Perfect transitional leader for GOP: F.W. de Klerk
Add comment May 13th, 2009
I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party lately, and the fact that its perfectly respectable conservative principles, many of which I agree with, have been hijacked by a gang of crazed wing nuts, the dozen or so radio ranters who think Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin are great intellectual giants.
There’s a reason that the GOP’s formal leader, Michael Steele, looks like a fish out of water at Republican gatherings — because he is. My slogan for the GOP remains what it always has been: “Unum — e-Pluribus need not apply.”
Then the other night I was watching C-SPAN and up popped F.W. de Klerk, who was giving a speech in the U.S. I’d forgotten about old F.W., but there he was, looking calm, cool and collected as he discussed world affairs with a high degree of sophistication and keen analysis.
F.W. is a good guy. The last president of apartheid South Africa is the one who led that nation out of its shameful past and into its current status as a multiracial democracy where all men and women can vote and the majority population is not relegated by law to segregated ghettos. De Klerk said candidly that the new South Africa is not perfect by a long-shot. He described it as a young democracy where the old revoutionary party, the African National Congress, is inevitably losing dominance as the new country progresses. Despite the election of radical Jacob Zuma, de Klerk does not expect the rule of law, or the capitalist economy, to collapse.
For helping to create the new South Africa, de Klerk was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, along with Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president and the man de Klerk released from prison.
Mr. de Klerk would be the perfect transitional leader for the Republican Party. After attending Republican functions for three decades I can report with a high degree of accuracy that our Republican Party looks and talks much like South Africa’s old National Party. And just like that party, the Republicans are doomed to permanent minority status if they maintain their unofficial policy as the southern white people’s party.
Just think: F.W. could lead the GOP out of its apartheid mentality and into the bright new world of 21st America, a rainbow land of many colors, nationalities and cultures and American idols.
The late Jack Kemp tried for years to convince his fellow Republicans to take the conservative message out of the board rooms and country clubs and preach it in the nonwhite neighborhoods of America. Kemp, a former NFL quarterback, was convinced that millions of nonwhite Americans were being harmed by liberalism and could benefit from common sense, business-oriented conservatism. But Kemp’s party just laughed at him.
However, Americans love to import consultants to tell them what to do. So let’s give F.W. de Klerk a chance. I think he’s available.
