No stopping the education

I noted yesterday that Dan Bongino was being mentioned as a possible 2014 candidate, but what I didn’t know at the time was that he was going to pen a piece at RedState showing off his economic chops. Yeah, Ben Cardin could write that – perhaps in his dreams and with about seventeen staffers helping him out, maybe.

Of course, what Dan writes makes good economic sense, which is probably why he lost the election in a state which doesn’t seem to reward cogent thought, instead favoring raw emotion. (Why else would Maryland voters believe that in-state tuition for illegal aliens and gay marriage are good things? They were equated with “rights” being extended to those who would otherwise be “victims” in our society.) Oddly enough, Dan occasionally mentioned his “Cheerios for dinner” upbringing but the fact that he brought himself up by his bootstraps and worked hard to attain his station in life didn’t have the same emotional appeal.

Yet Dan gives away the game early on:

It is disturbing to watch a growing number of politicians, who fully understand the consequences of detrimental tax policy, begin to cower to those who perpetually yearn for more of your money.

Isn’t that the Democratic ideal? The more who “perpetually yearn for more of your money” the easier it is for them to win elections. One could easily make the assumption that Mitt Romney truly knew what he was talking about when he said 47% would probably not vote for him. He was just off by a little over 3 percent and lost to the candidate considered the “food stamp President” because more Americans than ever are using them.

Obviously Maryland isn’t quite the basket case some other states are because they happen to be closest to the seat of the federal government – although inner-city Baltimore has plenty of desperately poor people who are certainly also reliable Democratic votes. But with that dependence of another sort on government revenue, it’s not easy to use conservative logic in the state. Here we have to whack them upside the head with a proverbial 2×4 in order to get the message across, and still too many are, as Dan puts it, “immune to logic.”

This point has been brought up a lot, but we can be the best teachers and local leaders. They may not have heard of RedState or even Dan Bongino – I saw his campaign volunteer on Election Day have to patiently explain who he was to a number of people, even after Dan had campaigned for 18 months. But they (hopefully) know us, and we have about two years to state the conservative case ourselves. Dan did a nice job of helping us with one part of the education.