Political Manifesto: Part I

"It Has Seven Elements."

To steer a ship to its destination, fly a plane, or just hike through the woods, you need a compass and a map. The outdoor use of these tools goes by the recreational name "Orienteering." Without them, in trackless forest, you will inevitably go round in circles, depending on your dominant foot. A left-dominant foot will gradually pull you to the right. A right-dominant foot will take you left. Without a compass, you will hardly notice how far you veer off course, like a sub-conscious force contributing to your desruction.

Without a map, you cannot mark your coordinates, take note of physical features that might cause you problems, like rivers and gorges, in time to sidestep them. If you plan on returning, you can mark your map accordingly, partly to avoid them, but also to act as a geographical coordinate, to remind yourself where you are. 

My reader should not have to extrapolate far on this information to see how it applies to governing a nation. You need a GPS-system of sorts to navigate the administrative environment of a government, that indicates the location of potential obstacles and possible allies, lets you see the physical lay-out of a legislative assembly, or places for an off-the-record chat.. 

The metaphorical compass here will help you navigate the hyperdriven human environment of congenitally conflicting egos, using constitutional coordinates. Like Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charibdis, a leader has to steer between the two in-house human elements, between those who want to govern according to party-tradition, and thodr who puts expediency ahead of tradition. We want to get our guys elected, right?

 Sometimes the factions of one party misunderstand the intentions of the other, with the result that no one provides the direction. Both sides get lost in the minutiae of the job until someone asks, "Who is the captain of this ship?"

During the Reagan Administration, to use an example, officials serving in the Presidential administration—members of the same political party—dealing with a physically weakened, elderly President—were not sure who gave them their marching-orders, talking-points, or made prioritizing-type policy-decisions on the spur of the moment? The President only admonished them, "Try to make it work."

Robert Timberg describes such a situation during the Reagan administration in The Nightingale's Song, published in 1995. Timberg served with the Marines in Vietnam, and it gave him access to other Marine vets who had important posts, like Robert McFarlane, Oliver North, and Jim Webb.

Reagan promoted McFarlane to the National Security Agency, and he began to attend senior-staff meetings. He had his suspicions about the functionality of the NSA and the coherence of policies, then in place; but a meeting in February, 1982, brought the disunity home to him. The nation's foreign-policy was in disarray, said someone during an NSA meeting:

He's not sure who said it, possibly press spokesman Larry Speakes. . . . In the course of the meeting,
he told the President that critics were saying he did not have a coherent foreign policy.
"Well, you don't," creacked an aide.
Unbidden, privately steaming, McFarlane broke the brittle, embarrassed silence: "Yes, you do!"
Heads snapped. The unfamiliar baritone seemed to be coming from a spot behind Vice President Bush
and National Secrity Adviser Clark, who were seated accros the long table from the President.
"It has seven elements," intoned McFarlane. He proceeded to enumerate an elaborate if predictable
laundry-list involving deterrence, alliances, the Soviets, arms control, and so on.
The recitation complete, someone said, "I think we just got ourselves a foreign policy."

This event takes place, suggests author Timberg, in an environment of increasing loss of focus and direction. I suggest that every direction-based organization, especially a political one, will have to compare two compasses, the philosophical or tradition-bound compass of the political party and the political-expediency or public-relations compass, as a matter of course. You have to get out your orienteering gear and take stock of your coordinates and direction.

At least, a political organization needs a man who will defy everyone else and say "Yes, you do," or even "No, you don't." If someone else asks you, "What are our coordinates, or what is our political plan-of-attack?" You should come prepared to answer, "It has seven elements."

Political organizations have to give way to expediency up to a point. President Hoover did not have a man who would tell him, "No, you don't," in order to tell him that his response to the 1929 Stock Market Crash was inadequate. The Crash had severely reduced the money supply. People needed cash in their pockets, since the banks had failed.

Scared of tampering with nearly sacred terms of a limited-government, Hoover did not respond quickly, and let the Crash degenerate into a crippling economic depression. It nearly bankrupted my grandfather and defined my father's early life. They remembered how consumer goods lost value. They did not produce enough income to offset the cost of producing and selling them. Besides that, the citizenry did not have the money to purchase them, so businesses closed wholesale. Farmers lost their lands to creditors, and the soup-lines at public-relief centers grew longer and longer.

Those extraordinary situations aside, Republicans should remember McFarlane's experience in the National Security Agency meeting. They should remember that they already have the ingredients for creating a country and making it prosper, and should never forget their navigational heading. For Republicans, it will have seven elements:

1. Respect for law enforcement;
2. Military power to protect us from enemies without and within;
3. Secure borders;
4. Reliance on freedom in the marketplace;
5. Capitalism to delvelop commercial concepts and upgrade them;
6. A preference for private ownership—schools, clubs, organizations, and businesses — over governmental institutions;
7. Many independent centers of power to promulgate different solutions and ideas, and to preserve space for genuine dissent.

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