photo credit: (Yuri Yuriev/AFP/Getty Images)

The new year, 2015, will be here in a couple of days.  The ball will drop in Times Square, and almost simultaneously hats will drop into the 2016 presidential election ring as campaigning starts in earnest.  The GOP is on a roll, having won both houses, and fully expects to win the White House by default as President Obama’s approval rating tracks right along with the wind chill in Fairbanks.

I admit I have never understood how the Republican party filters down to its final presidential candidate.  Obviously, whoever would make the best president should be the party’s candidate of choice.  But there doesn’t seem to be any established criteria for what makes a good conservative president.  I’m pretty sure the Republican leadership would say their candidate should be whoever is the most “electable”.

Here’s my simple conservative list of required qualifications for the “leader of the pack”:

Honesty.  What distinguishes conservatives from liberals?  Essentially, it is respect for the truth.  The word “right” means correct.  It also means just.  Maybe it’s no coincidence that it also means conservative.  We Rock on the Right Side because we know that there is right and wrong, and the truth is always right.  Many liberal Democrats openly lie.  They aren’t even embarrassed about it (when will Al Sharpton publicly apologize for the Tawana Brawley lie?).  The liberal playbooks (Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven) say “the end justifies the means”, and if you have to lie to the people to get what you want (political power, personal profit, etc.), so be it.  Communist countries embrace dishonesty – lying has been raised to an art form in North Korea – and our current administration seems to operate in “Kim Jong Un” mode.  “You can keep your insurance,” “the Benghazi attack was because of a video,” “all of our hard drives crashed simultaneously”. 

In the age of YouTube, our opponents can be beat to death with their own lies.The best way to differentiate ourselves from our liberal political opponents is to be honest.  That means our conservative presidential candidate had better have a squeaky clean personal and professional history, and be a straight shooter.  A person who will lie to his or her spouse will certainly have no problem lying to anyone else.  We want a leader we can trust.

Economic Savvy.  Our current president has never held a private sector job – never flipped a burger, fixed a tire, or washed a window.  He has never produced wealth for himself or an employer.  While he has been extensively involved in the redistribution of other people’s money, he has never built anything on his own.  Even his short legal career in racial discrimination cases was funded by the government.  To compound the problem, once in office, Obama surrounded himself with academic elites – almost nobody in this administration has ever held a private sector job.  The results were predictable – while the stock market, well-connected corporate cronies, and bureaucrats enjoy record gains, family incomes lag far below pre-Obama levels and the few new jobs that were created went to immigrants.

The US president is the head of the largest economy in the world – it is unthinkable that anyone in that position should not have extensive experience, knowledge, and proven skill in free market economics.  Nothing is more important to every US citizen than economic security and opportunity for our families.  We want a financial guru at the helm.

Leadership.   Our president is referred to as the “leader of the free world.”  This person must have extraordinary qualities that inspire us to follow – qualities like the ability to make difficult decisions firmly and fairly,  the vision and discernment to see alternative solutions that may escape others, and the humanity to care about those in his charge.  A leader is brave.  A leader takes responsibility and doesn’t make excuses.  A leader is optimistic and forward-thinking.  A leader is dedicated and hard-working.  We want a president who knows what leadership is.

We have all known people who have these qualities.  They are out there.  Somewhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific is the person who could get this big ship turned around and headed the “right” way again.  It won’t be easy, with the state of big-money corruption in DC and the embarrassing ineptness of our current party leadership.  But it can be done.

I’ll give you another couple of days off.  And then let’s get to work.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

My folks were always putting him down
They said, he came from the wrong side of town
They told me, he was bad, but I knew he was sad
That’s why I fell for the leader of the pack

Leader Of the Pack – the Shangri-Las