It seemed sweetly serendipitous that barely forty-eight hours after speculating about the potential for “Perot voters” (those particularly concerned about the exploding federal debt) to decide the 2010 — and possibly the 2012 — election that I would chance upon a Gallup poll showing that Americans are more likely than ever to say the government is doing too much.
The strategy for GOP rebuilding is clear, focus on diminishing the size and decreasing the scope of the federal government.
And when we make our pitch, should doctrinaire libertarians and conservative absolutists complain that the GOP has failed them in the past, ask them if they have a better alternative. For better or worse (and sometimes I do think it’s worse), we have a two-party system. Some new third party is not going to arise and supplant one or the other. Sure, it’s happened before, but that was just over a century and a half ago. And yes, it’s happened in other nations, but it’s unlikely it will happen here. We’re not Canada.
The GOP thus represents the best hope to stop the Obama Democrats rush to statism. And on the whole, the party has acquitted itself quite well these past eight months, voting almost unanimously against many of the big-government boondoggles the Democrats have attempted to (and often succeeded at) ramming through.
But, if the GOP wants to win, it has to be more than hope. It must do more than offer lip service to small-government ideology. Leaders must craft a platform around which people can rally and which taps into the sentiment for less government intervention in the economy (and in our lives). For free-market solutions to our nation’s problems.
Larry Ingraham has come forward with one idea: her 10 for ’10 “platform.” Yesterday, Bruce linked another such proposal, a Contract From America. Both are good starts, perhaps as possible preamble to a more substantive document.
As Republicans rally around a proposal, they need acknowledge that our party has not always lived up to its principles. So, perhaps they should include such language in the new document as, “We realize that member of our party haven’t always lived up to our principles and we suffered the consequences for it. You voted us out.”
Such language may not pacify the absolutists among us. (Some of them can never be satisfied.) But, perhaps if those folks considered the consequences of a fragmented opposition to Obama’s Democrats, they might reconsider. Dan Riehl has considered those consequences and they aren’t pretty: “Get your mind around one thing right now, a Perot or Paul-like fracture in the Republican Party in 2010, or 2012 is a guarantee that Euro-socialism will prevail in America.“
To avoid just such a fracture, Republicans need to reach out to those who rallied to Ross Perot’s cause in the last decade of the previous century and to Ron Paul’s in the first decade of this one. And they do this by recommitting themselves to the principles which served our party so well in the first years of this nation’s third century. Principles, which the latest polls indicate, resonate with an overwhelmingly majority of the American people.
But the thing is that the voters that voted for Perot and for Paul also voted for Reagan.
this is not rocket science. Freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
Lower taxes, less spending, no new federal programs. give power to states. etc
This is exactly the right thing we need to do, and of course, it’s what the Dems have done. We need to unite the different factions, which means individuals may have to compromise on some of their pet issues in order to get a candidate who can represent a broader range of people. It’s the only way we can win. If we sweep out the Dems beginning in ’10 and continue to keep pressure on them until ’12 and vote this sorry President out, that is not the end. We need to continue to root out the policies that allowed them to take control in the first place. That means we need local, state and federal pols who will inform voters of issues as the come up. And voters need to stay on top of what government is doing, all the way from our elected school board officials up to the President. People need to take control back.
We have to remember and remind that the larger the government gets, the smaller the citizen is.
(don’t remember where I got that from, but it’s stuck in my head)
unseen, love your succinct summary of this post. 🙂
Good column. Just to clairify, here in Canada we have a 5 party system. We have Conservatives (sort of your Republicans but more to the left), the Liberals (sort of your Democrats but a teensy more to the left of what your traditional Democrats were), the New Democratic Party (pretty much what Obama’s Democratic party is now), Parti Quebecois (Province of Quebec only party that is set on separating Quebec from Canada) and the Green Party (tree huggers who have polled a few pecent of the vote in each election usually in a riding that just manages to screw a main-stream candidate).
Sometimes this form of government works but more often then not we see national elections every year of two and the sales of Tylonol rise accordingly. At least this has been our experience of the last 8 years or so.
If I understand the process in the States correctly each time an election comes the incumbant still has to win the nomination in his/her riding. While it’s usually by aclamation they can be forced to run against a challenger if one is nominated by the riding association, is that correct? If so, conservatives that are concerned about the GOP incumbants (or candidates) being too pro big government (and there seem to be a lot of them) then they should be joining their associations in large enough numbers that they can choose a truly conservative candidate to run. If this happens in enough of the ridings then the National GOP has to take notice.
sadly, if you asked people to identify the one major issue important to the GOP, it would undoubtedly be abortion.
the general public knows the gop isn’t for less government; rather they’re for government that’s “good for you.”
what a joke. and until the gop abandons its social platform flank, it’ll continue to lose, lose, lose.
LOL…if that’s the case, buckeyenutlover, then why did the spinning lying Obama have to back away from his positions on abortion and insist that he wants to reduce it? A lie on his part, but we’ll ignore that for now.
We know delusional leftist liberals like yourself who impregnate underage girls and want to use Federal funds to cover it up are all in favor of abortion. But do you think the rest of the country supports the Obama Party position of Federally-supported organizations telling underage girls to break the law?
Interesting. You can chuck a baby in a soiled utility closet to die, but woe be unto anybody who defends America from terrorist attack.
Talk about “monstrous”.
The Republican Party will forever be a minority party without the social conservatives, the true conservatives. The LGBT wing of the Republican Party would do well to remember the Goldwater nomination and the insane hostility from Democrat and Republican progressives. Socially liberal conservatives recognized the pragmatism of the Goldwater nomination. Funny how one forgets history.
Like Proposition 8 lost, lost, lost in California?
Oh wait, it didn’t. It won, in a deep blue state that Obama won by 25 percentage points! Why? Because a majority of Americans, even in deep blue states agree with Conservatives on social issues.
A majority of Americans value the marriage institution and oppose ‘gay marriage’. A majority of Americans oppose the drug culture of the Democrat party. And a majority of Americans now oppose abortion.
I hate to break it to you, Ohioansemenswallower, but blacks, hispanics, and asians agree with the GOP on social issues, and the white, urban liberals who agree with you are a shrinking demographic while the former are all growing demographics.