Republican Needs

[philunderwood]

The Need to Explain

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The most successful Republican presidential candidate of the past half century— Ronald Reagan, who was elected and reelected with landslide victories— bore little resemblance to the moderate candidates that Republican conventional wisdom depicts as the key to victory, even though most of these moderate candidates have in fact gone down to defeat.

One of the biggest differences between Reagan and these latter-day losers was that Reagan paid great attention to explaining his policies and values. He was called "the great communicator," but much more than a gift for words was involved. The issues that defined Reagan's vision were things he had thought about, written about and debated for years before he reached the White House.

Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things long before the game began, and now just need to execute.

Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum wage rate, so that it would rise automatically with inflation.

That sounds fine. But the cold fact is that minimum wage laws create massive unemployment among black teenagers. Conversely, one of the lowest rates of unemployment among black teenagers occurred in the 1940s, when inflation virtually repealed the minimum wage law passed in 1938, since even unskilled labor was paid more in inflated dollars than the minimum wage law required.

Even during the recession year of 1949, black teenage unemployment was a fraction of what it would be in the most prosperous later years, after the minimum wage rate was raised repeatedly to keep pace with inflation. One of the few benefits of inflation is that it can in effect repeal minimum wage laws, which politicians can do directly only by risking their reelection.

Conservative opposition to minimum wage laws is just one of the ways that conservative principles often work out to benefit those with lower incomes, more so than liberal principles that sound so much better as political rhetoric.

It seems unlikely that Governor Romney had time to learn about such things during this year's busy election campaign. He was like a rookie quarterback with just a few seconds to try to figure out the opposing team's complex formations before the ball is snapped. One of the secrets of Barack Obama's success is his ability to say things that will sound both plausible and inspiring to uninformed people, even when they sound ridiculous to people who know the facts. Apparently he believes the former outnumber the latter, and the election results suggest that he may be right.

Since most of the media will never expose Obama's fallacies and falsehoods, it is all the more important for Republicans to do so themselves. Nor is it necessary for every Republican candidate for every office to become an expert on every controversial issue.

Just as particular issues are farmed out to different committees in Congress, so Republicans can set up committees of outside experts to inform them on particular issues.

For example, a committee on income and poverty could be headed by an expert like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This is a subject on which demonstrable falsehoods have become the norm, and one on which devastating refutations in plain English are readily available from a number of sources.

A committee on the counterproductive effects of liberal policies such as minimum wage laws on minorities could be headed by someone like economist Walter Williams. Here too, there are many writings in plain English that could expose the huge harm done to minorities by liberal policies that claim to be helping them.

It is not necessary to explode every single lie put out by liberal Democrats. All that is necessary is to thoroughly discredit a few of their key claims, exposing them as liars.

What is even more necessary is for Republicans themselves to understand the urgent need to do so, for their own sake and— more important— for the country's sake.

[mikekerstetter]

www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/16/meghan-mccain-on-why-the-republican-party-needs-to-wake-up.html

By Meghan McCain

I found out early on Election Day that Mitt Romney wouldn’t become our next president. I called my father, and he answered sounding somber. He told me that, based on early polling numbers, he didn't see a foreseeable way for Romney to pull it off. There’s a very specific tone of voice my father uses to deliver bad news, and I flashed back to 2008. Still, I must have been in denial, because I pointed out that Ohio and Florida hadn’t been called yet, and we all know that elections are decided in Ohio! My father just sighed and said, “Honey, I’m sorry.” I started to choke back tears.

There was no reason for me to have such an emotional reaction to Romney’s loss. It’s not like he’s a close friend. Looking back to last week, I think that I was mourning something else. For the last four years, writing on this website, I’ve been calling for the Republican Party to come to terms with reality and modernize. Last Tuesday, Mitt Romney lost—and he lost big. As Republicans, we lost again. I felt sad, exhausted, beaten down, and heartbroken. It was the first time that I considered that the Republican Party, which I love so much, might die.

I know there are many out there, especially in the more conservative sphere, that regard me with disdain. I don’t fit into the traditional Republican box that the wingnuts who have hijacked my party think all Republicans should. For the last four years, I’ve been calling for Republicans to stop concentrating on social issues. I am a single woman in my 20s and that fact alone gave me the perspective that I don’t want to regulate a woman’s right to choice. I am pro-life, but because life is complicated, that choice is between a woman and her idea of a higher power. I believe if Roe vs. Wade were repealed, abortion would still go on. I care more about my economy, national security, and fiscal conservatism than I do about what other woman do with their bodies. It’s not my place, and I don’t believe it’s the government’s place, to make such decisions.

I also don’t believe it’s the government’s role to tell gays and lesbians that they can’t be given the same opportunities in American just because of who they love. I think America needs a better immigration policy and immigrants who were brought here illegally as children shouldn’t be deported. I have said all of these things over the past four years and these issues have been important to the demographics that the Democrats carried on Election Day—single women, minorities, and young people.

Times are changing. The face of America is changing and we as Republicans stand at a crossroads. Are we going to accept the changing face of America and change with it? Or are we going to continue to become more isolated and irrelevant? It’s possible to maintain the core values of this party and evolve when it comes to social issues. Quite frankly, I don’t see any other path to success.

I’ve spent most of my adult life fighting for change from inside the Republican Party. We Republicans need to look at the future instead of living in the past. We have to learn from what the last two presidential elections have taught us. We must accept each other and the different opinions within the party instead of trying to cannibalize people that diverge from an arbitrary purity test. I refuse to let the extremists win. We can’t let the Tea Party bully us any longer. We can’t keep worrying about ultraconservative white male voters. At the end of the day, I still believe I’m on the right side of history, and we can’t let this party sink away. We can and we must evolve. I don’t know exactly how yet, but I for one am ready to spend the next four years helping us get there.



And if we don’t move forward, adapt, and become relevant again, the Republican Party isn’t going to survive. It will just continue to alienate more moderate voters like myself. If I don’t see some changes in the next four years, I’m going to consider registering as an Independent in 2016.

[philunderwood]

From it’s inception, this website has been devoted to individual freedom. Since individual freedom applies to everyone, it’s self evident that no one can use force or fraud to infringe upon another’s rights. The abortion issue should hinge upon at what point the unborn is legally considered an individual. As it now stands, there’s legally no such thing as the rights of the unborn.

Some social conservatives and liberals both want to control people’s behavior through the use of government force. This isn’t consistent with the individual’s right to pursue his or her happiness and should not be supported by anyone believing in individual rights.

Capitalism is the only economic system that allows for individual rights.

It’s been my belief that the Tea Party movement started and grew to promote the beliefs outlined above and the Republican Party is the best hope we have of implementing those beliefs. Independents and Moderates have an ideological choice between ever larger and more intrusive government or individual liberty. There isn’t a compromise between the two; we either move one way or the other.

Thanks Mike for starting this thread and I hope others will contribute to the discussion.

[mikekerstetter]

Your welcome Phil, but you started it. I just added to it. ;D

[philunderwood]

Thanks for adding to it.

[philunderwood]

Happy New Year?

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.

If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare.

With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year award goes to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for his column of January 24, 2012 titled: "The GOP Deserves to Lose."

Despite reciting a litany of reasons why President Obama deserved to be booted out of the White House, Stephens said, "Let's just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose."

To me, the Republican establishment is the 8th wonder of the world. How they can keep repeating the same mistakes for decades on end is beyond my ability to explain.

Bret Stephens said, back at the beginning of 2012, that Mitt Romney was one of the "hollow men," and that voters "usually prefer the man who stands for something."

Yet this is not just about Mitt Romney. He is only the latest in a long series of presidential candidates backed by a Republican establishment that seems convinced that ad hoc "moderation" is where it's at — no matter how many of their ad hoc moderates get beaten by even vulnerable, unknown or discredited Democrats.

Back in 1948, when the Democratic Party splintered into three parties, each one with its own competing presidential candidate, Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey was considered a shoo-in.

Best-selling author David Halberstam described what happened: "Dewey's chief campaign tactic was to make no mistakes, to offend no one. His major speeches, wrote the Louisville Courier Journal, could be boiled down 'to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead...'"

Does this sound like a more recent Republican presidential candidate?

Meanwhile, President Harry Truman was on the attack in 1948, with speeches that had many people saying, "Give 'em hell, Harry." He won, even with the Democrats' vote split three ways.

But, to this day, the Republican establishment still goes for pragmatic moderates who feed pablum to the public, instead of treating them like adults.

It is not just Republican presidential candidates who cannot be bothered to articulate a coherent argument, instead of ad hoc talking points. Have you yet heard House Speaker John Boehner take the time to spell out why Barack Obama's argument for taxing "millionaires and billionaires" is wrong?

It is not a complicated argument. Moreover, it is an argument that has been articulated many times in plain English by conservative talk show hosts and by others in print. It has nothing to do with being worried about the fate of millionaires or billionaires, who can undoubtedly take care of themselves.

What we all should be worried about are high tax rates driving American investments overseas, when there are millions of Americans who could use the jobs that those investments would create at home.

Yet Obama has been allowed to get away with the emotional argument that the rich can easily afford to pay more, as if that is the issue. But it will be the issue if no one says otherwise.

One of the recent sad reminders of the Republicans' tendency to leave even lies and smears unanswered was a television replay of an old interview with the late Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was destroyed by character assassination.

Judge Bork said that he was advised not to answer Ted Kennedy's wild accusations because those false accusations would discredit themselves. That supposedly sophisticated advice cost the country one of the great legal minds of our time — and left us with a wavering Anthony Kennedy in his place on the Supreme Court.

Some people may take solace from the fact that there are some articulate Republicans like Marco Rubio who may come forward in 2016. But with Iran going nuclear and North Korea developing missiles that can hit California, it may be too late by then.

[twinder]

Would anyone be TOO upset if North Korea hit CA with a nuke? Just saying.

[relenemiller]

Well Todd, that's thought provoking.

[philunderwood]

Does the Republican Party have a future?

By Star Parker

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The United States, from Day One, was a project about principles and ideals.

The superpower that emerged and grew from the handful of colonists that began settling here was not the product of where those colonists happened to land, but of the ideals and principles in their heads and hearts, applied in how they lived their lives.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to address one great blot on the nation's founding legacy: the existence of slavery in a nation founded under the ideal of freedom under God.

Runaway slave and self-educated abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said, "I am a Republican, a black, dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress."

Douglass called Abraham Lincoln, America's first Republican president, "emphatically the black man's president."

When some 30 years ago I told the welfare officer not to bother showing up again at my home -- when I decided that my own future would be based on the values of Scripture, work and personal responsibility -- there was no doubt in my mind what party would become my political home.

The party of "freedom and progress," the party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

But, as longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once observed, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

It 's no mystery why the Republican Party is having a hard time today. No matter how hard you squint and try to discern the values of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, or any values for that matter, in those now wielding the money and power at the top of the party, they've disappeared.

These establishment Republican leaders and operatives are not about ideals and values but business -- their own business.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is that unemployment will "remain above 7.5 percent through next year. That would make 2014 the sixth consecutive year with a jobless rate that high, the longest stretch of such elevated unemployment in 70 years."

Yet the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 could not defeat the current occupant of the White House.

In the party that is supposed to be about freedom and personal responsibility, party operatives want to blame everyone else for their own failures.

Worse, they want to pin it on candidates who actually take seriously the traditional values of their party.

Karl Rove would like to weed out candidates like former Missouri congressman Todd Akin.

Akin, defeated by Democrat incumbent Claire McCaskill in the Senate race in Missouri, was a six-term Republican congressman with a flawless conservative record.

For most of 2012, he was ahead of McCaskill in the polls. Then, in August, he expressed himself poorly in an interview about abortion. Despite his apologies and efforts to clarify himself, his own party abandoned him.

McCaskill ran ads, over and over, showing the Republican's own candidate Mitt Romney questioning Akin's qualifications. This race could have been saved. But the party elite wasted not a second to dump Akin because they were not comfortable with his conservative values to begin with.

We're living in a deeply troubled country today. Americans are looking for answers, not a political class feathering its own nest.

There are tens of millions of conservative American patriots who seek an opposition party to represent their conviction that America will not get back on the path to strength and prosperity without restoration of freedom, limited government, free markets and traditional values.

Today's big question is whether the Republican Party is going to be that opposition party. If not, it is not conservative values and convictions that will be abandoned. It will be the Republican Party.

[philunderwood]

'Me Too' Republicans

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Many ideas presented as "new" are just rehashes of old ideas that have been tried before — and have failed before. So it is no surprise that the recent "Growth and Opportunity Project" report to the Republican National Committee is a classic example of what previous generations called "Me too" Republicanism.

These are Republicans who think that the key to winning elections is to do more of what the Democrats are doing. In effect, they say "me too" on issues such as immigration, in hopes of gaining more new votes than they lose by betraying their existing supporters.

In the wake of last year's presidential election debacle for the Republicans, the explanation preferred by "moderate" Republicans has been that the GOP has been too narrowly ideological, and needs to reach out to minorities, women and young people, rather than just to conservatives.

In the words of the "Growth and Opportunity Project," the problem is that conservative Republican candidates have been "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac."

But the report itself says that the Republicans' election problems have been at the national level, not at the state level, where a majority of the governors are Republicans. Are the Republican moderates suggesting that the reason Mitt Romney lost in 2012 is that he was driving around in a conservative cul-de-sac? Romney was as mushy a moderate as Senator John McCain was before him — and as many other Republican losers in presidential elections have been, going all the way back to the 1940s. The only Republican candidate who might fit the charge of being a complete conservative was Ronald Reagan, who won two landslide elections.

The report to the Republican National Committee is on firmer ground when it says that national Republican candidates have not articulated their case very well — that "we too often sound like bookkeepers." Republican candidates "need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms."

Absolutely. It doesn't matter how good your case is, if you don't bother to articulate it so that voters understand you.

The heart of the report, however, is the argument that Republicans need to reach out to minorities, women and young people. With Hispanics and blacks becoming a growing proportion of the American population — and both groups voting overwhelmingly for Democrats — the Republicans are obviously in big trouble in future elections if they don't do something.

But if they do what this report advocates, they could be in even bigger trouble. Here again, facts seem to mean nothing to those who wrote this report.

They propose going through such organizations as the NAACP to reach black voters, as if the NAACP owns blacks, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Not only is the NAACP virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, the kind of black voters that the Republicans have some hope of winning over are unlikely to be enthralled to the NAACP, and many of them may see through such race hustlers.

Or do all blacks look alike to those who wrote this report?

It is the same story with Hispanics and Asian Americans. The Republicans are supposed to go through these groups' "leaders" as well — mostly leaders tied to the Democratic Party ideologically or otherwise. You might think that a Republican Party that talks about individualism would try to appeal to individuals.

Individuals whom the Republicans have some chance of winning over may well be a small minority within these groups. However, if the GOP can reduce the Democrats' 80 percent of these groups' votes to 70 percent, that can swing elections.

But a shotgun approach to minorities won't do it.

When it comes to minority votes, the Democratic Party is much like Eastman Kodak during the long period when it sold the vast majority of the film and cameras in the country. How did its competitors manage to drive Kodak into bankruptcy?

Not by saying "me too" while trying to imitate Kodak and trying to outdo Kodak with better film and better film cameras. They went digital instead. But that approach requires a lot more thought than apparently went into this report. Polls and focus groups are not a substitute for thought.

[philunderwood]

High Risk, Low Yield

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

This has been the worst time, politically, for President Barack Obama since he took office. Recent polls reveal that public confidence in both his domestic and foreign policies has been falling, amid revelations about their defects and dangers. Even people who once supported and defended him have now turned against him.

There have even been rumblings against Barack Obama in the Congressional Black Caucus and among labor unions that were a major factor in helping him get elected and re-elected.

Two of President Obama's own former Secretaries of Defense have publicly criticized his gross mishandling of the Syria crisis, which has emboldened America's enemies and undermined our allies around the world.

As ObamaCare continues to go into effect, step by step, its high costs and dire consequences for jobs have become ever more visible — as have the lies that Obama blithely told about its costs and consequences when it was rushed into law too fast for anyone to see that it would become a "train wreck," as one of its initial Democratic supporters in the Senate has since called it.

As more and more revelations have come to light about the cynical and dangerous misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to harass and sabotage conservative political groups, the lies that the Obama administration initially told about this, as part of the coverup, have also been exposed.

So have the lies told about what happened in Benghazi when four Americans were killed last year. Their killers remain at large, though they are known and are even giving media interviews in Libya.

With Congressional investigations still going on, and turning up more and more revelations about multiple Obama administration scandals, the political problems of this administration seem to loom ahead as far out as the eye can see.

What could possibly rescue Barack Obama from all these political problems and create a distraction that takes all his scandals off the front page? Only one thing: the Republicans.

By making a futile and foredoomed attempt to defund ObamaCare, Congressional Republicans have created the distraction that Obama so much needs. Already media attention has shifted to the possibility of a government shutdown.

Politically, it doesn't matter that the Republicans are not really trying to shut down the government. What matters is that this distraction solves Barack Obama's political problems that he could not possibly have solved by himself.

Should ObamaCare be defunded? Absolutely. It is an economic disaster and will be a medical disaster, as well as destroying the Constitution's protections of American citizens from the unbridled power of the federal government.

For that matter, President Obama deserves to be impeached for arbitrarily waiving laws he doesn't like, in defiance of his oath of office and the Constitution's separation of powers.

Chief Justice John Roberts also deserves to be impeached for his decision upholding ObamaCare, by allowing the government's taxing power to override all the Constitution's other provisions protecting American citizens from the arbitrary powers of government.

But, for the same reason that it makes no sense to impeach either President Obama or Chief Justice Roberts, it makes no sense to attempt to defund ObamaCare. That reason is that it cannot be done. The world is full of things that ought to be done but cannot in fact be done.

The time, effort and credibility that Republicans are investing in trying to defund ObamaCare is a high risk, low yield investment.

Even if, by some miracle, the Republicans managed to get the Senate to go along with defunding ObamaCare, President Obama can simply veto the bill.

There is a United States of America today only because George Washington understood that his army was not able to fight the British troops everywhere, but had to choose carefully when and where to fight. Futile symbolic confrontations were a luxury that could not be afforded then and cannot be afforded now.

[philunderwood]

Inarticulate Republicans

By Thomas Sowell

JewishWorldReview.com |

If the continued existence of mathematics depended on the ability of the Republicans to defend the proposition that two plus two equals four, that would probably mean the end of mathematics and of all the things that require mathematics.

Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, epitomized what has been wrong with the Republicans for decades when he emerged from a White House meeting last Wednesday, went over to the assembled microphones, briefly expressed his disgust with the Democrats' intransigence and walked on away.

We are in the midst of a national crisis, immediately affecting millions of Americans and potentially affecting the kind of country this will become if ObamaCare goes into effect — and yet, with multiple television network cameras focused on Speaker Boehner as he emerged from the White House, he couldn't be bothered to prepare a statement that would help clarify a confused situation, full of fallacies and lies.

Boehner was not unique in having a blind spot when it comes to recognizing the importance of articulation and the need to put some serious time and effort into presenting your case in a way that people outside the Beltway would understand. On the contrary, he has been all too typical of Republican leaders in recent decades.

When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about "OMB numbers" versus "CBO numbers" — as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown. Why talk to them in Beltway-speak?

When Speaker Boehner today goes around talking about the "CR," that is just more of the same thinking — or lack of thinking. Policy wonks inside the Beltway know that he is talking about the "continuing resolution" that authorizes the existing level of government spending to continue, pending a new budget agreement.

But, believe it or not, there are lots of citizens and voters outside the Beltway. And what is believed by those people whom too many Republicans are talking past can decide not only the outcome of this crisis but the fate of the nation for generations to come.

You might think that the stakes are high enough for Republicans to put in some serious time trying to clarify their message. As the great economist Alfred Marshall once said, facts do not speak for themselves. If we are waiting for the Republicans to do the speaking, the country is in big trouble.

Democrats, by contrast, are all talk. They could sell refrigerators to Eskimos before Republicans could sell them blankets.

Indeed, Democrats sold Barack Obama to the American public, which is an even more amazing feat, considering his complete lack of relevant experience and questionable (at best) loyalty to the values and institutions of this country.

The Democrats have obviously given a lot of attention to articulation, including coordinated articulation among their members. Some years ago, Senator Chuck Schumer was recorded, apparently without his knowledge, telling fellow Democrats to keep using the word "extremist" when discussing Republicans.

Even earlier, when George W. Bush first ran for President, the word that suddenly began appearing everywhere was "gravitas" — as in the endlessly repeated charge that Bush lacked "gravitas." People who had never used that word before suddenly began using it all the time.

Today, the Democrats' buzzword is "clean" — as in the endlessly repeated statement that Republicans in the House of Representatives should send a "clean" bill to the Senate. Anything less than a blank check is not considered a "clean" bill.

The Constitution gives the House of Representatives the responsibility to originate all spending bills, based on what they think should and should not be funded. But the word "clean" is now apparently supposed to override the Constitution.

If Republicans want to show some seriousness about articulating their case, they might start by deleting the abbreviation "CR" from their vocabulary. As has been said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." That journey is long overdue.

[philunderwood]

Thomas Sowell:

"No one seems as certain that they know what the Republicans need to do to win presidential elections as those Republicans who have lost presidential elections, such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole. Moreover, people take them seriously, and seem not to notice that what the losers advocate is the opposite of what won Ronald Reagan two landslide election victories."