The New Republic

Coconut Creek, Florida

Most political junkies never get the chance to protect the
candidates they admire from rapacious Muslim terrorists with a yen
for televised beheadings. But, just last week, Yomin Postelnik--a
Pompano Beach, Florida, GOP activist-- answered his own personal
three a.m. call when, he wrote, a "low-level operative" with a
Middle Eastern group attempted to ferry the Republican nominee for
Congress in Florida's 22nd district, Allen West, to "an undisclosed
location" and "pull off what most certainly seems to be a heinous
stunt." Outraged, Postelnik posted a promise of retaliation against
"the fiends" who targeted West at the news site
CanadaFreePress.com, where he is a columnist. "I'd caution you
against so much as threatening this man again, as the result would
be a torrent of articles and books highlighting his exemplary nature
and service," he wrote. "More writers than you care to know of have
made this pact out of admiration for Allen and for what he stands
for[.]"Fortunately, Allen West managed to save himself. To be fair, it
wasn't that hard. The fiendish Middle Eastern group was Al Jazeera,
the intended "stunt" was an interview for a segment on black
Republicans, and West just politely declined. The next day, when he
regaled a group (including Postelnik) at a Coconut Creek retirement
community with the tale of Al Jazeera's interview request, he meant
the "undisclosed location" part to be a joke. "I doubt anyone was
thinking about kidnapping me," he admitted later.

You can see why people might have missed the humor. The most famous
thing about West--a former high-ranking African American Army
officer--is that he was accused by the military in 2003 of abusing
an Iraqi detainee. The fact that he is now the Republican nominee
for Congress in an ostensibly competitive district speaks volumes
about the current state of the GOP. "This is not the year in which
an intelligent Republican would want to run against an incumbent, "
says GOP strategist Whit Ayres glumly. Recruitment troubles have
plagued the party in what should be competitive districts from
Arizona to Indiana to New York; in one blood-red district in North
Carolina, the Republican choice, a right-winger named Carl
Mumpower, recently shut down his own campaign to protest his
party's lax stance on immigration.

The GOP's greatest embarrassment of all might seem to be Florida's
22nd, where the party that Iraq destroyed is running a candidate
charged with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And,
yet, the South Florida GOP doesn't see it that way. This year's
surprise in Palm Beach County is that local Republican officials,
some of whom are also presiding over more competitive races,
believe their candidate is not a laughingstock but the marquee
Republican of the year--that he is not a symptom of what ails the
national GOP but a possible cure.

Palm Beach County Republican Chairman Sid Dinerstein, a gregarious
operative whose official bio recounts his receipt of Lefferts
Junior High School's "Most Popular Boy" award, insists that as
voters learn more about West's "Taji incident"--as West's spokesman
delicately calls it--they'll begin to see it not as an echo of Abu
Ghraib but as a neat parable about the dangers of creeping
liberalism. An egghead who reads medieval Muslim history and the
anti-socialist French thinker Frederic Bastiat in his spare time,
West was on track for a generalship when his unit was assigned in
August 2003 to interrogate an Iraqi policeman who had supposedly
turned Benedict Arnold. The policeman refused to cooperate, so West
dragged him outside, pushed his head into the sand, and fired a gun
next to his face to get him to sing. "I'd do it again if I had to,"
West tells me over tea and a doughnut in Plantation, Florida. "It
wasn't torture. Seeing Rosie O'Donnell naked would be torture."

But that summer was an uneasy political moment--Joe Wilson had just
published his yellowcake op-ed--and the Army, as West tells it, fell
victim to politicalcorrectness jitters, dragging him before an
Article 32 hearing. When the legal and media circus was over,
though, West found that he had gained conservative street cred.
National Review championed him and the right-wing FrontPage
Magazine named him 2004's "Man of the Year," declaring that he
"earned the disdain of leftist intellectuals ... for protecting the
lives of his troops." Retiring from the army soon after, West began
to float the idea of running for Congress.

Sadly for West, though, while conservative activists heralded him as
an action hero, the national party showed little interest in
rallying behind someone so controversial. Looking at the giant
ziggurats of cash the Democrats were building to protect their
newly won seats, the National Republican Congressional Committee
(nrcc) frantically searched for candidates who were safe and, most
crucially, had access to a lot of money. In the 22nd--a district
the Democrats took in 2006 but which still boasts more registered
Republicans than Democrats--a scion of a famous Florida political
family, a well-connected state representative, and the popular
mayor of cash-soaked Boca Raton were all begged to run. All
declined.

Disheartened, national Republicans stopped touting the race and
adopted a "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away" fatalism.
"It's a miracle [former Republican representative Clay Shaw] held
the seat as long as he did, but God stopped working the miracle,"
sighs a GOP strategist.

Indeed, there was barely even time to worry about Florida's 22nd as
other recruitment problems popped up all over the country. In
eastern Arizona, Republicans had to settle for their tenth choice;
in Staten Island, the GOP's bottom-tier selection garnered an
electoral challenge from his own disgruntled son--and then died. In
Indiana's competitive 2nd district, the under-funded Republican
challenger frittered away his precious money flying to Alaska to
film pro-anwr-drilling YouTube videos, one of which had to be
aborted because he was overwhelmed by swarms of mosquitoes. In
North Carolina's Bush-loving 11th, which failed Redskins
quarterback Heath Shuler claimed for the Democrats with a 2006
upset win, the party finally settled on Asheville councilman Carl
Mumpower--but, almost immediately after being nominated, Mumpower,
like an immune defender cell gone wrong, began attacking the host
body, calling for President Bush's impeachment and then, last week,
briefly refusing to do any more campaigning. It turns out this is
what you get for nominating a lawmaker who was, up to that point,
primarily known for conducting his own extra- judicial crack
busts.

As the nrcc abandons seat after seat that it lost in 2006, there's
neither money nor love to spare for somebody like Allen West. "I'm
still waiting for J. C. Watts to call," West told me.

The national party's disinterest is vexing for the South Florida
Republican leaders supporting West. They see him not as a lost
cause, but as the national party's Hail Mary pass. He's a prototype
of conservative manliness and an obvious alternative to Barack
Obama. An eloquent speaker, he gets standing ovations wherever he
goes. "You would think in the culture we're in now, the national
party would stand up and take notice," complains Broward County GOP
chair Chip LaMarca. "Heck, he's probably the most qualified
message-deliverer we have--and he's black!" Indeed, as a black man
who eschews African American culture in favor of self-consciously
race-blind interests (he admires Confederate generals like
Stonewall Jackson), West seems perfectly suited to soothe a certain
type of older voter who intellectually dislikes racism but also
fears the black-church-attending Obama. "I never grew an Afro," he
tells a cluster of fans at the Coconut Creek retirement village. "I
always had a nice little crew cut."

Most appealing of all, though, is the symbolism of his detainee
scandal itself, and his unwillingness to repent for it. Dinerstein,
the Palm Beach Republican chair, explains: "There's always been a
belief by those of us on our side that the rules of engagement were
inhibiting our military ... I mean, the whole Abu Ghraib thing is
quite extraordinary--not one person even got tortured! One of my
sound-bites is that more people died in Teddy Kennedy's car. " For
humiliated Republicans constantly hearing that voters want
"change"--in other words, anything but their shameful selves--West
is a relief, a walking argument that they have been right all
along. The desire among grassroots Republicans to resist adaptation
and retrench behind the very traits that have caused them to come
under fire helps explain some of the stranger nominees in other
districts, too. I was amazed to find that a number of Republican
politicians in North Carolina actually like Carl Mumpower.

Back in Coconut Creek, Pete DiRosa, the burly president of the
retirement community's Italian-American Club, hops to his feet and,
riled up by West, launches into a Braveheart-style oration: "We've
gotten so complacent with the miracles we've got every day! This is
the greatest country in the world! We're getting so soft!" Shhh,
don't tell Al Jazeera.

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