Was it hearing about Dennis Kucinich’s encounter with spacemen? Or was it seeing the ex-Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown, doing TV commentary? Something sent me on an out-of-body experience the other night, a sci-fi trip into the future — and it was scary.
I was driving home after my radio show, haunted by Mike Littwin’s prediction about John McCain’s detractors: “The Limbaugh Republicans will eventually vote for him, but the Dobson Republicans, who knows? They may not.” Suddenly my car was a tiny dot far below, and then it was caucus night 2012.
Nine of us lonely Republicans huddled in a school library that had held hundreds for previous caucuses. Out in the corridor were five caucus-goers of the feisty little Tory Party that had formed around Ann Coulter and James Dobson after McCain wrested the 2008 nomination from Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Three hundred Democrats packed the gym.
Caucus business quickly done, we brooded over the dramatic events of President Barack Obama’s first term. Despite campaign gaffes, foot-dragging by the Clintonistas, and his maturity deficit against the GOP’s war-hero nominee, Obama and Vice President Nancy Pelosi won the popular vote and narrowly took the Electoral College over McCain and Condoleezza Rice.
Fittingly, it was Colorado’s nine electoral votes that made the difference. “That’ll show’em,” a Tory leader in Colorado Springs told Fox after McCain’s midnight concession speech.
The president-elect rewarded state Democrats by naming Federico Peña as Treasury secretary and Ken Salazar as Interior secretary. Gov. Bill Ritter elevated Diana DeGette to the resulting Senate vacancy.
Helped by the Republican fracture, Dems had taken 58 Senate seats; after Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins switched parties, Harry Reid could now break any filibuster. DeGette’s embryonic stem-cell bill sailed through and was signed in Obama’s first hundred days. He inked the repeal of Bush’s partial-birth abortion ban the same day.
Tory radio hosts, already demoralized, grew more so after Sept. 11, 2009, when al-Qaeda took down a dozen airliners over the U.S., Britain and Canada in a single hour. Aboard one of them, tragically, was Chief Justice John Roberts. Obama appointed arch-liberal Laurence Tribe to replace him, and picked Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison to chair a commission on why they hate us.
McCain, now as lonely a voice in the Senate as Churchill had been in Parliament before 1939, pointed out that the Patriot Act and FISA surveillance could probably have averted the Second 9/11. But few listened, especially after the Super Fairness Doctrine was signed, muzzling conservative voices on cable and the Internet as well as talk radio.
Did I mention it was depressing, that GOP caucus I magically attended in 2012? It was the pits. Speaker Charles Rangel had passed a black reparations bill in 2009. The Tribe court had ordered gay marriage in 2010. Israel had fallen in 2011. Why didn’t thinking Republicans work harder to prevent the 2008 schism, we sat there asking each other.
The upside, we told ourselves, was Obama’s vulnerability for re-election against Condi or Newt or Jeb. Even Huck and Rudy were talking of a comeback. Chances seemed good, considering the recession triggered by Rangel’s huge tax increase, along with global tension over an al-Qaeda-dominated Iraq, an Iran with nukes, and a China that had seized Taiwan while the U.S. stood by.
Predictably, Obama-Care was way over budget and already unpopular. Thankfully, his Supreme Court nomination of Bill Clinton, a payoff to Hillary Clinton for the DNC deal on superdelegates, had failed. Republican hopes were reviving. But what a price to pay for getting America’s conservative party unified and competitive again.
Then, snap! I was back at the wheel, and it was still 2008. Heaven protects day-dreaming pundits. Headlights showed my garage door going up. My party might still avert self-destruction.
John Andrews (andrewsjk@aol.com) is a fellow with the Claremont Institute and a past president of the Colorado Senate. He hosts “Backbone Radio” on Sundays at 5 p.m. on 710-KNUS. His column appears twice a month.
