Two important reads on the topic this morning:
1) Byron York's reporting in the DC Examiner:
During the stimulus debate, the strategist argued, Republicans had an actual alternative but were unable to direct much attention to it -- in part because they were focusing so much of their rhetoric on the massive and unnecessary spending in the bill. The debate became a question of an up-or-down decision on the Obama/Democratic plan -- not a choice between the Obama/Democratic plan and a Republican plan. "The coverage of the stimulus bill focused on the difference between the House and Senate versions," the strategist told me, "which were basically two sides of the same coin." The Republican role was limited to a) saying no to the Obama/Democratic bill, and b) having three moderates in the Senate approve of the bill as long as it offered a little less than what Democrats proposed. The idea that Republicans, mostly in the House, had an actual full-scale alternative, was lost. "On the Sunday talk shows, right after it passed, find me one person who mentioned the Republican alternative," the strategist said.So now Republicans want to try something new. They point to last year's debate over energy, in which the GOP got the upper hand on the issue of drilling -- so much so that majority Democrats were forced to retreat from their position. That, the strategist says, was the kind of clearly-articulated policy alternative that Republicans will be seeking to put forward today.
That's a critically important shift. Despite the rallying of the conservative base on the issue of the stimulus, the GOP will not be successful electorally unless it can repeatedly emphasize its alternatives to what Obama and Congressional Democrats are pushing.
2) Patrick Ruffini on "The Joe-the-Plumberization of the GOP" (amen that he gives it a talking to):
When you think about it, a majority built around this solid middle-American base should beat the disjointed liberal rich/poor coalition. This sense of frugality, orderliness, and personal responsibility is something everything aspires to in difficult times. This is why Obama's pitch is fundamentally off-key if framed correctly. People's first instincts in a recession are not to overspend, but to tighten their belts. Obama's address last night assumed that no one is responsible for anything, except maybe corporate CEOs. The banks as institutions are not ultimately responsible. People who took out risky mortgages are not responsible. The Administration is not responsible for sharing in the pain by postponing longer-term projects like health care. And even if they are, everything in a recession is subsumed to the need to throw money at the problem in an attempt to stabilize the system. The risk for Obama in embracing the bailout mentality is that it catches up to you: this is not how ordinary people act in their daily lives without major consequences down the road.In these serious times, conservatives need to get serious and ditch the gimmicks and the self-referential credentializing and talk to the entire country. If the average apolitical American walked into CPAC or any movement conservative gathering would they feel like they learned something new or that we presented a vision compelling to them in their daily lives? Or would it all be talk of a President from 25 years ago and Adam Smith lapel pins? This is why I love Newt's emphasis on finding 80/20 issues and defining them in completely non-ideological terms. We need to advance our ideas without ever once saying the word "conservative" or "Republican" in a speech. We need to define these ideas not as conservative, but as American. We need to be confident, like the left is, that we are the natural governing party because our ideas are in alignment with basic American principles, and quit treating middle class, working class, or rural Americans like an interest group to be mollified by symbolic, substance-free BS.
A fair argument could be made that Joe the Plumber's continued publicity is more a function of media paying attention rather than GOP interest in doing so. Nonetheless, Ruffini's core points stand. Have solutions, articulate them without gimmicks, and don't rely on infusing your points with ideology - independent voters don't care about liberal v. conservative, they care about a government that is relevant and effective.
Posted by Eric Earling at February 26, 2009 07:49 AM | Email ThisWell, the other shoe has dropped and the Rs are in no position to counter the wealth redistributions now being proposed by Obama and a very pliant and powerful Democrat majority in Congress. They won't hold back.
The Rs wasted an opportunity. While it may be nice and pretty to stand back and talk about campaigning and positioning for 20110 and 2012, our world is coming apart. Drudge Report is beginning to hint at the new budget that will be rushed through Congress.
Hugh Hewitt is all over the sneaky things that could destroy our economy from the stimulus such as changing the polar bear listing which could destroy all manufacturing and the amount of miles you drive your car each year (if taken to the extreme). He is all over the Consumer Product Safety Act which Bush and the Congress hastily passed last summer which has dire consequences.
And here we are talking about campaigns and looking good.
Posted by: swatter on February 26, 2009 08:25 AM• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
A real alternative would be spending cuts and deregulation. Other than Ron Paul I have not heard any GOP (including much adored Jindall) suggest this.
Posted by: lysander on February 26, 2009 10:34 AMwow.
This trend of self-flagellation is disconcerting, even to me.
I'd love to hear some honest discussion and debate of ideas and policy without the hyperventilating identity politics we've grown accustomed to. I hope it comes to pass that the talk about what is conservative and what is liberal, and who is a fascist and who is a marxist gives way to talk about what is effective, but that ain't how the faithful like to hear it.
They like their "Two Minutes Hate."
Posted by: Acid Brain on February 26, 2009 11:53 AMI think you miss the point. The Solid Republican opposition to the stimulus bill was exactly the right thing to do.
Sure, it energized the base, but that was not all. It led to a sharpening of the public debate and beginning cracks in the lies being put forward by Obama and the left.
There is a genuine and substantial (though still small, growing, and new) opposition to the Obama far left agenda. The question before conservatives is how to advance the discussion, further improve the debate, make the most of the opportunities, and widen the openings.
The biggest mistake conservatives could make would be to misread, or ignore, the lessons of the solid GOP opposition to the stimulus package.
The solid and principled opposition to the wasteful, inflation-inducing, tax-increasing, economy-slowing, job-killing "stimulus" was the fact of sticking to fiscal conservatism as a principle (at least on this issue). That is the most effective way to both energize the base and truly impact public opinion and move the national debate forward.
As other issues come to the fore - health care, abortion, amnesty, card check, control, global warming, retreat from Islamic fascism - we likewise will need to stick to principle - fiscal conservatism, national security conservatism, immigration conservatism, social conservatism - to have the strongest and most positive effect.
As other issues come to the fore - health care, abortion, amnesty, card check, gun control, global warming, retreat from Islamic fascism - we likewise will need to stick to principle - fiscal conservatism, national security conservatism, immigration conservatism, social conservatism - to have the strongest and most positive effect.
* theocracy
* pushing creationism
* anti-science
that's just about it.
Posted by: Crush the GOP on February 26, 2009 05:36 PMPosted by: DaveinPhoenix on February 27, 2009 04:41 AM