The Outsiders: The Governor Races

Robert Bentley Wins in Alabama

In my last post, I looked at the U.S. Senate. I pointed out that many of the supporters of the Bush amnesty have been purged in primaries, defeated, or disgraced. Several others have died, retired, or renounced their views.

The incoming Senate will be much improved on immigration. In the Bush years, a two-party consensus in favor of “comprehensive immigration reform” reigned in Washington. In the Obama years, immigration has become more of a partisan issue.

The battle lines are still not perfectly clear. There are still a few Republican holdouts who support “comprehensive immigration reform.” Likewise, there are a few conservative Democrats who oppose amnesty. Their numbers have dwindled in recent years though.

Conservatives and Independents have been challenging and succeeding in defeating the GOP establishment. In the Senate, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Joe Miller are symbolic of this trend.

The Governor Races

The Governor races are another arena where the transformation of the Bush GOP is playing out.

1.) Arizona – Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona is the apple of my eye in this respect. She has reaped a huge political dividend from banning ethnic studies and signing SB1070 into law. Brewer has gone to court to defend SB1070 from the Obama Justice Department.

In recent years, Arizona has moved to the forefront of the immigration debate. In 2007, the Grand Canyon State passed a law that penalized businesses who hired illegal aliens. More than 100,000 illegal aliens have since left Arizona. More will leave after SB1070 and if Arizona continues heading in the right direction.

Gov. Brewer has a commanding 12 point lead over Terry Goddard and will almost certainly win re-election in November. From 2003 until 2009, the god awful Janet Napolitano, now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, was Governor of Arizona.

Arizona’s SB1070 set off a political earthquake that was felt across America. An obscure state bill set off a polarizing national conflagaration over immigration that pushed moderates in a more radical direction.

The consequences of SB1070 were felt in other states. This was especially true of the South.

2.) Florida – In Florida, Rick Scott defeated Bill McCollum in the Republican Primary. McCollum had the support of the entire Florida GOP establishment.

Like Arizona, Florida has one of the largest populations of illegal aliens in America. Immigration resonated in the Sunshine State and became a battlefield in the Republican Primary there.

In the wake of SB1070, Bill McCollum initially staked out a moderate position on immigration, saying that the Arizona law wasn’t needed in Florida. Rick Scott responded by promising to bring SB1070 to the state. McCollum flipflopped two weeks before the election, but it proved too little too late.

Scott made immigration the hallmark of his campaign and beat the drum against the “Tallahassee insiders” to victory.

From 1999 until 2007, Jeb Bush was the Governor of Florida. With his Hispanic wife and children, Jeb was a prominent symbol of the Bush GOP and its attempt to woo Hispanic voters with  “comprehensive immigration reform.”

3.) Georgia – In Georgia, Nathan Deal defeated Karen Handel in the Republican Primary. Handel was endorsed by Sarah Palin and her defeat was widely interpreted in the mainstream media as proof of Palin’s waning influence.

As in Florida, Arizona’s SB1070 became a hot issue in the Georgia Governor race. Deal released a campaign ad attacking the Obama administration for its lawsuit against Arizona.

Deal promised to bring SB1070 to Georgia and contemptuously told the Obama administration you can “sue us too.” The ad struck a chord in Georgia which is also home to a huge population of illegal aliens.

It is possible that Nathan Deal could turn out to be another Sonny Perdue who exploited the Confederate flag issue to defeat Roy Barnes and get himself elected Governor. Unlike Perdue, Deal has a strong record of fighting illegal immigration in Congress.

With an A+ grade from NumbersUSA, I am inclined to believe that Nathan Deal intends to follow through on his promises. He will face Roy Barnes in November.

Barnes, the former Governor and Democratic challenger, says he would support an Arizona-style law in Georgia too. It is nothing more than political posturing, but it shows how far the political spectrum in Georgia has shifted since the Bush years.

4.) Alabama – Alabama has gone through one of the most memorable primary seasons of the year. Candidates like Rick Barber, Tim James, and Dale Peterson (all unsuccessful) made national headlines with hilarious campaign ads.

Who can forget Peterson with his shotgun ranting about “thugs and criminals” or Barber “gathering his armies” with the Founders?

In Alabama, the plain spoken outsider Dr. Robert Bentley emerged victorious in the Republican Primary over Bradley Byrne, the GOP establishment favorite. Earlier this month, the Alabama GOP committed itself to a platform called the “Handshake with Alabama” which is committed to bringing Arizona’s SB1070 to Alabama

Robert Bentley will face Ron Sparks (the progressive nutroots candidate) in November. Sparks is a supporter of “comprehensive immigration reform.” As Governor of Alabama, Bentley would almost certainly sign Arizona-style immigration reform into law.

The Republicans have a chance this fall of taking over the Alabama state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. Such is the extent of the backlash against the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

5.) South Carolina – Like Jan Brewer, Nikki Haley isn’t exactly an outsider, but was propelled to victory in the South Carolina Republican Primary with a Sarah Palin endorsement and Tea Party support.

Haley is an Asian Indian, which is certain to provoke opposition from pro-White corners, but as Governor of South Carolina she would do to promote our interests than Meg Whitman in California.

South Carolina is one the handful of states that is most likely to become the next Arizona. Haley has emphatically stated that she supports Arizona and would sign an Arizona-style immigration bill into law.

Haley will face Vince Sheehan in November. Sheehan, who will almost certainly be defeated, claims to support an even tougher immigration law. The political spectrum in South Carolina has also shifted to such a degree that both parties compete to sound tougher on immigration.

Arizona’s Imitators

There are plenty of other Governor races in this election cycle. I’ve mostly been following the ones closest to my own home turf. I’m excited by the possibility of a geographically continguous bloc of states in South passing Arizona-style immigration reform and entering into a polarizing showdown with the federal government.

Florida, Virginia, and Texas are the squishiest of the Southern states. Virginia has already followed in Arizona’s footsteps. Florida is poised to follow soon. Pressure from the conservative grassroots in Texas could force Gov. Rick Perry to flip flop like Bill McCollum and John McCain.

Tennessee has also been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Arizona. The Tennessee state legislature passed a resolution congratulating Arizona for defending its borders. Bill Haslam, the next Governor of Tennessee, has indicated that he would sign Arizona-style immigration reform in the Volunteer State.

Mainstream vs. Fringe

Pro-Whites have two paths before them. The first path is to work within the mainstream and use polarizing national debates over issues like immigration to push moderates in a more radical direction. The second path is to work within the fringe to build a credible radical alternative to the status quo.

At least from my perspective, having tried the second path (and reaching its terminus in a bad experience), the first path has become more attractive as of late. It seems an easier task to radicalize moderates in the mainstream than to mainstream radicals on the fringe. It is easier to cure ordinary people of ignorance than odd people of more serious problems.

In the last five years, the only detectable movement has been the rise of the Tea Party and the demise of the Bush GOP in the mainstream. As we recently saw in Knoxville, nothing has changed on the fringe.

Until that changes, Whites will continue to look elsewhere for their salvation.

About Hunter Wallace 12389 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

25 Comments

  1. Discard, we are producing doctors, BUT, according to all the Title 9 nonsense HALF the spots in Medical School are reserved for women. Now I’m not against women becoming physicians if that is really their long term goal, but I have a feeling in a lot of cases these girls real goal in going to med school is to rub shoulders with all the boys going to med school so they can “Marry a Doctor.” Lot’s of these girls practice for a few years and then drop out to raise a family that their Doctor Husband can support on a single salary. I don’t propose to ban women from medicine, but the natural ratio of Male/Female true interest in a CAREER in medicine is NOT 50/50. Instead of filling up our med schools with “Doctor Groupies” and Orientals, let’s give White Males priority in admittance before filling up the rest of the slots.

  2. Nightowl: I’ve read similar things about female doctors. I think it was 60% of them choose psychiatry, general practitioning, geriatrics, pediatrics, obstetrics, or gynecology, so other fields are understaffed. Also, they work shorter hours and retire at younger ages. For the same investment, the country gets about 2/3 as much a return in career hours.
    A further contributor to the contrived doctor shortage is that the Darks send very few competent students to med school. Blacks and Hispanics together make up over 25% of the population, and will never contribute anywhere’s near that share of the physicians. Importing Hindus and Orientals is the Regime’s preferred solution to that deficit, since they know that even the most extreme affirmative action won’t get enough Darks through a pre-med program, let alone an M.D.

  3. I agree with Oats-and-Honey’s post on August 28, 2010 at 2:11 am. Of course what he’s saying is sensible, as is 95% of what HW is saying. [The Nikki Haley issue is just beyond the pale for me, and it seems to have irked many other commenters here too].

    All I’d further say is this: “Beware of the Abyss staring back”!

  4. Michael Vilmar Avery wrote:
    Palingeneticists

    Whoa! …Whatever that is, keep it well clear of me please 😀

    [I swear, if I ever have to again see a female-politician winking at camera multiple times during scripted responses during cardboard TV debates… Thanks a lot to Johnny McCain for hoisting this airheaded twit on us.]

  5. Wanderer,

    Meg Whitman in California is more of a problem than Nikki Haley in South Carolina. If White Nationalists had done the hard work of building a viable alternative in South Carolina and Louisiana, Haley and Jindal wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.

    Haley is going to be the next Governor of South Carolina. That’s inevitable at this point. If she signs a polarizing anti-illegal immigration law like the one in Arizona, then at least something good will come of it.

  6. Why is that?

    Obama is non-White. He defeated McCain. Most White Nationalists thought that was a good thing.

    It was a good thing because Obama’s election created more polarization than would have otherwise been the case. Similarly, if South Carolina passes an Arizona-style immigration law, there will be a government crackdown and a polarized political environment there as well.

  7. HW– Barack Obama is a Democrat and Haley is a Republican. That is the difference. None of those white-racialists would have supported a “Michael Steele, Republican for President” effort. Not one.

    Republicans, David Duke often says, are the white party, whether we like it or not!

  8. Jon,

    1.) I didn’t attack the KKK.

    2.) I never attacked the NSM or skinheads for doing something in the real world. I criticized their motivations and tactics.

    3.) The people who are “doing something” in the White Nationalist movement, most of them at any rate, are acting out their own individual psychodrama, not trying to effectively communicate with their contemporaries.

    4.) Umm, I don’t have a problem with anti-Semitism, so long as it is a rational and justified. If you simply said, “Jews are bad,” I would find nothing objectionable about that idea.

    5.) I didn’t say anything about alliances with Jews.

    6.) I didn’t say anything about creating a kosher movement either. I don’t expect White Nationalists to change their ways.

    7.) I think it is more likely that conservatives will unintentionally set loose forces they cannot control within the mainstream than a viable alternative to the status quo will emerge on the fringe.

  9. Maybe some of you who been around have a good answer to this, but I have to ask, why don’t white advocates, white nationalists, white-whatever-you-want-to-call-them, ever take a stab at running for political office as Republicans? I mean, look at how the evangelical Christian movement of the 80s and 90s managed to gain significant power within the GOP for awhile there (and still have it to some extent). Even if it’s only on a smaller scale, this seems like a perfectly reasonable model for how to get out of the basement and get real world political influence.

  10. “Whoa! …Whatever that is, keep it well clear of me please”

    Yeah, yeah I know this blog is Southern Populist now and all, but come on, reading a book won’t hurt you:

    “Palingenetic Myth”: http://tinyurl.com/285rb7q

  11. WN Sympathizer says: Maybe some of you who been around have a good answer to this, but I have to ask, why don’t white advocates, white nationalists, white-whatever-you-want-to-call-them, ever take a stab at running for political office as Republicans? “

    Because unlike evangelical Christians, White Nationalism is NOT treated as a legitimate political viewpoint by the jews in charge and so is subject to the same sort of marginalization and persecution that the Mafia would get. However, perhaps running as a kind of “stealth” WN, talking about crime and immigration and such, would work…IF one was very careful. I wouldn’t even MENTION jews or Israel for instance, but all the while I’d be very careful to NOT take any money from AIPAC or the NAACP.

  12. Doesn’t it strike people as odd how she went from an unknown among several Republican choices to being elected in the primary? I sensed from the moment they gave publicity to this woman that she had already been chosen by the RNC to win. We Southerners are more racially conscious that other Americans and I just can’t believe she won. It doesn’t give me confidence in our election process, that’s for sure.

  13. I can believe she won.

    In South Carolina, 45% of Whites or thereabouts voted to keep the state anti-miscegenation law in 1998, but White Nationalists spent the next decade reading books and arguing with each other on the internet.

  14. Hey WN Sympathizer, it’s already been tried. Duke, Metzger (who actually won the democratic primary in CA and was denied the right to run in the general election by Nancy Pelosi) Don Black’s son Derrick, who was denied the right to run as a Republican….all that’s been tried. Running as a 3rd party candidate doesn’t work under the US Political System, it was specifically designed to discourage that.

    As long as the jews wield power in this country, you can forget about a peaceful political solution. It’s just not going to happen.

    On the Christian Sikh, I seriously doubt that she is going to sign anything like SB 1070. All we can hope for is that Alvin Greene wins the Senate election. 🙂 We need more Alvins and Obamas, not “white like me except for a better tan” types like Haley.

  15. WN Sympathizer says:
    August 29, 2010 at 5:06 am
    “Maybe some of you who been around have a good answer to this, but I have to ask, why don’t white advocates, white nationalists, white-whatever-you-want-to-call-them, ever take a stab at running for political office as Republicans? ”

    I’ve worked a lot in Republican politics and actually won some important races. In San Diego our Congressional delegation is solidly White Gentile, straight, tough on immigration, good on gun rights etc.

    I worked on Brian Bilbray’s Congressional campaign in the one of the most hotly contested races in the nation. Bilbray won by making immigration control the #1 issue, but not the only issue. He presented an intelligent, successful work history as a mayor, Congressman – his campaign theme was “He’s on your side” – gets along with most folks, doesn’t enter religious squabbles, isn’t coming out for flaming queer stuff, but leaves responsible gays alone.

    I went door to door for Bilbray, did phone banks – followed the scripts, but learned to present my own talk. I had to work behind the scenes to get another candidate (from my Church) who spent $ millions in a primary to drop out in the general election and not split the “conservative” vote. Religious Right types are a real problem for us.

    Anyway, we won. And it was a good experience. I learned a lot.

    We can present WN issues in a “stealth” way – just make it that you and your candidate are:

    “On their side”.

  16. “Maybe some of you who been around have a good answer to this, but I have to ask, why don’t white advocates, white nationalists, white-whatever-you-want-to-call-them, ever take a stab at running for political office as Republicans?”

    They do, they just don’t come out and say it. Then “Cryptkeeper” type WN come out and scream that these folks like Tancredo are no good sell outs because unless someone shows up dressed like Hitler, they just don’t get it. The fringe left shares similar characteristics, if someone doesn’t take the most radical rhetorical posturing they just don’t get it as well, like the way the queer fringe is giving Obama hell for not picking a fight with most Americans over their most radical agenda, when Obama has already bitten off more than he can chew. Having a radical Black in the white house pushing the envelop isn’t enough for the fringe left, they won’t be satisfied until a drag queen is sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon and NAMBLA runs the education department. Fringe politics are for people who are socially retarded and can’t interpret hints, everything has to be spelled out in full detail for such people or they just don’t get it.

  17. Free America wrote:
    I sensed from the moment they gave publicity to this woman that she had already been chosen by the RNC to win.

    I’d not doubt it a bit. The RNC today is almost as P.C. as the DNC. (Note the Michael Steele affair).

    But 95% of loyal-Republicans are white, most of whom have varying degrees of silent-racialism in their worldview.

    Another example of an elite betraying its own…

  18. Commenter JMO wrote in another thread a reference to the Paul-Craig-Roberts idea of “the new feudalism”: Whites always have to kowtow to the nonwhite protected class. In effect whites are sociopolitical serfs and the Multicultural elite are the new lords. PC enforcers maybe are the knights in service of the lords? (It is possible for a white-serf to purchase emancipation for him-/her-self from serfdom by vocally turning against white interests). It’s a solid metaphor.

    The Republican Party finds itself with a party of serfs who are declining in population-share anyway. Who wants a party of serfs? They need to get a larger share of lords in their party, both out of expediency and simply because Lords Are Better Than Serfs.

  19. Excellent post by orion14:
    On the Christian Sikh, I seriously doubt that she is going to sign anything like SB 1070. All we can hope for is that Alvin Greene wins the Senate election. 🙂 We need more Alvins and Obamas, not “white like me except for a better tan” types like Haley.

    In 2008, I never did get on board with the “Support Obama because he is polarizing” idea. But McCain threw the election in a righteous fit of Political Correctness. McCain was awful as it is. He forced an annoying airhead on us all that we’ll have to live with for years to come. Also– “Obama is good because he’s polarizing” has proved partly true, I’d admit that readily.

    Anyway, if nonwhite ascendancy is foregone and certain, MUCH better that it be of the Alvin-Greene/Barack-H.-Obama variety than the Michael-Steele/”Nikki-Haley” variety.

  20. HW, “In South Carolina, 45% of Whites or thereabouts voted to keep the state anti-miscegenation law in 1998”.

    Can you provide more info on this? What do you mean by “anti-miscegenation law”? Federally such laws were illegal since the mid-1960s. How/why would SC “vote” on it?

  21. Chuck Baldwin has an article over at Vdare about how clueless American voters are with their fawning over Sarah Palin, the renomination of John McCain and the watering down of the Tea Parties.

    http://www.vdare.com/baldwin/100827_revolution.htm

    It doesn’t make much sense to push for a slow radicalization of the White population by voting for establishment candidates or what Baldwin calls celebrity conservatives. Your playing by the elite’s rule book and nothing good will come of it.

  22. onion14 says: Hey WN Sympathizer, it’s already been tried. Duke, Metzger (who actually won the democratic primary in CA and was denied the right to run in the general election by Nancy Pelosi) Don Black’s son Derrick, who was denied the right to run as a Republican….all that’s been tried.

    Yeah, but those people all were or had connections to OVERT White Nationalists. That will never fly; the jews will be on it like flies on horse…stuff. The canidate would have to be a newcomer with NO KNOWN prior connections to White Nationalism. That’s the smart way to sneak someone in.

    Nightowl says: They do, they just don’t come out and say it. Then “Cryptkeeper” type WN come out and scream that these folks like Tancredo are no good sell outs because unless someone shows up dressed like Hitler, they just don’t get it.

    LOL so true. Then again, the travelling WN circus makes it harder for the jews to smear a crypto-WN as most folks will only see a reasonable-sounding man being screamed at by “Nazis.”

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