Barack Obama is President-Elect right now in large part because of his appeal as a pragmatic centrist despite his voting record. In charge of finding Democratic candidates who could win Congressional seats the past two election cycles, Rahm Emmanuel did not recruit typical left-leaning Democratic candidates and hope they were competitive. Instead, he recruited “Blue Dog” Democrats like Jim Webb who are anti-big government spending and have centrist appeal. Granted, the Democrats had the luck of Republican corruption investigations on the national news and having voters tie the entire party to an incredibly unpopular president was not helpful either, but if Republicans want to get back to winning competitive races, they need to take a page from the Democratic playbook and run in the middle of the road. We cannot win back the country with a neo-conservative agenda. We need to position ourselves firmly in the center-right.
We lost young voters, we lost suburban voters, we lost college-educated voters, and we lost Latino voters. We could appeal to all these voting blocs but at times it seems like we are not even trying.
This does not mean we need to let go of conservative ideals. On the contrary, we absolutely have to get back to being the party that rallies against wasteful government spending and tries to bring morals back to American politics. More Americans call themselves “conservative” than “liberal” and the United States remains a center-right country. Running on ideology alone is not enough, however, not when the Bush Administration’s out of control spending and so many Republican scandals are fresh on voters’ minds. We need to be the party of big ideas and the party of real solutions for the financial crisis and an ever dangerous geo-political situation. We need to provide a viable alternative to the Democratic Party for everyone in the center-right and we need 21st century campaign strategies to get our message across.
We also need the right leaders. Fortunately, we have no shortage of emerging stars. Governor Bobby Jindal is a young, Ivy-League and Oxford educated first-generation American with unquestionable conservative reformer credentials who many see as the “Anti-Obama.” Governors Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Charlie Crist, Jon Huntsman Jr., Jodi Rell, Haley Barbour, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mitch Daniels, and others are popular, effective, and prime examples of how Republicans are successful around the country when they work to appeal to their electorate. In Congress, Eric Cantor might be conservatives’ best hope for a new Newt Gingrich style Republican uprising but it is also important for moderates like Lindsey Graham and Mel Martinez in the Senate to show we can be a big-tent party that represents center-right America.
The task at hand may appear hopeless at times but as soon as Republicans get back to common sense Republican ideals, our time in opposition will not last long.
Last 5 posts by Abel S. Delgado
- Let’s Support the Cantwell-McCain Bill - January 6th, 2010
- Deeds Gets Dirty, Doesn’t Win Anyway - November 2nd, 2009
- Obama & The Berlin Wall - October 25th, 2009
- The Nobel Prom King - October 11th, 2009
- Bureaucratizing Interrogations a Horrible Idea - August 28th, 2009
The middle of the road is the wrong track. I can’t stand these moderate republicans and their talks of bipartisanship. Any time these legislators start discussing bipartisanship you can be sure two things are going to happen: 1)its gonna be expensive, doesn’t matter what it is they are trying to do, and 2)its gonna reduce liberty in some shape or form, that is why they need both sides to agree. Both of these are profoundly unconservative.
Arguably one of the best presidents over the last century also happened to be the most radical and furthest to the right on the ideological spectrum, Ronald Reagan. Although Reagan was far from perfect, his ideas and vernacular at the time was very pro-freedom, i.e. pro-libertarian in nature. He even stated as much, that the fundamentals of conservatism was grounded in libertarian thought.
Republicans would do well to focus on this notion alone for principled governance, and they should pledge this to the American people, as noted it came from a man known as Mr. Conservative: “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interest’, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very I can.”
I´d like to point out to everyone one of the main reasons President Reagan was so popular and there was such a thing as “Reagan Democrats´´was because he could make friends with and even work with people like Democratic Speaker Tip O´Neill. Of course we should focus on principled governance, but one of the principles of representative government is actually representing the electorate. Our electorate is not as conservative as Mr. Conservative unfortunately, so in order to survive and work for our most important ideals, we must adjust to the current situation.
I guess it depends on what “middle of the road” means.
I like to forget about the road, and focus on the journey. We will sometimes win and sometimes lose arguments on which side of the road is better. We need to get past that thinking and move toward an idea of where is the road taking us and is there a better route.
I’m mixing analogys too much here, but instead of picking and choosing the planks that seem to be palatable to a majority of the population – let’s lead and explain to a majority of the population where success is. In other words, persuade a majority of the people that conservatives are main stream, that conservatives are “middle of the road” not try to catch the majority with what we think will swing them over.