On the heels of its official release yesterday at Red Maryland, I present this guide for the Maryland Repubican Party. We haven’t seen any of the Chair candidates sign this yet – why not?
You can also check out existing signatories (including me) here.
While I certainly agree with the intent of the Compact, it’s sort of a shame we couldn’t add a little more context to it by making a larger-scale event at the unveiling (as with, say, the Mount Vernon Statement earlier this year.) Then again, by and large we’re just a renegade band of concerned citizens who happen to be conservative Republicans, far away from the bright lights inside the Beltway.
An original idea was to unveil it at Whittaker Chambers’ Carroll County farm but that soon proved impractical. (History buffs may recall that Chambers evolved during his life from communist to conservative, briefly working at National Review during its infancy and credited by Ronald Reagan as an influence in his political seachange from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican.) Instead, the document got a soft launch through its own website.
However, that transformation Chambers (and Reagan) underwent during their early lives is similar to the one Maryland needs to make in order to succeed and prosper, so the comparison is reasonably apt.
So I’d like to see more people climb on board with these principles and a plan of action. After next week the hard work will begin.
FWIW, I was among those asked to sign the Chambers Compact and declined to do so. I explained my reasons over at Questing for Atlantis, http://questingforatlantis.com/2010/12/04/why-i-did-not-sign-the-chambers-compact/
Interesting document. We’ll see if they can pull any part of it off…
I actually ended up writing about this for the MD Policy blog today as well:
http://www.mdpolicy.org/policyblog/detail/the-chambers-compact
In a nutshell, I don’t really think it goes far enough to spell out what to do and how to do it…