The following guest column was published in the Ashe Mountain Times on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2008.
John Wheeler is the chairman of the Ashe County GOP.
Thanks to all my critics
by John Wheeler Jr.
“Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you.” Jesus said that. But I don’t have to worry, because I’ve always had plenty of people upset with me for one thing or another.
The latest one is Melba Jones, leader of the Ashe County Democrats, who doesn’t like the radio ads that I made during the recent election. Looks like maybe I hit a nerve, so agitated is she still, weeks after the fact.
Melba confronted both Dan Soucek and myself on the sidewalk outside the West Jefferson polls on election day, calling our advertisements lies. I told her then, calmly and politely in front of several witnesses, that to the best of my knowledge and belief, everything I said in my radio ads was true. And Soucek cited the numbers of specific legislative bills to support his claims against Cullie Tarleton. I suggested that we should just agree to disagree.
Still, Melba can’t let it rest. So now I am forced to respond to her letter — and the objective facts don’t look too good for the local blue team.
You see, while Obama was winning red states left and right and squeaking out a razor-thin statewide victory in North Carolina, the voters in Ashe County were supporting McCain-Palin by a margin of almost two-to-one. Elizabeth Dole lost her U.S. Senate seat but carried Ashe County comfortably. So did Pat McCrory in the NC Governor’s race. Of course, our conservative stalwart Congresswoman Virginia Foxx soundly thrashed Roy Carter. And all three Republican candidates captured seats on the County Commission. Not a shabby showing for the local GOP.
Even Dan Soucek, a political neophyte and all around nice guy, ran a clean, tight race against the incumbent Cullie Tarleton. The margin separating the two in Ashe County was just about 320 votes, out of a total of 12,889 ballots cast in that race. Soucek is a fresh new face with good ideas, sterling credentials and untarnished integrity, and he’ll be back to fight another day. Just for the record, the one radio ad that I made for Dan Soucek — the one that says “Cullie Tarleton ought to be ashamed of himself” — was made specifically in response to Tarleton’s own vicious attack on Soucek’s character. Dan was too fundamentally decent to respond, but I just couldn’t let the sleazy slur pass unchallenged.
All these facts indicate that lots of local Democrats and Independents broke out of the old, rigid party-line mentality and voted their consciences for traditional conservative values. And that’s a good thing for the county.
If my pointed letters to the newspaper and my aggressive radio ads contributed to these lopsided pro-Republican election results in Ashe County, then I did the job that I signed on to do. I personally don’t have anything to apologize for or be ashamed of. Neither does the Ashe County GOP, nor do the dozens of dedicated volunteers who worked tirelessly for the conservative cause in which they fervently believed.
But the real credit should go to the honest, hard-working, God-fearing citizens of Ashe County. They are the ones who — unlike so much of the rest of the nation — were able to see through the sham and media spin and identify the candidates who represented the core values that Americans still believe in. On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful to live in a community where those timeless Christian values are still honored.
Melba told me that she just doesn’t like “negative campaigning.” According to the talking heads on most TV networks, holding Barack Obama accountable for his stated positions, questionable associations and ultraliberal voting record is mean-spirited, and maybe even secretly racist. I disagree. I think that citizens have a right to know the truth about a person before they make a choice to vote for him. That’s simply full disclosure, and people are entitled to know the truth, whether CNN wants to talk about it or not.
“Politics is war without blood.” Chairman Mao said that. I picked it up during my old student radical days, back in the 1970s. Which brings me to that other critical letter from Independent Annie Brown, who questioned what counterculture I was once part of. She seems to think that maybe I was a little too timid to join those who were “marching in the streets.”
Well, Annie, truth be told, marching in the streets was really pretty tame fare. There were guerilla groups taking over college campuses, and setting fire to ROTC buildings after the Kent State shootings, and all manner of civil disobedience, violent and otherwise. The glorious “People’s Revolution” was funded mainly by drug profits and bank robberies.
I personally was fired from my job as a newspaper reporter in Texas for speaking out against the Viet Nam War at the very first Earth Day Rally in 1970. That was while I was conducting a public seven-day hunger fast, sitting on a blanket in the middle of the campus protesting the war, wearing my black armbands and “Power to the People” buttons and passing out SDS literature. Then I drove from Dallas to Nashville to meet my student radical friends for the March on the Capital in Tennessee, led by Jerry Rubin (one of the Chicago Seven). Lots of young people read Ramparts, and some actually did what it said. I’ll leave it at that, and you can use your own imagination.
It’s because I lived through that tumultuous time, and came to understand the truly anarchist nature of it, that I am so concerned today about Barack Obama’s association with the former terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn. Neither of these radical Marxists has ever repented or apologized. The FBI still believes that Dohrn both made and planted the bomb that killed one San Francisco policeman and seriously injured another. The cavalier dismissal of their relevance today by the mainstream media is both disturbing and dishonest.
Former student radical leader and Ramparts editor David Horowitz, who with maturity has changed his political perspective and become a patriotic conservative, interviewed Ayers after the government’s case against him had been thrown out on a technicality. “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America’s a great place,” Ayers gloated to Horowitz. Ayers hated America back then and still hates America today, Horowitz says. That’s a problem for me.
You see, I am not proud of the mistakes of my past. I was wrong and misguided, and I did a lot of things that you’ll never know. By the grace of God, I survived more than 14 years in the counterculture, some of those years as a fugitive and some in prison, before I finally met Jesus Christ when I was 32 years old. He supernaturally changed my life, my heart and my mind. I see things a lot differently now than I did back then. I don’t claim any kind of Christian perfection today, just a clear Bible-based vision of what I believe and the intent to follow it through to the end.
In the words of my onetime counterculture hero, Bob Dylan: “If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise, just remind me to show you the scars.”
Today many pundits are debating whether President-Elect Obama will govern America as a left-wing socialist radical or as a moderate centrist statesman. Based on Obama’s private past and public record, I tend to suspect the former, but I sincerely hope I am wrong. We should all pray for our new President, because the fate of our country and our children will depend on what he does during the next four years. Whether we like him or not, we should pray simply because God says to do it.
I personally expect that we will see some very tough times ahead over the next few years. Meanwhile, the Republican Party will be redefining its patriotic conservative vision and grooming new leaders for their future responsibilities. Join us for change . . . for the better.
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