I wanted to write a short piece on why Governor Parnell lost the election, especially about a reason that most might not realize. Obviously, with the final vote count putting him 2.22% behind the Walker/Mallot camp any single reason lost him the election. First and foremost was that they punished him for his success. He was able to successfully get the oil tax reform that the voters demanded in 2012 (and verified in the 2014 primary). He got the Point Thomson settlement to finally move forward and there were up to 1200 people working there this last year at any one time, and this settlement besides boosting oil production, would be a key component for any gas project. He also negotiated the Alaska LNG project so that for the first time in history we have an LNG project that has buy-in from the producers. In the end, others may try to take credit for these achievements, if they allow the LNG project to actually complete, but well know who got the ball rolling. What was amazing was how they used the primary campaign on the oil tax referendum, and then the general campaign to constantly accuse him of unethical activity, because he actually believed in free enterprise principles of working with industry, instead of dictating to them. Their strategy of unfounded negativity worked, and they were able to sway the electorate. Another reason he lost was the National Guard incident. I already wrote on this, so I wont say much except to repeat that he really showed his leadership by allowing the whole situation to come forward instead of holding it off until after the election. He realized that the situation needed to be fixed, that hed been deceived before, and he took action. The reason I really wanted to address though is that this was really the Republican partys election to lose. For the past half dozen years, the party leadership has been attacking the conservatives in the party, directly and indirectly working against them. This really culminated in 2012 at the State convention, when they lied about all the new young conservatives coming into the party, disenfranchised them, and drove them away. Even doing this, the conservatives groups were able to rally together and replace the leadership with Christian conservatives, who were then lied about and rules broken to kick them out of office the following year. For four years I was on the SCC and spoke constantly about our need to be the party of honesty, openness and transparency, but wasnt able to stop the anti-conservative agenda. The opposition was able in the minds of many conservatives to tie Parnell to the corrupt leadership, even though that link wasnt really there. The proof of my hypothesis is the Alaska Constitution Party; who achieved a voter percentage of 2.5%. The ACP platform is very similar to the Republican Partys, and most of those in it used to be republicans before they got turned off by the unethical behavior of our party, and our candidates not upholding the platform. Please note, that Im not saying what I consider to be a misstatement by some, that the ACP people cost us the election, and they should have not voted third party. Im saying that the Republican party had this won, but they drove away the staunch conservatives by their actions, and lost us the election. I believe that we will be seeing more of this in the future if our party doesnt get its act together, and stand on integrity and the principles of their platform.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 22:09:15 +0000
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