Not a pro-Republican day, but anti-Democrat

TURNING TO THE REPUBLICANS ?????

You may be asking yourself, considering the current conservative momentum, who do the Democrats still have left? This won't surprise you at all, but Pew research polling shows that Democrats hold substantial leads only among blacks, younger voters, those with low family incomes, union households and the religiously unaffiliated. Although other polls show that low-income Americans have actually turning toward the Republicans along with undecided women who are now turning to the GOP for the first time since 1982. Could it possibly be that women are thinking about surrendering security for opportunity?

Some are asking [what] made it OK for Americans to seriously consider the GOP again? Not so fast. As I've said just a few times before ... these people going to the polls today aren't engaging in this exercise to vote for Republicans. They're voting against Democrats. This election is one of the biggest political repudiations of all time. It truly is a revolution .. a revolution against big government. And this revolution was not led by the Republican Party. It was led by loosely organized groups of Americans who finally tired of arrogant government and politicians, high taxes and the diminishment of the country they love. These are people who were repulsed by a president who said that America is no more special than "Greece, England or any other country." These people shouted back "The hell it isn't!" and went to work.

Do you know what the biggest fear will be for Republican politicians as they convene the 112th Congress? The very same Tea Partiers who are in the process of feeding the Democrat congress into the political shredder today. Bob Beckel said it well on Fox & Friends this morning. This is not a Republican Day. This is an anti-Democrat day. Republicans need to remember that.

It was the Tea Partiers that forced the GOP to focus on spending, the economy and jobs and has therefore put its vote-killing social agenda on hold. But remember that the elections today are not a mandate for the Republican agenda, they are a house cleaning for the current bums in Washington. If the GOP believes today's elections to be some sort of mandate of their social agenda, they will completely lose all gains that they have made and you will absolutely see the emergence of a new majority party in the United States. Unless the GOP wants to personally experience impotence, it would be wise to leave all bedroom talk behind.

I couldn't agree more. Follow the link to the original if you want to see the embedded links.


Also see:

Why you should vote for Republicans
     

Why the GOP needs to Get Christie Love

I don't mean the old '70's TV show. I'm referring to the fact that the GOP needs a campaign strategy, and they could start by loving what New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is doing, and using that as a role model. Peggy Noonan nails it here:

Try a Little Tenderness
Chris Christie, not the Tea Party, is the model for the Republicans.

[...] For those candidates who are themselves Tea Party, and who identify more with a rebellion than an organization, some advice: Get conservative, quick. Which is another way of saying: Get serious. Conservatives are not fringe and haven’t been accused of being fringe since they got themselves a president, in 1980. He cared about reality, about the facts of the world, and bothered to know them. He bothered to think about them. He respected process, or rather respected the reality of it and learned to master it.

He also tried to put his arms around those who disagreed with him; he loved his foes into submission by showing regard for them. “Come walk with me,” he said, in 1984. And they did. And they got a new name, Reagan Democrats. Some of them wear it proudly, still. Here’s something that sounds corny but is true: Only love makes great political movements. Movements based on resentment, anger and public rage always fade, they rise and fall, they never stay. If you came to play, get serious.

Members of the Tea Party are not going to vote Democratic, and the Democrats have figured this out. Someone noted on cable the other day that only months ago many Democrats still hoped they might benefit to some degree from the Tea Party’s populist spirit, and attempted a certain tentative sympathy. True, but they did it like anthropologists discovering a new tribe in Borneo: “Come. No hurt. Be friend.” Now, seeing the Tea Party is not gettable or co-optable, the Democrats are attempting to demonize them, and use them to demonize the GOP.

Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual “Jaws”-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are “one and the same.” Not only that, they’re cooking up a plan to “get rid of” or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy and education and the EPA.

Your average viewer will see this not as information but as theater, like Demon Sheep, and of course propaganda, though some will perk up at abolishing the agencies. But the ad signals a central Democratic argument for the fall, which The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder summed up as “We may be incompetent, but they’re crazy.”

It’s a sign of Democratic panic that a week ago they were saying what was wrong with the GOP was they have no plan, while now what’s wrong is that they do have one.

The problem for the Democrats, however, is not a new Contract With America, or the Tea Party. Their problem is Chris Christie.

National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”

That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. He is famously blunt and doesn’t speak in those talking points that make you wonder, “Should I kill myself now with rude stabs to the chest, or should I just jump screaming from the window?”

On “Morning Joe” this week he said, “There were a lot of hard cuts and difficult things to do in there, but fact of the matter is we’re trying to treat people like adults. They know that we’re in awful shape, and they know that no one else is around anymore to pay for the problems that won’t hurt them.” [...]

Read the whole thing. It's not a rant against the tea party; far from it. It's about understanding politics, and letting the Tea Party be the supporting force that it is, to get common sense problem solvers like Chris Christie elected into office.

Rich Lowry also understands how important the "Christie" role model is:

Look Outside D.C. for Grown Up Government

[...] The sweep of Obama's ambition has necessarily forced congressional Republicans into a perpetual posture of "no," but they are reluctant to outline their own agenda of "yes." Out across the United States, a populist movement of great moment and promise wants to pull the country back to its constitutional moorings. Its favored candidates, though, are often shaky vessels, the likes of Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada, who are always one gaffe away from self-immolation.

For adults, look to the statehouses. Look in particular to New Jersey and Indiana, where Govs. Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels are forging a limited-government Republicanism that connects with people and solves problems. They are models of how to take inchoate dissatisfaction with the status quo, launder it through political talent, and apply it in a practical way to governance.

Christie has just concluded a six-month whirlwind through Trenton that should be studied by political scientists for years to come. In tackling a fiscal crisis in a state groaning under an $11 billion deficit, he did his fellow New Jerseyans the favor of being as forthright as a punch in the mouth. And it worked.

Christie traveled the state making the case for budgetary retrenchment, and he frontally took on the state's most powerful interest, the teachers' union. He rallied the public and split the Democrats, in a bravura performance in the lost art of persuasion. At the national level, George W. Bush thought repeating the same stalwart lines over and over again counted as making an argument, and Barack Obama has simply muscled through his agenda on inflated Democratic majorities. Christie actually connected.

He matched unyielding principle (determined to balance the budget without raising taxes, he vetoed a millionaires' tax within minutes of its passage) with a willingness to take half a loaf (he wanted a constitutional amendment to limit property taxes to 2.5 percent, but settled with Democrats for an imperfect statutory limit). He'll need an Act II to get deeper, institutional reforms, but New Jersey is now separating itself from those other notorious wastrels, California and Illinois. [...]

Read the whole thing. The article talks about Mitch Daniels, too. The more the merrier. It's going to take real adults who talk straight, talk the talk and walk the walk, not spend-thrifts with talking-points, who avoid town hall meetings and skirt around issues, to get us out of this mess. Christie, Daniels and those like them are showing us the way out. The GOP needs to be the party that supports the folks who are leading the way, who are DOING it.
     

Republican complacency. But whose agenda?

Do they need a stronger agenda? Some would argue yes:

Get With the Program

[...] If GOP consultants who are advising the party to avoid embracing a substantive agenda prior to the November elections get their way, this will be the pitiful Republican dance for the next three-and-a-half months.

We understand the Republicans’ temptation to believe that they can beat the Democrats with nothing. The public has recoiled from President Obama’s agenda and seems set to swing to the Republicans as a check against his liberal overreaching. Why not just play it safe and ride the wave that’s already building?

One, this wouldn’t be as safe as it seems. The consultants think Republicans risk putting targets on their backs by associating themselves with particular policy ideas. But Republicans will be targeted regardless. The White House wants to define them as mindless apostles of “No,” and as “Bush Republicans.” Both of these charges could hurt, and they are more likely to stick if Republicans lack a forward-looking agenda of their own.

Two, a campaign agenda is, if nothing else, a sign of seriousness for voters. The danger in the kind of cynical calculation urged by the consultants is always that the public will recognize it for exactly that and react accordingly.

Three, if Republicans plan on having a majority in either house after November, they had better have some idea in advance of how they will conduct themselves in power. If they have an agenda that has won at least loose assent from voters, they’ll be better-off than if they were trying to come up with something on the fly in the flush of victory, when giddiness will rule and special interests will all want a piece of the pie.

Fourth, Republicans should have confidence in their ideas. If they can’t offer an alternative to Obama now — with the president sagging in the polls, with tea partiers in the streets, with conservative sentiment on the upswing across the board in the public — they should be in a different business. This needn’t entail recklessness. The Contract with America of 1994 wasn’t a radical document, but it did point in a clearly different direction than the Clinton Democrats. This is what Republicans need now (watch this space for our ideas) and what House Republicans have been planning on — so long as they don’t flinch. [...]

My fear is though, that the Uber Conservatives are going to push social issues as the spearhead of the party. That would be a mistake.

Spain's economy is collapsing. It's been doing poorly for a while. Conservatives there have not been able to win elections, despite the poor economy. Why? Because their conservative party is dominated by people who wish to push unpopular social issues, that the majority of voters don't agree with. So the economy there continues in it's downward spiral.

Here at home, the Republican's need an agenda, but it must be one that the majority of voters can gather behind. It should be about jobs and the economy, first and foremost.

I don't expect social conservatives to give up their issues, but those issues should not be the spearhead of the party. We need a large tent, with a spearhead that the majority of voters can rally behind.

Swing voters matter. People who are not rigid social conservatives are not RINOS. If social conservatives insist on drumming all who are unlike themselves out of the party, then we will follow the path of Spain. Or worse.

This next election is ours to win or lose. And it may be the last chance to save our Republic.

And for an agenda that many can rally behind, perhaps Paul Ryan's roadmap would be a good place to start:

'Roadmap' a realistic plan to remake the tax system

[...] The Wisconsin Republican's Roadmap is not a "reactionary" document, as the left usually describes most anything that involves substantially reducing the size, scope and cost of government. It doesn't seek to turn back the clock. Rather, it breaks with a strain of libertarian logic that is always at war with the State, while staying true to the idea that the best government is the one that governs least. It advances libertarian ends by admitting the limits of libertarian means.

The key to Ryan's do-over is acknowledging that America will never eradicate the welfare state entirely for the simple reason that Americans don't want to eradicate the welfare state entirely. The Roadmap explicitly declares that the social safety net — in the form of health and retirement benefits — for those "suffering hard times" is something Americans want to keep. On this and other fronts, the document is a monumental concession to political reality. [...]

It may not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be. It only has be good enough for the majority of voters to agree with, and better than the alternative that the current administration is trying to force down our throats. And THAT, it is.

     

The Republican Problem

And what would that be? Getting people to trust them about spending:

Do Not Trust Cornyn or McConnell on Spending Cuts

[...] Republicans, perhaps because of their party’s evangelical wing, understand what it means to be born again — and they’re out to convince Americans that they are born-again debt crusaders, ready to rumble in the holy struggle for smaller deficits and less-unbalanced budgets. This takes a little bit of chutzpah. Here’s McConnell: “The American people don’t think our problem is that government taxes too little. Our problem is that government taxes too much. And that it spends too much and borrows too much. And until Democrats demonstrate even the slightest ability to restrain the recklessness with which they spend Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars, the job creators and the workers of this country aren’t about to take them seriously on how to lower the debt. The American people shouldn’t be asked to pay the price for Democrats’ recklessness through higher taxes.” Until Democrats demonstrate the slightest ability to restrain their recklessness? Fair enough, but let me refresh Senator McConnell’s memory:



Check out the spending under your guys, Senator McConnell. Notice how it doesn’t go down? This is why nobody trusts Republicans on spending: because Republicans have not earned anybody’s trust. [...]

And it doesn't help that we had eight years of a Republican Administration that spent money like a Democrat. Money we didn't have. Republicanism in recent years has meant sucking up to the social conservatives, and ignoring fiscal conservatism.

If Republicans can't put fiscal conservatism FIRST, even before social issues, then why should anyone bother with them?
     

How many people are fiscally conservative, but socially liberal? Nearly 60% - the Majority?

How Many Libertarian Voters Are There?

In our new study, David Kirby and I round up various estimates on the number of libertarian-leaning voters. Our own calculation, 14 percent, is actually the lowest estimate.

We use three questions on political values from the generally acknowledged gold standard of public opinion data, the surveys of the American National Election Studies, and find that 14 percent of respondents gave libertarian answers to all three questions. But other researchers have used somewhat looser criteria and found larger numbers of libertarians: [...]

One can split hairs over the definition of "Libertarian", but most people seem to relate to the idea of fiscal conservatism combined with social liberalism, which goes against both the politically ideological Left and Right. In other words, most people are in the moderate, non-ideological center.

For too long this majority has been battered between two extremes. Both Left and Right has been pushing for bigger government to enforce their ideology. Now, it's time to do something about it.

     

We Must Dump the Republican Baggage

I'm sorry if the truth hurts, but the Republicans must own up to this, so they can then dump it and change course. IF they want their credibility back.

Karl Rove’s Hypocritical Call for Fiscal Rectitude

[...] I’m a big fan of condemning Obama’s big-government schemes, but Rove is the last person in the world who should be complaining about too much wasteful spending. After all, he was the top adviser to President Bush and the federal budget exploded during Bush’s eight years, climbing from $1.8 trillion to more than $3.5 trillion. More specifically, Rove was a leading proponent of the proposals that dramatically expanded the size and scope of the federal government, including the no-bureaucrat-left-behind education bill, the two corrupt farm bills, the two pork-filled transportation bills, and the grossly irresponsible new Medicare entitlement program.

Not surprisingly, Rove even tries to blame Obama for some of Bush’s overspending, writing that “…discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush’s last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That’s a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama.” This passage leads the reader to assume that Obama should be blamed for what happened in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, but as I’ve already explained, the 2009 fiscal year started about four months before Obama took office and 96 percent of the spending can be attributed to Bush’s fiscal profligacy. Yes, Obama is now making a bad situation worse by further increasing spending, but he should be criticized for continuing Bush’s mistakes.

Rove then has the gall to complain that Obama is “…growing the federal government’s share of GDP from its historic post-World War II average of roughly 20% to the target Mr. Obama laid out in his budget blueprint last February of 24%.” Yet a quick look at the budget data shows that the burden of federal spending jumped from 18.4 percent of GDP when Bush took office to more than 25 percent of economic output when he left office. Even if the (hopefully) temporary bailout costs are not counted, Bush and Rove are the ones who deserve most of the blame for today’s much larger burden of government. It should be noted, by the way, that none of the new spending under Bush was imposed over his objection. He did not veto any legislation because of excessive spending. [...]

Read the whole thing, for the embedded links.

In 2000, for the first time since I became and eligible voter, I did not vote in the presidential election. Both choices seemed equally awful. I'm sure I was not the only one who felt that way, which is why I think the election was so close.

In 2004, I nearly didn't vote again, for the reasons mentioned in the above article. But John Kerry seemed possibly worse, so I held my nose and voted for George Bush. I hoped, in vain, that W would embrace fiscal conservatism. It was not to be.

Republicans really need to dump this baggage they've collected. If they hang on to it, I'm not sure I can be bothered to vote anymore.
     

Time to stop whining and get back to basics

Republicans have spent too much time whining about Democrats, and it's a losing strategy. And when I say basics, I mean Republican principles that a majority of Americans can get behind and support. And what principles might those be? Gov. Tim Pawlenty explains:

Cut up the credit card

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist — or even a political scientist — to understand the steps the Republican Party must do to again become the national majority party.

The 2006 and 2008 election results are warning signs for the GOP. The good news is our party’s future is brighter than many think. Newsweek’s recent cover story makes it clear America leans more right than left.

The Republican Party’s conservative values — freedom, personal and moral responsibility, the power of capitalism and a limited accountable government — are as important as ever. The GOP should build on its core principles by making its case with common sense ideas that are better than our competitors.

Our approach on issues like security, energy independence, free market solutions for better health care and education with a focus on accountability for results instead of just increased spending are ideas that will do just that.

But it all starts by putting first things first. A cornerstone of the Republican Party must be fiscal responsibility — living within our means like most Americans do. Wall Street and the federal government chronically disregard this principle and have substantially contributed to our current economic mess.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Americans don’t need a Nobel Prize winner to understand we can’t solve a crisis caused by the reckless issuance of debt by then recklessly issuing even more debt.

Remarkably, we have now entered the second or third round of bailouts for some companies and industries. But bailing out the bailouts is like using credit cards to pay off credit cards. It’s a strategy that would have made even Charles Ponzi blush.
[...]

He goes on to make some good points, about the weak spots in the Democrat's plans. But he says above, "A cornerstone of the Republican Party must be fiscal responsibility — living within our means like most Americans do." But DO they? I'd like to think so, but it seems a shocking amount of people are living beyond their means, and they are doing it on credit.

I was going to add, "... and that's why they've elected a Democrat government that wants to keep spending". But we've just had 8 years of Republican government that did that! Republicans have lost credibility on that issue.

The Democrats may blow it too, as Pawlenty points out, but it remains to be seen just what they will do. It would be ironic if the Democrats were to lead us into fiscal responsibility. I'm not saying they can or will, but stranger things have happened.

Every government screws up some things, they are only human. But the question is, how much, how fast, and what the damage is. The answers to those questions will determine who becomes (or stays) the dominant power. We shall see how the Democrats do. Then next four years certainly won't be boring.