Republicans

Posted on February 21, 2007 '08 Election, Conservatives, Republicans

interesting strategy

john mccain must feel that he still has something to prove to social conservatives. despite his consistently pro-life voting record, he doesn’t believe that we are convinced enough to give him our support. why else would he openly call for the repeal of roe v. wade? while i’m not sure that his previous statements on abortion are as strong as what he is saying now, i don’t think that mccain’s record gives us any indication that this is a massive position shift for him.

of course, if abortion was the only concern that conservatives had with mccain, then he would be in a great position to get the republican nomination. however, he has a few more hurdles to jump before he can gain their support.

there is his opposition to a federal marriage amendment, which many social conservatives support. in addition to that, it may be hard for the religious right to forgive mccain for his harsh statements about them during the 2000 campaign. some of them have long memories, and they haven’t forgotten how mccain treated them. even though the influence of the religious right has diminished somewhat over the years, it still exists, and it wouldn’t hurt to have them in your corner when running for president.

then there’s the main disagreement most conservatives have with him — mccain-feingold. this legislation is an imperfect solution to an unsolvable problem. we can’t improve the process of electing candidates by restricting debate.

mccain doesn’t need to prove anything on abortion, but on some of these other issues, he’s got some fences to mend. he’s the closest thing the republicans have so far to a viable conservative candidate for ’08, but i remain undecided on the field. anything can happen in a year.

tags: john mccain, social conservatives, ’08 election

1 Comment Posted on February 17, 2007 '08 Election, Republicans

some thoughts on the ’08 candidates

it’s understandable that social conservatives would have a few legitimate questions about mitt romney. we have all seen conflicting statements that he has made, and it is troubling to think that someone who wants to be president would change his mind on these very important issues purely for political advantage. that’s the indictment that has already been handed down for mr. romney, and many of us may have already convicted the guy.

knowing what I know about mitt romney, i still like him better than hillary, obama, or edwards. it goes back to what i said in a previous post trying to persuade conservatives to vote republican in the ’06 mid-terms — it’s better for us to have a party in power who agrees with us most of the time (which we had) than a democratic party who disagrees with our entire plate of issues.

social issues are important to conservatives, but there’s more to supporting republicans than abortion and gay marriage. there’s also fiscal concerns with taxes and reducing spending, as well as judicial nominations, gun rights, and the growing terrorist threat we face as a nation. even though we may disagree with a candidate’s views on social issues, we still take other factors into account when picking a nominee.

for me, it’s about finding a president (no matter what party he/she happens to be) who scares the hell out of rogue states, bad actors like kim jong il and ahmadinejad, and all other terrorists. i haven’t seen a democrat who gives me that impression. i’m still deciding about romney, giuliani, and mccain.

i would love to find a viable presidential candidate who has always agreed with social conservatives, but i don’t see any of those out there. my ideal candidate would also be a communicator-in-chief, someone who could sell his policies to the american people and rally their support. that’s the kind of president i would like to have, and that’s where i think president bush has really struggled at times. it would also be nice if this person believed in shrinking government and permanent tax cuts. oh yeah…and appointing supreme court judges like scalia and roberts.

why is it that giuliani gets a free pass on his views on gay rights, abortion, and gun control, but every single thing romney ever said or did is sliced up six ways from sunday? if we can forgive giuliani for all these things, we can certainly make allowances for romney.

i don’t know whether romney’s new positions are borne out of political calculation or whether he had a geniune change of heart on all these issues. but if social conservatives can’t accept romney, they also have to reject giuliani, who has been consistent in supporting both abortion and gay marriage.

social conservatives have never gotten everything they want, even with a republican president and a republican-controlled congress. at some point, we have to accept that reality and settle for getting someone who will go along with most of what we believe.

tags: mitt romney, rudy giuliani, ’08 election

3 Comments Posted on February 14, 2007 '08 Election, Republicans

looking for mr. right

it’s a difficult search in real life, but it’s even harder in politics. i don’t know how many more stories i will have to read about how conservatives are unhappy with all the current frontrunners for the republican presidential nomination. they know the kind of candidate they want, and they just don’t see that ONE TRUE CONSERVATIVE in the race right now who is capable of beating the democratic nominee (whoever that is). i admit to being disappointed in the current field, but maybe conservatives will just have to settle for romney, giuliani, or mccain. maybe there won’t be a late entrant on a white horse who will fulfill all requirements of the social and the fiscal conservatives this time. there’s nothing wrong with having high standards and never compromising those standards, but in the political world, we don’t always get everything we want in a candidate.

in supporting romney, giuliani, or mccain, we have to accept that they aren’t really reagan conservatives, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. it makes sense that they would want to embrace the social conservatives and the religious right, because those are still influential groups in the republican party. there is more to conservatism than “values issues”, although those issues are very important.

how should we define conservatism? in its hard-core form, i suppose that the definition would be a combination of the social (pro-life, pro-gun, opposition to gay marriage) and fiscal policies (low taxes, limited government, and significantly lower federal spending). it would also include a no-tolerance policy for terrorists, as well as an affinity for judges who have an originalist view of the U.S. constitution. (did i miss anything in this definition?)

i’m not sure that there are many conservatives out there like that who would be willing to run for public office. most of them are too smart to run and put themselves through that grinder, and i don’t blame them for that choice, but that’s why we are where we are.it would be hard to make the case that any of the current candidates will be exactly what we want, and on some issues, it will be difficult to overlook past history. that’s ok. take the bad with the good, and don’t give up on this field of candidates just yet.

i have a few ideas for my perfect presidential candidate (which i may or may not share in a future post), but i want to know what you think. if you could elect anybody as President of the United States, who would it be…and why?

tags: ’08 election, republicans, conservatives

Posted on January 21, 2007 '08 Election, Democrats, Republicans

follow the yellow brick road

the road to oz sure is getting crowded. on the democrat side so far we have edwards, obama, kucinich, dodd, (maybe richardson), and a few others. lining up for the republicans so far we have giuliani, romney, mccain, duncan hunter, possibly mike huckabee, possibly newt gingrich, and TBA(to be announced). i’m yawning. you can’t see it, but trust me, it’s happening.

saturday we had two more entrants in the political sweepstakes that the presidency of the United States has become.

senator sam brownback (who?) (r-ks) is now in:

My family and I are taking the first steps on the yellow brick road to the White House…

give him points for originality and a clever kansas reference. social conservatives will find much to like about senator brownback on issues of concern to them. it should also please a few people that he opposes the president’s iraq troop surge. is he too far right to gain support of the rest of the republican party who may not take such a hard line on abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, and other such cultural issues? maybe. he does support amnesty for illegals, which isn’t a very popular position to hold in today’s republican party. the bottom line for me is that i want someone who can beat hillary. i just don’t think brownback is that guy.

senator rodham also let slip the worst-kept secret in DC relating to her future plans:

I’m in. And I’m in to win.

Today I am announcing that I will form an exploratory committee to run for president.

And I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country — about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.

I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I’m starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of web chats over the next few days.

the great hillary wants to chat with us mortals. she is even allowing one lucky soul to have the chance to write a guest post at her new campaign blog. i am so tempted to write something, but i will leave it to more talented bloggers than myself to take advantage of this priceless opportunity. does she really want to know what the average american thinks? i guess we will find out.

just a word of advice to john edwards and barack obama…watch out for the flying monkeys.

tags: ’08 election, sam brownback, hillary clinton, yellow brick road

10 Comments Posted on December 28, 2006 '08 Election, Democrats, Liberals, Republicans

just take the field

things aren’t going so well for senator rodham in her possible bid to be our next president. is it possible that she would decide that ’08 is not her year after all? well…no. just because a few polls haven’t gone her way, that doesn’t automatically translate into votes or a nomination for any of the other contenders. that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take those contenders seriously. there is reason to believe that democrats are not so thrilled about a hillary candidacy, and they are looking for someone else to support in ’08. have they found that someone else in senator barack obama? maybe their savior could be mr. “two americas”.

john edwards and barack obama could pose a threat to hillary’s chances if they can present themselves as that someone else, and perhaps even a more electable someone else. they certainly have the capacity to raise ridiculous amounts of money. edwards is still relatively popular, even though he couldn’t seem to deliver his own state to kerry in ’04. obama has come out of relative obscurity (to the non-political folks at least) to become the next big thing in candidates. i’m always skeptical of that tag because that phrase is used too frequently to have any significant meaning. obama should be wary of all the hype, because eventually the honeymoon will be over and people will start to ask serious questions about his record and whether he has the right experience to hold the highest office in the land.

have we found a worthy democratic nominee in this group? the democrats will get the opportunity to decide that later on this year.

for unabashed mockery of john edwards that you would never find on this blog, enjoy wonkette and scrappleface.

tags: john edwards, barack obama, hillary clinton, ’08 election

Posted on December 21, 2006 '08 Election, Conservatives, Republicans

good point

ramesh ponnuru on romney and the abortion question:

I think we ought to be unsentimental about this question. Those of us who favor Romneys position on sanctity-of-life issues ought to care less about its sincerity than about its stability. We ought to care about whether he will abandon the position, that is, not whether he truly believes it. Pro-lifers would win very few votes in Congress if every representative voted his conscience, after all. Presumably a politician is more likely to stick with a position if he deeply believes it; but it is too facile to say that having flipped before, a politician will flop again.

As a test case, I offer the first President Bush. He converted from pro-choice to pro-life, and many questioned his sincerity since the conversion dovetailed so perfectly with his political needs. I myself think that he genuinely became a moderate pro-lifer: But does the answer really matter? He was a steady friend of pro-lifers during his administration, vetoing one pro-abortion bill after another.

If a politician cant project sincerity even when he is insincereor worse, cant do it when he really is sincerethen he is probably in the wrong business. The suspicious timing of Romneys change of mind may end up dooming his candidacy. But in that case, the most likely beneficiary is John McCain, the sincerity of whose own pro-life convictions has been questioned, and we will have to answer the same questions about him.

if pro-lifers want to support a romney candidacy, that’s really the question we need to ask — whether romney’s current position on abortion will change if he is elected. his earlier interviews weren’t helpful in determining the answer to this. i think that that his apparent change of heart is genuine, but i can certainly understand why many social conservatives aren’t convinced.

dean barnett offers a similar defense of romney’s past record here.

social conservatives will never get everything they want. we have had some of the most socially conservative presidents and some of the most liberal-friendly oval office occupants. what has been gained by the social conservatives as a result of their endorsement of certain candidates? abortion is still legal, gay marriage now exists in several states, and congress couldn’t make any progress on that flag-burning amendment. isn’t it possible that the president of the united states might not have the ability to make any major changes, no matter what his personal beliefs may be on these issues?

the same is true for mitt romney. he was lucky to accomplish as much as he did in massachusetts with the opposition he had.

tags: ’08 election, mitt romney, abortion

Posted on November 28, 2006 '08 Election, Conservatives

newt’s got a few questions

it’s hard to buy the argument, if it is made, that iran and syria’s involvement will actually further the interests of the united states rather than their own interests. let’s not forget that iran is part of the problem. neither country is interested in a stable iraq as the united states would define it. syria isn’t even interested in a stable, independent lebanon. we need to evaluate the ISG’s proposals with that in mind.

newt gingrich has a few tests for the baker/hamilton commission here. this is an excerpt from his human events column along with his comments on each question.

Does the Commission Have a Vision for Success in the Larger War Against the Dictatorships and Fanatics Who Want to Destroy Us?

If Iraq were only a one-step process, the answer might be to leave. But the reality is that Iraq is a single campaign within a much bigger war and within a power struggle over both the evolution of Islam and the rise of dictatorships seeking nuclear and biological weapons to enable them to destroy America and her allies. If the Baker-Hamilton Commission does not take this into account, it is a dangerously misleading report.

Does the Commission Recognize That the Second Campaign in Iraq Has Been a Failure?

This is the hardest thing for Washington-centric bureaucracies to accept. There was a very successful 23-day campaign to drive Saddam out of power. It used America’s strengths, and it worked. The second campaign has been an abject failure. We and our Iraqi allies do not have control of Iraq. We cannot guarantee security. There is not enough economic activity to keep young males employed. If the Baker-Hamilton Commission cannot bring itself to recognize a defeat as a defeat, then it cannot recommend the scale of change that is needed to develop a potentially successful third campaign.

Does the Commission Recognize the Scale of Change We Will Need to Adopt to Be Effective in a World of Enemies Willing to Kill Themselves in Order to Kill Us?

We need fundamental change in our military doctrine, training and structures, our intelligence capabilities and our integration of civilian and military activities. The instruments of American power simply do not work at the speed and detail needed to defeat the kind of enemies we are encountering. The American bureaucracies would rather claim the problem is too hard and leave, because being forced to change this deeply will be very painful and very controversial. Yet we have to learn to win.

Learning to win requires much more than changes in the military. It requires changes in how our intelligence, diplomatic, information and economic institutions work. It requires the development of an integrated approach in which all aspects of American power can be brought to bear to achieve victory. Furthermore, this strategy for victory has to be doubly powerful. For three years, we have failed to build an effective Iraqi government, and we now have a shattered local system with many players using violence in desperate bids to maximize their positions. The plan has to be powerful enough to succeed despite Iraqi weaknesses and not by relying on a clearly uncertain and unstable Iraqi political system.

Does the Commission Describe the Consequences of Defeat in Iraq?

What would the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq look like? Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute recently offered this chilling picture:

“The pullback of U.S. forces to their bases will not reduce the sectarian conflict, which their presence did not generate — it will increase it. Death squads on both sides will become more active. Large-scale ethnic and sectarian cleansing will begin as each side attempts to establish homogeneous enclaves where there are now mixed communities. Atrocities will mount, as they always do in ethnic cleansing operations. Iraqis who have cooperated with the Americans will be targeted by radicals on both sides. Some of them will try to flee with the American units. American troops will watch helplessly as death squads execute women and children. Pictures of this will play constantly on Al Jazeera. Prominent ‘collaborators,’ with whom our soldiers and leaders worked, will be publicly executed. Crowds of refugees could overwhelm not merely Iraq’s neighbors but also the [Forward Operating Bases] themselves. Soldiers will have to hold off fearful, tearful, and dangerous mobs.”

this doesn’t surprise me

apparently the national republican congressional committee (NRCC) is out of money, and they have asked me to help them out with an emergency contribution. even the NRCC is spending more money than they have. at least they are consistent with the republicans they support.

i may yet send them a response to their request, but i certainly won’t send them any money. the flawed nature of their candidates caused them to spend more money than they wanted to spend. that is not my fault. the republican party has not listened to its base on spending, illegal immigration, and several other issues. they have not given us enough credit for paying attention to what they have been doing and calling them on it. all this contributed to the downfall of the republicans on november 7th, in addition to the iraq war. when you lose your base, you don’t win elections very often.

the republicans are slow learners. they still don’t get it. what we needed was a change of direction in the republican party. they know what we want and how we feel, but they don’t seem to care, as long as the old guard wins. that’s why they are not getting my money, and why they barely got my vote.

tags: republicans, NRCC

3 Comments Posted on November 9, 2006 Conservatives, Republicans

no dead skunks

dick armey:

Moving forward, my advice to Republicans is simple: Don’t go back and check on a dead skunk. The question Republicans now need to answer is: How do we once again convince the public that we are in fact the party many Democrats successfully pretended to be in this election? To do so, Republicans will need to shed their dominant insecurities that the public just won’t understand a positive, national vision that is defined by economic opportunity, limited government and individual responsibility.

We need to remember Ronald Reagan’s legacy and again stand for positive, big ideas that get power and money out of politics and government bureaucracy and back into the hands of individuals. We also need again to demonstrate an ability to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. If Republicans do these things, they will also restore the public’s faith in our standards of personal conduct. Personal responsibility in public life follows naturally if your goal is good public policy.

Besides the obvious impact on the House and Senate, Tuesday’s elections will no doubt redefine the Republican field going into early presidential primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. It will be up to grassroots activists in those battlegrounds to establish a constituency of expectations that anyone aspiring to be the next president of the United States must satisfy. To voters I say: Demand substance and you will get it. To Republican candidates for office I say: Offer good policy and you will create a winning constituency for lower taxes, less government and more freedom.

republicans didn’t just lose. they surrendered. they were willing to compromise rather than fight for the issues that conservatives considered important. conservatives looked at the republicans’ record and simply said “that’s not good enough for us”. that’s the lesson they need to take from this election. support from democrats and independents is never guaranteed, but losing your base in addition to those two groups is never a great formula for winning elections.

we can do better as republicans. we can learn from this defeat, and maybe even return to the small-government idealistic vision that reagan gave us. that’s the best way to win elections. in the meantime, we need to get our credibility back…one small step at a time.

there’s just one main thing that concerns me about the democrats controlling congress. president bush hasn’t been able to stop congressional republicans on the spending, and he has supported the senate immigration proposal. he is no fiscal conservative and doesn’t see any problems with the minimum wage. what makes anyone think that he will stop the democrats from implementing most of their agenda?

tags: ’06 election, republicans

2 Comments Posted on November 8, 2006 Conservatives, Editorials, Republicans

many unhappy returns

short and sweet recap at this point in the game: democrats win the house, senate still undecided, shepard smith is yelling at somebody for some reason.

this was a defeat for republicans, not for conservatism. the american people didn’t give the democrats a mandate for higher taxes, possible impeachment hearings, more moderate judges, amnesty for illegals, or a policy closer to surrender in the war in iraq. they simply believed that the republicans had not met their expectations, so they decided to give the democrats an opportunity to do a better job governing. i just hope that we won’t be sorry that this choice was made.

philip klein:

We will hear a lot of reasons for why Republicans lost this year. We will hear that they lost because of an unpopular war, an unpopular president, a culture of corruption, a traditional anti-incumbent six-year itch and a dispirited base. But one thing is for sure. Republicans did not lose on a platform of limiting the size and scope of government.

Just as this election wasn’t a defeat for conservatism, it wasn’t a victory for liberalism. Democrats intentionally avoided a publicized “Contract With America”-style platform advancing a progressive agenda in favor of making the campaign a referendum on President Bush. The closest thing they had to a platform, “A New Direction for America,” was not a sweeping ideological document, but a laundry list of initiatives such as making college tuition tax-deductible, raising the minimum wage, and negotiating drug prices. Though a Democratic majority will likely roll back President Bush’s tax cuts, they didn’t advertise that in the “fiscal discipline” section of their platform. (It is a testament to how enamored Republicans became with big government that they enabled Democrats to run as the party of fiscal discipline.)

it is what it is. the democrats now control congress. the republicans need to learn that they don’t ever have a blank check from their base to abuse the trust they were given on issues that we care deeply about. i voted for republicans this time, because i thought that the bigger picture (terrorism, iraq) was more important than our concerns about spending and illegal immigration. (i also wasn’t convinced that the democrats would be an improvement in these areas.)

we can’t go to canada. there are few conservative havens in the world. so we need to stay engaged…now more than ever. we can’t give up fighting for what we believe, because the stakes are too high. keep calling. keep writing and emailing your representatives, no matter what their party affliation is. keep your eyes open.

tags: 2006 election, republicans, conservatives

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