Palin is what Republicans need

Whether or not she will ever see this I guess is up to whomever reads this first. I hope it’s someone that agrees with the way I feel. This is an open letter to Governor Sarah Palin.

Mrs. Palin, I have to admit when you were nominated I was excited, not excited enough to vote for the moderate you ran with, but excited to see what your career would bring to our party. I voted with the Constitution party.

I do think you are exactly what this floundering party needs, though. And I think a lot of the folks in our party feel the same way, as was seen with the excitement over your nomination.

The talk has already begun as to who will step into the leadership of our party. You obviously are on this list, and rightfully so. When you were yourself and came across as such, people loved you, when the handlers descended upon you to mold your policies you struggled. The disgusting attacks from the media didn’t help either, but people have come to expect that from them.

I, for the first time since I was of voting age, didn’t support the Republican Party this election cycle. The reason had nothing to do with your nomination, but everything to do with the “new” direction of our party. The interventionist, loose fiscal policy, social irresponsibility, open borders, and free-trade liberal policies that for some reason we’ve seized upon over the last five decades only to cost us election after election. These are not conservative principles, and they never were until the party began to be hijacked with the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower. A great general, but also a man that didn’t really have a political affiliation and with his nomination changed what our party stood for since its inception.

People have criticized you for being inexperienced and an outsider. There is no such thing. Politics isn’t about experience, it’s about having a basis stance to make decisions as issues come up. The problem with the Republican Party is that it has lost its principles. It doesn’t stand for anything, so nobody will stand with it.

Yesterday I heard a poll on Sean Hannity’s show. It overwhelmingly showed that people were disillusioned with the Republican Party because it wasn’t conservative enough and was incompetent. Hannity then went on to give what he thought needed to be done within the party to bring it back to greatness. Which is wonderful, a debate needs to begin on what direction we need to go. The problem with some of his ideas was that they are what the current administration is doing now. He still wants us to protect the countries in NATO, he still wants us to intervene in the world’s problems, and he still wants to allow our manufacturing base be destroyed by third-world countries. These our liberal policies, and as far as I’m concerned they can keep them.

When I heard in one of your interviews you spoke about our NATO guarantees, and including Georgia in NATO, or when I heard you talk about the protection of Israel, I had to ask myself, why would a governor in Alaska care about NATO and Israel? We are running budget deficits and our unable to maintain our own infrastructure. Yet we are still trying to look for monsters to destroy. People do not agree with that. And I believe you do not agree with that.

Now the attacks are coming from the McCain camp against you. Those attacks are leveled at you by the very people we need out of this party. They have subverted our message and destroyed our cause. These people don’t care about America, they care about their own political gains and ambitions. The current leadership in our party is deathly afraid of losing it, but losing it they must.

The next few years are very important to our country and our party. What happens to you will be intricate in both instances. If people like Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Norm Coleman, and any of the people that neo-conned the Bush administration, we are in trouble. If true conservatives like Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Pat Buchanan are your advisers we will see a second America’s century. The neo-cons have had our party for decades now, I say it’s time the conservatives take it back, I hope you agree.

Either way I wish you the best of luck in your future in politics, and thank you for what you’ve done already.

Brady Ernst lives in Dassel, Minn.