, I predict we will see more examples of media failure as the left dominates the muckraking journalism profession while the right seems too dependent on a small handful of seemingly obscure, over-worked journalists and – as my case illustrates – unconnected and often baffled citizen activists.

I met Obama in December of 1980, a couple of days after Christmas, in Portola Valley -- a small town near Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.

As an eye witness to young Obama’s Marxist ideology, I was excited to see Cashill busting up the myths surrounding Obama and replacing them with a simpler, easier to believe story that is a much better fit with accessible, on-line evidence.

I’m working to put my observations on the young Barack Obama in book form with the help of Tea Party Leader, Michael Patrick Leahy.  Here’s a short article that gives Leahy’s comments on the fellow stalking the poor Gov. Palin family.  http://bit.ly/b2rbS3

It was clear to me that President Clinton has a real nature which leaks out once in a while, a real nature which is immoral, ruthless, and prone to lie.

For example, a recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll of 900 registered voters on April 6-7, 2010 shows 61% support in response to the question worded: "Do you support or oppose the United States taking military action to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons?"

Nevertheless, as much as I understand that Obama was too important to attend faculty meetings, I also think his claim that he was a law school professor is likely to offend those of us who truly compete for that honor through research, publication, and lonely scholarship.

Beck got things started on his radio show when he said, "I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words…If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish."