Peter Berkowitz of the Wall Street Journal wants to remind both social & economic conservatives of the power of the Constitution…

“…a constitutional conservatism provides a framework for developing a distinctive agenda for today’s challenges to which social conservatives and libertarian conservatives can both, in good conscience, subscribe.

…

If they honor the imperatives of a constitutional conservatism, both social conservatives and libertarian conservatives will have to bite their fair share of bullets as they translate these goals into concrete policy. They will, though, have a big advantage: Moderation is not only a conservative virtue, but the governing virtue of a constitutional conservatism.”

…while Paul Krugman recommends throwing out the GOP’s divisive strategy for success for the past 40 years:

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.”

The GOP needs to figure out - quick, as in, yesterday - how to grow its party, not shrink it. I suggest it follow Lamar’s lead. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

& it also needs to recognize that the smart strategy lies in crafting a smart government, not just attempting to wipe it out at every turn.

Not to mention remembering that the U.S. Constitution is the party’s (& all of our) friend, even & especially during wartime.

What do you think?

This little clip was sent as a “Christmas present” by the chairman of the RNC, who defended it even though many in the GOP have (rightly) distanced themselves.

It seems like Barack Obama’s not fitting the traditional “liberal attackable mold,” standards of which were set so high by Bill Clinton, Al Gore & John Kerry. That has -apparently- left many in the GOP struggling to find a way to attack.

Well, I’m here to help.

Let me just offer this clear & easy to understand bit of advice for those who are looking for ways to be a naysayer:

When in doubt, don’t call attention to the fact that he’s black.

He knows it.

You know it.

Everyone in America knows it.

Pointing out his skin color - in any way - says a heck of a lot more about you than it does him.

& heaven knows there are - & will be - plenty of things with which to criticize the man. Have patience.

This is not to say you should ignore his skin color, not at all. But -particularly- Republicans, listen: if you still wish to be viewed as a relevant political force in this country, you should take my advice & just leave it alone. You can notice it all you want, but don’t ever think you’re going to win anybody to your side by pointing it out.

[above: Sunset, from the back of the Chattanooga High School - Center for Creative Arts, April 26th, 2003. photo by my wife.]

“When a man has joined a [political] party, he is likely to stay in it. If he change his opinion - his feeling, I mean, his sentiment - he is likely to stay, anyway; his friends are of that party, & he will keep his altered sentiment to himself, & talk the privately discarded one. On those terms he can exercise his American privilege of free speech, but not on any others. These unfortunates are in both parties, but in what proportions we cannot guess. Therefore we never know which party was really in the majority at an election.”

Who said it?

My fellow-Missourian Mark Twain, in an up-til-now unseen 1905 essay called “The Privilege of the Grave,” published in the most recent New Yorker magazine (registration required).

Above: an ad from the Republican National Committee attempting to tie Barack Obama to the Rod Blagojevich scandal.

Newt Gingrich was not pleased. Read his rip-roaring response, in full, after the jump.

“I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over seventy years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative, attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.

The recent web advertisement, “Questions Remain,” is a destructive distraction. Clearly, we should insist that all taped communications regarding the Senate seat should be made public. However, that should be a matter of public policy, not an excuse for political attack.

In a time when America is facing real challenges, Republicans should be working to help the incoming President succeed in meeting them, regardless of his Party.

From now until the inaugural, Republicans should be offering to help the President-elect prepare to take office.

Furthermore, once President Obama takes office, Republicans should be eager to work with him when he is right, and, when he is wrong, offer a better solution, instead of just opposing him.

This is the only way the Republican Party will become known as the “better solutions” party, not just an opposition party. And this is the only way Republicans will ever regain the trust of the voters to return to the majority.

This ad is a terrible signal to be sending about both the goals of the Republican Party in the midst of the nation’s troubled economic times and about whether we have actually learned anything from the defeats of 2006 and 2008.

The RNC should pull the ad down immediately.”

Gingrich is right.

& not because the relationship between Obama’s transition team & its ties to Blagojevich shouldn’t be investigated; far from it. & I’ve not seen a) any indication that the Obama team is stonewalling the release of any/all information or b) any kind of evidence of any wrongdoing regarding the open Illinois Senate seat. You can count on me to squawk if I do.

I suppose this becomes the knee-jerk reaction for the GOP; the ghost of Lee Atwater is alive & well. But it’s also, at the moment, quite tone-deaf. It may be necessary for a further, more blatant & damaging misstep for those in the GOP who are chomping at the bit to bring Obama down for them to get the message that most of the country doesn’t want to hear the same ol’ same ol’ attacks right now.

What do you think?

Check out Marc Ambinder’s analysis on which GOP fights in the 1st year of the Obama administration are worth picking, including:

The stimulus package. First, make that packages, plural. There’ll be several of them spread throughout the year, though there is no consensus right now about how to divide up the proposals. A trillion dollars worth of government spending over the course of a few years is a ripe target for conservatives. Think back to the (Bill-Clinton/Joe Biden!) crime bill of 1994, when Republicans rallied their base against the legislation by ridiculing a tiny part of it — proposals to expand midnight basketball leagues as a way of keeping kids off the streets and out of gangs. Watch for Republicans to settle on a handful of objectionable items and create the impression that the entire enterprise is suspect. Doing so will give Republicans cover to vote against more wildly popular projects.

An interesting graph from SecularRight.org (h/t the Daily Dish) that shows people who are more partisan are more likely to pray more often.

What do you think?

..but at the moment, it’s difficult to tell what it is for the GOP.

Marc Ambinder, on what he calls ‘the Republican Lockbox Dilemma’:

“Conservatives hold more sway in the Republican Party than liberals do in the Democratic party. To put it another way, conservatives make up a larger portion of the Republican base than liberals do of the Democratic base — a larger percentage, even of their national committee that liberals do in the DNC. Therefore, it’s more difficult for Republican candidates to challenge orthodoxy and dogma; it’s harder for a Bill Clinton figure to emerge. You cannot build a Republican Party without social conservatives.

…the high water mark for the modern Republican coalition was 2004, when national security became the glue that held disparate strands together, when George Bush’s popularity pulled just enough voters across the line. But even then, his majority was among the narrowest of the century. And in 2000, John McCain did George W. Bush a favor; the latter, by protesting so loudly against the Pat Robertsons of the world, allowed the former to avoid explicitly indentifying them. (Note well: Bush still lost the Philly suburbs.) You can’t win elections without the strong support of social conservatives, and it seems as if, going forward, Republicans won’t be able to win them without somehow convincing the denizens of Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery counties that social issues are simply less important to them. It used to be that Republicans won the culture wars and Democrats won the economy wars; ironically, the base of the Democratic Party isn’t demographically wired to be responsive to economic populism and more and more responsive to post-material appeals about culture, America’s role in the world, and government reform.”

& then, there’s this:

“Republicans can’t write off everything outside the deep South and the interior rural West. The traditional Republican campaign blueprint has to be rewritten almost entirely. It’s very upsetting, and worrying, to many Republicans operatives when they realize that millions of tax-sensitive voters knew that Obama would raise their taxes and still voted for him.”

My two cents: Sorry, GOP, but eliminating strict adherence to dogma is really the only way out of this. Advocating ’smarter,’ more efficient government (& thus recognizing the truth that government does in fact have a role to play in people’s lives) should no longer be viewed as selling one’s conservative soul to the devil.

FURTHER READING: David Frum points out this is how conservatives in Britain came back from the dead.

What do you think?

Marc Ambinder:

“Habitual voters tend to vote in special elections; in Georgia, there are more Republican habitual voters than Democratic habitual voters; the minds of Republican habitual voters were no doubt focused on Chambliss’s sudden cameo as the bullwark against an overweening Democratic majority. But these habitual voters are an ideologically charged subset of the electorate. On November 4, 3.7 million Georgians voted. Yesterday, about 2.1 million Georgians did.

Barack Obama pulled out all the stops for Martin? Not really. His campaign lent some expertise and people, but Obama did not campaign in the state; radio ads in urban markets doesn’t cover all of the “stops.” If Obama’s coattails still fluttered in December, they were gossamer-thin. In November, they were thick and meaty, backed by strands of expensive television advertising, significant early vote efforts in the black community, and hundreds, if not thousands, more volunteers. The Obama political team chose to stay out of Georgia for the most part, and they did so for several reasons, not the least of which was their desire to send a message that mere politics isn’t what’s important right now. Also, candidly, some Obama advisers didn’t think Martin had a chance to win, and they didn’t want to expose Obama to a losing campaign.
Nonetheless, it is conceivable that the fact of the exisrence of a President-elect Obama helped his opponents, who had something to run against. Jim Martin had change; but the general election already took care of that.”

Scott at Powerline:

“The decisive victory won by Saxby Chambliss over Jim Martin yesterday in the Georgia Senate runoff is reassuring in several respects. A contrary result would have carried a disproportionately large negative impact. It would have added further weight to the notion that some fundamental shift occurred on November 4. It would have added to the demoralization felt by Republicans licking their wounds following the results on November 4. It would have brought Democrats to within shouting distance of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

…

Given the closeness of the Georgia Senate vote on November 4, the magnitude of Chambliss’s margin over Martin is suprising. So far as I know, no one predicted it. In the event, the Republican base proved more motivated than the Democratic base. That has to be encouraging for Republicans.”

Fair point, but I have to wonder if Saxby ‘gets’ why his party finds itself in the ditch right now; I have seen multiple instances both during his 1st Senate term and during his recent campaign that he still believes that George W. Bush & Dick Cheney were actually beneficial to his party. The man, to me, seems nothing but unrepentant, divisive, & clueless.

I’ll be watching.

A concise & fantastic piece from Richard Posner dissects not only the recent splintering of the Republican party, but also what led liberals astray during the Reagan era; he offers excellent advice for breaking the chains of dogma:

First, Republicans:

“The financial crisis has hit economic libertarians in the solar plexus, because the crisis is largely a consequence of innate weaknesses in free markets and of excessive deregulation of banking and finance, rather than of government interference in the market. Believers in a strong foreign policy have been hurt by the protracted and seemingly purposeless war in Iraq (the main effects of which seem to have been discord between the United States and its allies, increased recruitment of Islamic terrorists, and the strengthening of Iran and of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of al Qaeda in Pakistan) and the Bush Administration’s lack of success in dealing with Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. And social conservatives have been hurt by the stridency of some of their most prominent advocates, who all too often give the appearance of being mean-spirited, out-of-touch, know-nothing deniers of science (e.g., evolution, climate change).

The efficiency gap between the competing presidential campaigns created the appearance of a competence gap between the parties. As the campaigns progressed, a surprising number of conservatives switched their support to Obama. Thoughtful conservatives, already disturbed by the accumulation of blunders of the current Administration (the Iraq WMD, Katrina, the Justice Department scandals), culminating in its uncertain response to the financial crisis, were appalled at the iconic status that Joe the Plumber attained in the Republican campaign, the wild rumors spread by the conservative bloggers and talk-radio hosts, and the intellectual vacuity of many Republican candidates and advocates. The Republican Party seemed to have descended to anti-intellectualism–to deriding highly educated people who speak in complete sentences as “elitists,” as compared to the down-to-the-earth ignorance of Joe and his ilk–which sorts badly with the strong intellectual tradition of conservatism. It is a self-defeating strategy of conservatives to argue that “all” intellectuals are liberal and therefore conservatives should think with their guts rather than their brains.”

His solution, which includes pointing out the failures of Democrats (my emphasis added):

For myself, I would be happy to see conservatism exit from the political scene–provided it takes liberalism with it. I would like to see us enter a post-ideological era in which policies are based on pragmatic considerations rather than on conformity to a set of preconceptions rooted in a rapidly vanishing past. We have accumulated a substantial history of liberal and conservative failures. The liberal failures include underestimating the cost of egalitarianism and of social engineering by judges (the Warren Court, Roe v. Wade, the near abolition of capital punishment), and the benefits of discipline, of punishment, of enforcing principles of personal responsibility, and of military force. The conservative failures include overestimating the efficiency of unregulated markets, the efficacy of military force, and the beneficent effects of religiosity. Liberals are wrong to promote unions (described by one wag, albeit with some exaggeration, as the parasites that kill their hosts) and conservatives to promote abstinence as a substitute for condoms in preventing teenage pregnancy.”

What do you think?

Could Neal Gabler have just hit the nail on the head when it comes to the reason the GOP had such a crushing defeat this year? I do believe so. He charts a different course in the rise of conservative success not with Barry Goldwater, but with Joe McCarthy:

“Reagan’s sunny disposition and his willingness to compromise masked the McCarthyite elements of his appeal, but Reaganism as an electoral device was unique to Reagan and essentially died with the end of his presidency. McCarthyism, on the other hand, which could be deployed by anyone, thrived. McCarthyism was how Republicans won. George H.W. Bush used it to get himself elected, terrifying voters with Willie Horton. And his son, under the tutelage of strategist Karl Rove, not only got himself reelected by convincing voters that John Kerry was a coward and a liar and would hand the nation over to terrorists, which was pure McCarthyism, he governed by rousing McCarthyite resentments among his base.

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That’s why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama’s relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Palin. It’s in the genes.”

This reveals a truth, I think, about where to move forward. Let me hazard a guess that until the GOP figures out how to destroy this need to scapegoat anyone - be it gays, Muslims, liberals, abortion rights advocates, Hispanics, etc, etc, etc., it will remain a party entrenched in the minority for the forseeable future. It’s very easy to place the blame for what ails the country on a certain individual or group. It’s harder, but far more rewarding, to find common ground in those same groups.

I can tell you’re just heartbroken, Republicans, especially by the way he seems to be on many of your minds this week.

Subbing for Marc Ambinder, Mike Memoli sizes up the current state of the race for the presidency in 2012:

“As Barack Obama prepares for his third press conference in as many days, it is still remarkable even as we head into the holidays to think that just four years ago, the president-elect was a senator-elect, heading from Springfield to the Senate. Yes, it’s become trite, but what a difference four years makes.

In that spirit it’s interesting to think about 2012, and how our earliest of early senses of the Republican field might change.

…

In the end, it’s where Obama’s presidency stands after two and a half years that will have the greatest impact on the Republican field.”

Memoli talks about recent activity by Pawlenty & Jindal this past week; but again, you should probably take all activity with a grain of salt.

By the way, in researching this post I came across a blog dedicated to the year 2012. Worth a browse.

The latest installment of our listening in to the discussions among conservatives about the future of the conservative movement, after the jump.

There’s been a lot of reaction to this column by Kathleen Parker, a conservative who believes the party’s adherence to an anti-abortion platform is what helped ‘do them in’ this year.

Eunomia’s Daniel Larison:

“The argument that opposition to abortion in particular is somehow a drag on the GOP is one that doesn’t seem persuasive even at first glance, and it becomes less so the more one engages it. In state after state, somewhere between a quarter and a third of Democrats right now say that they are pro-life, but for a variety of reasons they remain in the Democratic Party because they find its positions on economic policy, social services and the like to be preferable. The ever-elusive 60-70% of the Hispanic vote that keeps going to Democrats, despite the alleged “natural” Republicanism of this community (a “natural” Republicanism defined by claims of socially conservative attitudes), remains elusive because of other policies endorsed by the GOP. That doesn’t mean that these voters would move into the GOP column even if Republicans altered their views (i.e., moved to the left) on a number of other issues, but it almost certainly does mean that it is not pro-life planks in the party platform that are driving them away. As I mentioned earlier this month, the rising generation is neither more nor less pro-life than its elders, so you cannot blame the loss of young voters on this, either.

The GOP is losing younger voters, but it is not particularly because of its abortion stance. Part of the shift is structural: non-Christians, non-whites and singles are much less likely to be Republican voters, and there are a lot more non-Christians, non-whites and singles among Millennials than in the past. What is notable about this for our purposes here is that despite significant demographic and cultural changes–Millennials are less religious and more ethnically diverse–young voters’ attitudes on abortion are essentially no different from older generations that tend to be more religious and more white. Another is simply backlash against the Bush administration–most Millennials became politically conscious at the beginning of or during the Bush Era, and like all other groups in the country they have soured on the GOP as a result. An important part of this is what happened in Iraq between 2004 and today. Kerry still won 18-29 year olds in 2004, but not by the large margins that Obama did this year. It is partly the case that Bush made most of the 9/11 generation into Democratic voters primarily through his national security and foreign policy decisions, which his other prominent policies did little or nothing to counteract, but these just exacerbated the party’s problem with younger voters that has its roots in demographic and cultural changes.”

CrunchyCon’s Rod Dreher (after a major dip into the sarcasm pool):

“No, I don’t think the social and religious conservatives are blameless. We were part of this coalition, and we didn’t stand up to the party and its leaders when they were doing things they ought not to have been doing. We own our share of this disaster. But it’s objectively absurd to blame us for the GOP’s implosion, and we’d be fools to let that happen.”

George Weigel of the Ethics & Public Policy Center blames Catholics whom he says voted against their faith:

“This year, the pro-abortion candidate carried every state in what Maggie Gallagher calls the “Decadent Catholic Corridor” — the Northeast and the older parts of the Midwest. Too many Catholics there are still voting the way their grandparents did, and because that’s what their grandparents did. This tribal voting has been described by some bishops as immoral; it is certainly stupid, and it must be challenged by adult education. That includes effective use of the pulpit to unsettle settled patterns of mindlessness. This year, a gratifying number of bishops began to accept the responsibilities of their teaching office; so, now, must parish pastors.”

To which Ross Douthat (insightfully, I think) responds:

“In 1980, ‘84 and ‘88, Republican (and pro-life) Presidential candidates managed to capture nearly all of the Midwest and the Northeast, “settled patterns of mindlessness” notwithstanding. Now here we are twenty years later, with FDR and JFK even further in the rearview mirror - and yet Weigel wants to chalk up the Republican Party’s horrible showing in these regions to mindless “tribal voting” among Catholic Democrats? This is self-deception, and it ill-behooves pro-lifers to engage in it. John McCain did not lose this election because the Catholic clergy failed to anathematize Barack Obama loudly enough, or because Pennsylvanians and Michiganders thought they were voting for Roosevelt or Truman. He lost it because his party flat-out misgoverned the country, in foreign and domestic policy alike, and because of late the culture war has mattered less to most Americans than the Iraq War and the economic meltdown. And pro-lifers who see the GOP as the only plausible vehicle for their goals have an obligation to look the party’s failures squarely in the face and work to fix them, instead of just doubling down on the case for single-issue pro-life voting.

No, social conservatives aren’t the problem for the GOP. But they haven’t been the solution, either: Too often, on matters ranging from the Iraq War to domestic policy, they’ve served as enablers of Republican folly, rather than as constructive critics. And calling Catholics who voted for Obama “mindless” and “stupid” is a poor substitute for building the sort of Republican Party that can attract the votes of those millions of Americans, Catholic and otherwise, who voted for the Democrats because they thought, not without reason, that George W. Bush was a disastrous president whose party should not be rewarded with a third term in the White House.”

I think Douthat is exactly right on this last point.

The problem wasn’t Palin, or her stance (symbolic & otherwise) on abortion - it was the fact that for too many people, that stance was “enough” for them, without looking critically at her other skills or abilities. For so many voters, Sarah Palin didn’t do a good enough job demonstrating why she wasn’t a female manifestation/reincarnation of George W. Bush.

It’s not enough to have a candidate “check all of your favorite boxes.” Palin will never, repeat never, succeed until she is able to convince the public she’s competent, capable, &, above all, curious about how to lead this diverse country.

What do you think?

Ross Douthat gets it exactly right:

“This problem is not, repeat not, a matter of conservatives needing to abandon their core convictions in order to win elections, as right-of-center reformers are often accused of doing. Rather, it’s a matter of conservatives needing to apply their core convictions to questions like “how do we mitigate the worst effects of climate change?” and “how do we modernize our infrastructure?” and “how do we encourage excellence and competition within our public school bureaucracy?” instead of just letting liberals completely monopolize these debates, while the Right talks about porkbusting and not much else.”

It’s putting your philosophy into practice on a ‘micro,’ day-to-day, issue-to-issue level, rather (as has been painfully the case for too many years) saying one thing & doing another.

Too often Republicans have defended Republicans simply because they’re Republicans (which of course plagued the Democratic party for decades): “Go against my core principles? Who cares? As long as my party’s in power.”

This ‘cocoon-like’ way of thinking leads to ruin, a fact I’m sure many in the GOP now see all too clearly.

Praise or criticize the idea itself.

Don’t praise or criticize based on who has the idea.

What do you think?

Republican National Chairman candidate Michael Steele:

“Let´s just be very frank about it. What the party´s got to do is get its head out of the clouds and out of the sand and recognize that the dynamics politically and otherwise around them have changed.”

“The problem is that within the operations of the RNC, they don’t give a damn. It’s all about outreach … and outreach means let’s throw a cocktail party, find some black folks and Hispanics and women, wrap our arms around them - ‘See, look at us,’ ” he said.

“And then we go back to same old, same old. There’s nothing that is driven down to the state party level, where state chairmen across the country, to the extent they don’t appreciate it, are helped to appreciate the importance of African-Americans and women and others coming and being a part of this party, and to the extent that they do appreciate it, are given support and backup to generate their own programs to create this relationship.”

“Outreach is a cocktail party. Coalitions … a relationship. I’m going to look you in the eye. I’m going to be at your table. I’m going to sit and talk to you,”

In other words, adapt.. or die. Republicans, regardless of whether or not Steele is elected chairman of your party’s National Committee, solving this problem is the only way to become victorious again.

Hoo-boy.

Kathleen Parker, already on thin ice for her criticism of Sarah Palin during the campaign, may be setting herself up for a good old-fashioned stake burning among religious Republicans with her column today:

“..the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

It isn’t that culture doesn’t matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.”

While I think she goes a bit too far in painting with a broad brush (”gorilla” “oogedy-boogedy” (?)) I think I agree with the point she’s trying to make. The problem with the approach of many hardcore conservatives is it is far too “exclusive.” The mentality of “you’re either with us or against us.” There has been far too much insistence that the party’s national-ticket candidates, not to mention those farther down-ballot, “toe the party line” on each issue, particularly each issue that deals with faith.

This had been a problem with Democrats for many years, especially on the issue of abortion. & look where that kept them from, say, 1988 to this year.

A sign of a strong party is a willingness to have a big tent. A sign of a weak party is a pronounced intolerance for impurity.

What do you think?

UPDATE:

Jonah Goldberg:

“For the record, I have no problem with arguments about how the GOP has become too religious. I ended my book with pretty much that argument. I opposed Mike Huckabee vociferously because he seemed the quintessential rightwing progressive imbued with a rightwing social gospel. These are all good arguments to make and they have good responses to them. But please drop the nonsense about how the G-O-D people or the Palin people are low brows and beasts. There are low brows and beasts everywhere, on every side of the ideological spectrum. Maybe if you got more ecumenical hate email you’d realize that.”

Conservative columnist & former Bush speechwriter David Frum becomes the latest to leave the National Review, which in its heyday was the center of conservative intellectual thought (now a shell of its former self, in my opinion).

Frum was one of the many Cassandras this election cycle who warned Republicans to broaden its base before it was too late.

He’s now started a new site called ‘TheNewMajority.com,’ which we’re adding to our blogroll. Here’s his mission statement:

“The New Majority will broaden the appeal of the Republican party by promoting a fiscally responsible philosophy toward government & lending resources to Republicans who support an inclusive, mainstream approach toward politics.”

You can read my earlier posts on Frum & his ideas here, here, here, & here.

Also, click here for a recent soundbite in which he pretty much sums up (for me) the reason behind the Sarah Palin phenomenon (hat tip: A Fish in the Percolator).

From Newsweek:

1. Avoid mindless opposition. We should support President Obama when he is right (Afghanistan), persuade him when his mind appears open (trade) and oppose him when he is wrong (taxes). It is the Republican Party’s job to hold him accountable on the merits only.

4.Republicans must regain ground among critical voting groups. Voters ages 18–29 voted Democratic by a 2-to-1 margin. A market-oriented “green” agenda that’s true to our principles would help win them back. Hispanics dropped from 44 percent Republican in 2004 to 31 percent in 2008. The GOP won’t be a majority party if it cedes the young or Hispanics to Democrats. Republicans must find a way to support secure borders, a guest-worker program and comprehensive immigration reform that strengthens citizenship, grows our economy and keeps America a welcoming nation. An anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal. As the party of Lincoln, Republicans have a moral obligation to make our case to Hispanics, blacks and Asian-Americans who share our values. Whether we see gains in 2010 depends on it.

& probably what I think is the most important:

10. The GOP must master new media. Today, more than 70 percent of Americans say they find news online; 37 percent are online daily looking for it. Democrats have successfully developed tools to exploit online advocacy, and Republicans must spend more time and energy doing the same. The Web edge we had through 2004 is gone.

]]> http://vote08.freedomblogging.com/2008/11/17/back-to-the-drawing-board-with-karl-rove/7752/feed/ http://vote08.freedomblogging.com/2008/11/15/in-case-you-think-it-isnt-reaganesque/7634/ http://vote08.freedomblogging.com/2008/11/15/in-case-you-think-it-isnt-reaganesque/7634/#comments Sat, 15 Nov 2008 18:16:33 +0000 Dan Lehr http://vote08.freedomblogging.com/2008/11/15/in-case-you-think-it-isnt-reaganesque/7634/

Charles M. Blow:

“In 1980, the Republican Party platform spoke at length to blacks and Hispanics, promising to stand “shoulder to shoulder with black Americans” in the fight against racism and to “pursue policies that will help to make opportunities of American life a reality for Hispanics.” That year, Ronald Reagan captured 14 percent of the black vote, becoming the last Republican to do so. He also doubled the Hispanic support that Gerald Ford had enjoyed in the previous election.

The 1980 platform went on to make a specific pitch to the nation’s youth, committing itself to broadening “the involvement of young people in all phases of the political process.” Reagan won 44 percent of the youngest voters in 1980, and that support grew to 61 percent when he was re-elected in 1984. No Republican has seen this level of support from that demographic since.”

David Broder:

“…there are signs in this year’s returns of voter shifts that could herald a new political era — and that certainly define the challenge facing the Republican Party.

Several of the most important are pointed up in memos I received this past week from Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, and Steve Lombardo, a Republican consultant. They were done independently, but there were significant overlaps.

Greenberg’s post-election survey for Democracy Corps found that the three most important reasons voters gave for supporting Obama concerned his promises to withdraw troops from Iraq, to cut middle-class taxes and to expand health insurance coverage.

In arguing that the returns spell the emergence of a “center-left” majority, replacing the “center-right” majority of Bush and the Republicans, Greenberg and his colleagues note that Obama won the debate on tax policy with John McCain by 51 percent to 42 percent.

If Democrats follow through by cutting taxes for most middle-class families, as Obama promised, then Republicans could lose one of their hard-rock advantages.”

President Bush, yesterday:

“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, but too much."

George Will, today:

"Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government. But if conservatives call all such spreading by government "socialism," that becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost everything, including the refundable tax credit on which McCain’s health-care plan depended.

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker’s intelligence. And falsely shouting "socialism!" in a crowded theater such as Washington causes an epidemic of yawning. This is the only major industrial society that has never had a large socialist party ideologically, meaning candidly, committed to redistribution of wealth. This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an envious, people. It is also because the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of the strong, e.g., sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.

In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do rent-seeking — bending government for the benefit of private factions. The difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become."

[above: Snakeranch, Missouri, January, 1978. photograph by my father.]

Intriguing idea from Jesse Walker:

“Expel your base or retreat into an echo chamber: If those choices seem dispiriting, Republicans can take heart. They’re the same false alternatives that the Democrats allegedly faced four years ago. Then a politician who hadn’t fallen behind the bipartisan Iraq war — but, unlike Howard Dean, actually wanted to be president — came out of nowhere to beat his party’s establishment and take the White House.

There’s a lesson there. If I were a Republican, I’d ignore the inane Palin debate and start looking around for a politician who had the good sense to break with the bipartisan consensus and oppose the bailout bill before it passed. Then I’d start planning an insurgency.”