By Ralph Benko
Francis Suarez has shown the temerity of throwing a ray of sunlight into the gloom and doom of American presidential politics. Hey!
Works for this happy warrior conservative!
If another demographic can claim the rainbow, maybe I can claim a sunbeam as the motif for a Conservative flag. Here goes….
I, for one, and assuredly another 39,999 other conservatives and sunny populists are ready to donate a dollar (or more) to ensure that Mayor Suarez qualifies to bring a ray of sunshine into the Mordor-like Republican presidential primary.
It’s been a very long time, so… Big Reveal! This is what a ray of political sunshine looks like:
Suarez: “In America, our struggles don’t define us. Our dreams do.” And, as he said of my old boss, President Reagan “didn’t define himself by what he was against but by what he was for.”
Mayor (and former president of the US Conference of Mayors) Francis Suarez for President? Absolutely. Here is why.
I believe that we voters are a LOT smarter than most politicians give us credit for. And we voters want three things above all, personally and nationally: security, equitable prosperity, and dignity. All the rest is mostly sound and fury.
Mayor Suarez, a self-described Reagan Republican, most appropriately launched his campaign as the final speaker of the Reagan Library’s series, A Time for Choosing. The series was named in homage to the Reagan convention speech that launched Reagan to national political stardom and, then, the presidency.
Reagan, introducing GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, therein observed:
“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
Francis Suarez’s parents had been among those who escaped from Castro to the sweet land of liberty, the United States of America. What makes America so special?
Three things.
Mayor Suarez, uniquely, runs the trifecta on all three of the purposes declared in America’s mission statement, the Declaration of Independence. Other aspirants pay tribute to one or two.
Only Suarez bats three for three
What are America’s defining qualities? That we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
At 20 minutes into his big Reagan Library announcement speech, Suarez invokes the fundamental American right to “the pursuit of happiness,” a right buttressed by the personal security he built with a well-funded police force driving crime down to historic lows while crime was getting worse in most other major cities.
Happiness, he noted, also is founded on the kind of equitable prosperity Suarez built. How? By robust tax cutting and by luring cutting edge tech companies to Miami.
Happiness is a theme Suarez, unlike the other, doom and gloom, candidates, glories in. He declares:
“Our Declaration of Independence clearly invokes the mission of every American government, securing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My governing philosophy has been built on advancing happiness for all of my residents by protecting their life and expanding their liberties. This has led to Miami being ranked, you guessed it, as the happiest city in America.”
Pretty much all Republican hopefuls embrace, at least rhetorically, the rights to life and liberty. And there are opulently funded advocacy groups dedicated to the right to life and many devoted to the right to liberty.
Meanwhile, the pursuit of happiness was an orphan. Until Suarez showed up.
Suarez apparently stands as the lone champion on America’s third unalienable right, to the pursuit of happiness. Among a field of candidates mostly defined by puritanism, which H.L. Mencken famously defined as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” Suarez stands out as the singular happiness champion.
In his presidential announcement speech Suarez invokes the Declaration’s commitment to the right to the pursuit of happiness. Repeatedly.
Suarez, thus, persuades me that he is the true heir to Reagan. And hey, I am a red-pilled conservative, called by a Washington Post (humor) columnist the second most conservative man in the world (for my gold standard advocacy).
How right wing am I? A member of the Conservative Action Project, considered the assembly of the top 100 conservative movement leaders in America. One of the dozen or so early supply-siders at the core of stabilizing the dollar and cutting marginal tax rates, propelling American equitable prosperity from real per capita GDP of $30,000 to $60,000 (by some measures much greater) and pushing the Dow from 814 to 34,000+.
I’m a former Reagan White House deputy general counsel. A veteran Cold Warrior. I was a prominent Tea Party leader, co-emcee of the 2009 Boston Tea Party rally.
I am the co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and co-founder and chairman of the 200,000 follower Capitalist League. Just last Saturday I triggered a minor melee in Phoenix visiting an assembly of Ultra MAGAs by calling them out as CINOs (Conservatives In Name Only) for failing to embrace our willing conservative recruits from the hard core anticommunist Latin America refugees now seeking freedom in the US. Just as did Suarez’s ancestors, embraced by Reagan!
Meanwhile, Suarez’s real life achievements for Miami’s security, prosperity and dignity — with the advancement of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — enhanced his ability to produce other social goods, such as reducing homelessness.
As we know all too well, homelessness is a social malady exploding in blue-hued cities across America. Meanwhile, bright red Miami, after eliminating homelessness among veterans, reduced its overall homelessness by almost 90%. Under Suarez!
Moreover, Suarez is committed to restoring mental health services, the real cure for homelessness. And he is committed to make Miami the most city most resilient to challenges posed by climate change.
Miami-style prosperity and the free-market policies that brought it about are consistent with social consciousness. Indeed, such prosperity, rooted in personal security and expanded liberties, is key to addressing social and climate morbidities.
There are a dozen Republican presidential aspirants who are more interested in criticizing and attacking society’s obnoxious and pernicious elements (e.g., “progressives”). Suarez alone consistently honors the wise counsel, “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
Management guru and proto-supply-sider Peter Drucker wrote in his 1967 breakthrough classic The Effective Executive (p.98, emphasis original), that “In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problem.”
Feed the opportunities.
Starve the problems.
And as I wrote at Forbes, long ago, “The same insight can bring about explosive growth for a presidential candidate. For a party. For America. Forty-five years later, however, Washington still hasn’t gotten the memo. None of the candidates (nor any member of the Congressional leadership) are showing how they will feed the opportunities and starve the problem.”
None… until Francis Suarez.
Do you view politics as the apogee of post-Marxist philosopher Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle? Or as, to paraphrase Clausewitz, professional wrestling with the addition of other means, as a performance which, as I wrote at Newsmax two years ago,
“affects showy costumes and over-the-top behavior and showcases matches pitting a villain (called a ‘heel‘) against a good guy (called a ‘face‘ or ‘baby face‘) in an epic confrontation of good and evil. The matches are (spoiler alert) scripted, and although fans of professional wrestling are aware of their predetermination, they, nevertheless, enjoy the melodrama and pantomime that unfolds in and outside of the ring between wrestlers. In the 1980s, wrestlers began using the code word kayfabe in reference to the staged performance presented as authentic as well as to the act of maintaining the fiction by staying in character.
…
“A drastic cultural shift has transformed (some say deformed) the world socially and politically. Guy Debord captured this, in 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle.
“Debord’s insight, anticipating Trump, is summed up very well by Noel Yaxley in an article at The Article: “In his theory of the spectacle, Debord sees society slowly being divorced from reality, culturally denuded and subjected to false needs. … The individual is reduced to a consumption pattern, set by a corporate narrative. Citizens enter into a life that is nothing but a mere passive relationship with the social world. Consumer society, with its vast proliferation of goods and culture, offers up to the populace an illusory image (spectacle) of happiness and unity. …”
“That lays out the essence of the cultural and political revolution now consuming us. After the Trump presidency we reach a fork in the political road. Donald Trump has established, or at least is clinging to, a kind of new political cultural hegemony. (H/t, Antonio Gramsci.) Now what?
“The regulars next will figure out and follow the ‘spectacular’ rules of engagement, learning how to stage a more melodramatic, thus more voter-satisfying, spectacle than Donald Trump’s.”
Hey! If spectacle is what you, dear reader, seek from American politics, have at it! You have a dozen “heels” and “baby face” GOP aspirants to choose from.
However, if you, like me, consider politics the hinge of history upon which our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness depends, we now have a declared champion of advancing all three values that made, and again can make, America great:
Life.
Liberty.
The pursuit of happiness.
Crave a ray of sunlight in the gloom and doom of American presidential politics?
Meet Francis Suarez.
