Redstate

The case for picking the candidate that makes strategic sense in both the long and short term.

By Martin A. Knight Posted in 2008 | Allen West | Archived | FL-22 | GOP | Mark Flagg | Primary | Ron Klein — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The 22nd Congressional District of the state of Florida is currently represented by a freshman Democrat, Ron Klein, the former Minority Leader of the Florida Senate, who defeated Republican Clay Shaw in 2006, a very senior 26 year veteran of the House.

This is still a marginal district, a purple seat with neither red nor blue having a distinct advantage, even with the benefit of incumbency that Ron Klein currently holds.

And it is one of those seats we need to start winning before we can have a hope of regaining a majority any time within the near future. 2006 saw the GOP lose probably around 90% of every toss-up race in the country, and to make matters more ... difficult, we just lost our former Speaker's nominally Republican seat thanks to our side's nomination of someone who, by all accounts, was a terrible candidate.

Like Dan would say, it's people ultimately that run for public office, not disembodied ideas, ideologies or Parties.

Read on below ...

In the case of FL-22, we've got ourselves two (from all indications) good candidates to take out the Honorable Ron Klein (D) in 2008.

Both are veterans of the US Armed Forces, one a former Naval aviator now serving as a pilot with UPS Airlines. Mark Flagg's parents were killed on 9/11 - they were passengers on American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon that Tuesday. His campaign website is here, but for some reason it shows up blank on my browser - which is why I will not provide as extensive a profile of him as I would for the other guy.

Either way, here is a picture of him and his wife at a Florida event organized by Howard Kaloogian's Move America Forward in support of the mission in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2005, with Debra Burlingame (sister of Charles Burlingame - the pilot of Flight 77) in the middle.

The second guy is retired LTC Allen B. West, a decorated veteran of the Gulf War, famously almost railroaded out of the Army for firing a gun near a detainee's head in order to extract information on a planned series(?) of ambush attacks - including ambush attacks planned specifically to kill him because of his work and close relationships with the local authorities and tribal leaders as a civil-military affairs officer. The said detainee, an Iraqi police officer, had been fingered by local intelligence as a participant in the attack plans.

According to the New York Times' not-surprisingly sympathetic interview with the "innocent" victim; out of fright he offered "meaningless information induced by fear and pain." However, according to Jed Babbin, a more reliable source than the Democratic Party's flagship news outlet; "... the prisoner gave very specific information about the plot. He named the conspirators, gave times and dates of the assassination plan, and even described how attacks would be made." Amazing how, by all accounts, strangely accurate and detailed, a mind "induced by fear and pain" to invent something out of wholecloth can be, eh? By the way, to show just how much more trustworthy than New York Times Jed Babbin is, his final recommendation was that the Army should still "reprimand and retire" Allen West.

Anyway, LTC West was charged with violating the UCMJ's regulations against assault and conduct unbecoming, facing serving 11 years of incarceration, a dishonorable discharge and losing his retirement benefits. But then his case became public and ...

... he received over two thousand letters and e-mails from the American public offering him moral support and a letter was drafted to the secretary of the Army, its signatories ninety-five members of Congress, in West's support. A prominent critic of the Abu Ghraib affair, Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, wrote a letter to his constituents in support of West's honorable intentions during the controversial incident ... [As a result,] West was processed through an Article 32 hearing in November 2003, but was never Court-martialed. Instead in a deal with the prosecution, he admitted wrongdoing, was fined $5,000 over two months for misconduct and assault.

The good thing is that Allen West has been very open and pro-active about his case in his campaign, which is certainly brave considering that the average journalist is going to strive mightily to transform the denotation of his partisan affiliation to something like, T-FL i.e. "Torturer (Republican) - Florida". This would be notwithstanding the fact that he very likely saved the lives of many of the men under his command by risking his 22 year Army career and reporting the incident, unbidden, immediately after to his commanding officer and also taking full responsibility for it.

Since his retirement, Allen West has been a high-school teacher in Florida's Palm Beach and Broward counties, and until November 2007, served in Afghanistan as a civilian adviser to the Afghan Army under (former US Army Chief of Staff) GEN Carl Vuono's Military Professional Resources.

As you all might have guessed, I recommend to the good GOP'ers of FL-22 to vote for Allen West to be their nominee against Ron Klein come November 2008. This is not to denigrate Mark Flagg's service in the Navy, his life story or his sterling support of the mission in both Iraq and Afghanistan and/or his hard work as a candidate so far, in any way whatsoever. To me, it is a matter of simple pragmatism.

Apart from being every bit as qualified as Flagg, Allen West has the added benefit of being a veteran of the current Iraq War. 2006 saw the Democrats outshine us in getting veterans (including Iraq War veterans) to run for office i.e. say whatever you will; but the Fighting Dems was an excellent attempt/concept to neutralize the traditional Democratic weakness on military issues and to bolster the subtle Republican Chickenhawk™ meme the Democrats have been pushing since 2003. For a party that routinely receives 70% of the military vote, that was a little embarrassing.

Another advantage, and let's be honest here, is that LTC West is an African American. The fact of the matter may be that using race as a "thumb on the scale" is traditionally seen by the Right as the beginning of the slippery slope toward using race as the factor, but I believe the time has come for Conservatives to comes to grips with the lack of elected minorities in the Party and what it continues to do to our image.

Democrats (and their media surrogates) have used the lack of elected minorities in the GOP to great effect in pushing the conventional wisdom that the GOP has a closed door policy to non-whites as the reason why we regularly lose minority votes to the Democrats.

This has done a great deal of damage to our image, especially with swing voters, who are famously not prone to voting based on issues but on image and conventional wisdom. This hurts us and hurts us bad. To illustrate just how serious this is, let me say that I've encountered numerous foreigners from/in Europe, Africa and Asia who are shocked when it comes out that I'm a Republican, because what they have been led to believe from American and foreign news outlets and the American movies and TV shows they watch is that the GOP is the "party of White America."

Worse, I've encountered even more non-affiliated politically apathetic Americans i.e. the typical perennial "swing voter" and "undecided", (who have the right, and sometimes do indeed vote) who say the same thing. These are the people who feel the need to hide the fact that they voted GOP for some reason or other in mixed-race company - for fear that they would be inadvertently outing themselves as racists or "racially insensitive" even when there is not a single prejudiced bone in their body.

We need to work harder to get minority Republicans elected, and let's be honest, opportunities like this are rare and hard to come by. I still cannot comprehend (2002-2005 IL-GOP Chair) Judy Baar Topinka's idiotic decision to import Alan Keyes all the way from Maryland to replace Jack Ryan (who never should have dropped out - I still don't understand dropping out of a race because of a sex "scandal" when it involves you and your wife ...) - on the ballot. A major opportunity was lost because we had an impressive and accomplished potential candidate in Chirinjeev Kathuria - a Chicagoan since he was eight months old, who had actually competed in the Illinois US Senate primary that year.

One can only imagine the huge amount of editing the MSM would have had to engage in to make sure the guy in the turban on the Senate floor doesn't appear in any broadcast - people might decide to investigate further and find out that the guy is (gasp!) a Republican ...!

Make no mistake, the addition of Allen West to Florida's GOP delegation to the US House of Representatives would be just about as torturous an experience as Jindal's victory in "racist" (when the state votes GOP, of course) Louisiana was for the Left, and he would be faced with a regular barrage of "Oreo", "Traitor" and "Uncle Tom" catcalls from the likes of Obama's pastor and their acolytes ... which is even more reason why we should pick him over a not-unworthy Mark Flagg.

If we succeed in getting him into Congress, even if not in 2008 but 2010, we can vault West into the Senate against Bill Nelson (or whoever) in 2012 and Mark Flagg can get his chance to represent FL-22 then.

We really need to get rid of this image as the "White Party." It's a major drag on our future as a viable party. We happen to have a great candidate in West, who makes both great short and long-term strategic sense. And we need more, a heck of a lot more.

So I once again suggest we (especially those of us in FL-22) start with a highly decorated and highly regarded officer who decided that the lives of his men were more important than his career, and even more importantly, his reputation.

Author's Note: This is a bit longer a diary than I expected ... Sorry!