Is Angle heading down wrong road?
It’s soul-searching crunch time for Sharron Angle.
After toppling diva-cum-anointed candidate Sue Lowden in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Angle is suddenly the flavor of the month.
She got where she is because she stuck to her belief system, even when the rhetoric associated with those stated beliefs wasn’t exactly ready for prime time. (“Second Amendment remedies” might go down as one of the quotes of the year.)
Now that she has done the unthinkable – an actual social conservative/libertarian winning a primary against two handsome and more mainstream candidates, Angle has no shortage of new friends.
Oh, my heavens, I’m sure Angle is buying a new camera now that she is good friends with Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie and a whole new gaggle of GOP national insiders who want to tell her how important she is and how they were secretly – super-secretly in some cases – behind her candidacy. (Some landed on Friday like a rescue unit from the Republican version of the Red Cross. It’s funny that NOW they think they need to rescue the winner.) Because, you know, they are also true believers who respect the Constitution and believe in small government and yada-yada-yada.
Call me Panglossian, hey, everyone does, but I think Angle is better off refraining from buying into the national GOP obsession with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I think she should whack Reid and talk about her beliefs and political philosophy: small government, lower taxes, brighter days through fiscal sobriety. This is a winning formula.
What Angle will be tempted to do, alas, what I fear she will do and regret for the rest of her life, is get caught up in the great big phony machine of nationally underwritten political campaigns. She will be asked to start buying into formulas and cheat sheets and experts who can’t even pronounce Nevada. She will be told that, dollar for dollar, she will win because they can recreate Reid as a monster and a Socialist and a relative of Obama, who as everyone knows was born in Kenya. Oh, God help us, Harry Reid’s a Kenyan!
In short, they will flash the fear card, and try to convince Angle that the best way to beat Harry Reid is to make everyone afraid of him and to remake her into Sue Lowden with more sensible shoes.
And late on some Sunday night in the Nevada that she loves, Sharron Angle will ask herself the toughest question of her life?
What am I willing to do to be “popular” with the “in crowd?”� The thing I like about Angle is she’s an unabashed conservative Nevadan. I don’t even share all her political beliefs and I admire the fact she can answer a question on the square.
If that changes, heaven help Sharron Angle. Heaven help the GOP. And heaven help Nevada.
