“Here’s an idea for beleaguered California Republicans looking for someone to run against Gov. Jerry Brown
in 2014: Why not Victor Davis Hanson,” asks Mickey Kaus*:
He’s an articulate advocate of the conservative point of view on the central political issues of the state– a farmer, scholar, charismatic speaker who combines broad knowledge with ground-level machismo. He’d have an appeal in the disaffected, depressed central valley, where he lives, and the yuppie coast. While he’s skeptical of the current rush to amnesty, he talks about illegal immigrants living in his area with compassion. He’s not a career pol like the other mentionees. He’s a real human being. He’s not a multimillionaire ex-CEO either (we’ve had enough of them). The media would have an excuse to cover him–the fish out of water angle–as long as he kept them amused. The debates with Jerry Brown would be highly informative. It’s possible Brown would freak out in a fit of intellectual insecurity.
Works for me. VDH’s campaign team are more than welcome to use the retro Ike-era button I created in 2011 as a starting point for their own graphic design efforts, when our own Roger Simon also suggested that VDH take a run at the governorship. Though when I searched on that post, I came across my thoughts on the idea when it was posited by Roger:
After California chose Brown over Meg Whitman — by far the worst of the two choices available, if only given his track record in the past, I doubt very much that someone as sophisticated and erudite as VDH could actually win an election here. It brings to mind Adlai Stevenson’s legendary, though possibly apocryphal exchange with a fellow liberal during his presidential run in 1956:
A woman called out to Adlai E. Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”
Stevenson called back, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
I would never say such a disparaging thing about Americans as a whole; but at least at the moment, it seems sadly applicable to the once Golden State and the prospects of an increasingly dystopian future, as one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers described last month, using their rather colorful and more than a little PG-13 in-house language.
Sadly, little has changed in California since, other than even more icebergs have since floated into range. Rather than VDH attempting to wake Californians from their torpor, perhaps Aaron Clarey could produce a special California-Customized edition of his Enjoy the Decline book for those of us here in Weimar on the Pacific.
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