I’m With Mike!

Bob Strodtbeck 

“So the choice for 2004 is clear,” wrote I on October 6, 2003, “Write in Joe Sobran for president and show greater trust for the U.S. Constitution than you do for a scripted, polished, and coifed front man for a political organization that is trashing the rule of law for the sake of a partisan hold on power.”

This endorsement for Sobran, made nearly a year ago, was a repudiation of a political system that is driven by money and a laser tight focus by Republicans and Democrats to keep all of the nation’s electoral offices under their control. Sobran offered to break the duopolistic chain of political malfeasance with a promise of, “no wars, no spending programs, no taxes. My legislative program is equally simple: the repeal of most Federal laws on the books. As for foreign policy, I have another simple approach: stop intervening around the world and making enemies we don’t need. This will also eliminate the need for ruinous defense spending. In short, the Federal Government will return to the U.S. Constitution.”

While Sobran’s candidacy received this single endorsement (as well as the offer of this columnist to manage his campaign about which Sobran pledged, “I’m not spending money, much less seeking unconstitutional matching funds from the Federal Government; you won’t be getting mailings or seeing TV ads for me. I’m simply relying on word-of-mouth...to spread my message. Those who agree with it can write my name in.”), President Bush was preparing to campaign against one of a gaggle of unspectacular Democrats which, at the time, was led by Howard Dean.

Since then the race has been narrowed to the president, who claims to have made no mistakes as president or told a lie about his military service in Vietnam (or a lie about anything else because he has always believed everything he has said), and Senator John Kerry, who makes up for his inability to take a coherent position on anything with mind-numbing incompetence. As of this writing more than $1 billion has been spent on the race between these two consequently making them the best presidential candidates money can buy. This fact also verifies claims that the dollar is losing its value.

Although the passing of time and the sins of omission, commission, and utter inanity of the Bush’s and Kerry’s campaign organizations were giving this columnist’s endorsement of Sobran the appearance of prescient genius, an embarrassing event occurred; Sobran endorsed the presidential candidacy of the Constitution Party’s Michael Peroutka.

In his endorsement of Peroutka, Sobran wrote, “But no real rule of law can emerge from subjectivist interpretation, by either legislators or judges. So in a sense, Peroutka isn’t just running for office; he’s fighting for an honest political language that has become almost extinct among us. The Constitution presupposes that words do have objective meaning, and that a shared and reliable political language is one of the deepest preconditions of a free society. If you doubt that fuzzy language can lead to tyranny, look around you.”

This is the sort of insightful prose that guided my endorsement of Sobran in the first place. During this past quadrennial as conservatives embraced the growth of government beyond the wildest dreams of liberals, wars on terror that included empowering government to investigate every aspect of our lives, and preemptive strikes on dilapidated third-world countries as long as trusted propaganda sources could rally public support, the offer to restore constitutional limits on government by anyone is considered here to be a worthy cause.

Peroutka, however, brings advantages to the campaign that Sobran could not. The most notable of which is that Peroutka is actually campaigning. His campaign schedule can be found on his web page, www.peroutka2004.org. There also can the platform of the Constitution Party be found as well as Peroutka’s philosophies of governing and written commentaries on the current state of American politics – yes he both writes and reads newspapers which are practices some current presidents find unnecessary.

Over the past 12 years the presidency has been transformed into a hub of perpetual campaigning for reelection. Central to that campaign has been the absorption of power to forward the cause of incumbency. It has not mattered one whit to either Republicans or Democrats if the tactics of the post Cold War presidency have respected the limits of the Constitution, consequently the evaluation of Presidents Clinton and Bush have become subject to the partisan loyalties of the evaluator – which means the Constitutional standards by which presidents should be judged have been nullified by partisan pretense.

With Michael Peroutka there is no wasted vote, but only investments in the hope that our contract with government officials will once again become valid.

September 1, 2004

Since 1993 Bob Strodtbeck has been writing commentaries for The Apopka Chief, a news weekly circulated in a community ten miles north of Orlando. His analyses investigate a wide range of topics from what he calls a “Christian pragmatic” view – that is to say, he considers that human interactions are largely driven by the human instinct toward self-service, which is traditionally known as sin. This perspective has given Bob great liberty to criticize governmental officials from both parties upon the standards of constitutional laws they swear to uphold and review cultural and economic phenomena from moral standards defined in the Bible. Bob currently lives in Orlando with his bride Pam and children Charlotte and Richard. He may be reached for comment here.

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