The Redhunter

Today I caught snippets of Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh attacking Jeb Bush and their line of thinking. Ingraham had Senator Jim DeMint on her show and went after him pretty hard.

I think that Jeb Bush and his fellow Republicans are dead right.

Among others attending the meeting were The NCNA - with a "national panel of experts" made up of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Except for McCain, they'll all good conservatives.

Cantor stressed that they are not trying "to recast the party" or branding, but "this is about trying to foster some discussion." Romney said that "there will be no wholesale changes to the core tenets of the party."

This is all very good, I think.

Let's Back Off the Reagan

The problem is that Ronald Reagan has become the third rail for the GOP. Touch him and you immediately come under attack from the guardians of conservatism.

And to my liberal readers let's be clear; I love Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh. I wasn't listening to them today by accident. Yes, we on the right do have the ability to disagree with them and the other conservative talk-show hosts on occasion.

Ronald Reagan was one of the two greatest presidents of the 20th century, the other being Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is rightly an inspiration to conservatives. I was 20 when he took office, and the transition from Carter to him was my formative political experience. It was an age of true heroes; Reagan in American, Thatcher in Britain, Kohl in Germany, and John Paul II in the Vatican. Among them they changed the world in a way that no one had since Churchill.

But Reagan means next to nothing to anyone under 40. They see him as an old dead white guy. I was 20 when he took office, and I have friends who are 40 today and they were still in high school or younger, at the time and is the wont for most young people, paid little attention to politics.

Unfortunately, it's Reagan this and Reagan that from too many conservatives. It was positively embarrassing to watch the Republican candidates for president trying to out-Reagan each other in the GOP debates during 2008 primary races.

If the Democrats treated any of their past presidents like we do Reagan, we'd mock them until the cows came home.

So my message to my conservative brethren is that we need to back off the constant references to Reagan. We need new blood in our party and need to look forward. We've got some very good up-and-comers but that's a subject for another post.

Not a Question of "Too Conservative"

The charge is made that the GOP is "too far to the right." We saw this most recently with Senator Specter's defection.

This is wrong, but it mostly misses the point. The Democrats, for example, are farther to the left than they've ever been and it certainly hasn't hurt them any.

Further, the charge that the GOP is too far to the right is just wrong. President Bush moved far to the left during his presidency, and many Republicans in the Senate went with him. He jacked up spending on all manner of social programs, most notably eduction with "No Child Left Behind," a bill mostly (or at least partially) written by Ted Kennedy.

So if anything the Republican Party of the Bush years was a lot farther to the center than it was in the 1980s. I know because I was around then.

Rather, the problem with the GOP is lack of authenticity, and nostalgia for the past. In this sense Cantor was wrong when the article quotes him a saying that it was not about branding. I think that branding is definitely part of our problem. We are seen as too nostalgic for the Reagain years.

By authenticity I mean "living up to your professed beliefs." The GOP talked the fiscal conservative game, but governed like big spenders during Bush's term. Some of this was straight pork, and some of it was an increase in the welfare state, but it doesn't really matter. The people saw that the Republicans didn't live up to their own standards, and the damage was done.

Jeb Bush is right; one of the reasons the Democrats won in 2008 is because theirs was a forward looking message, not a backward looking one. On

It's not that I think that John McCain's political philosophy is the future of the GOP, because it isn't.

Shortly after the last election I attended a conference Leadership Institute at Patrick Henry in which they shared some survey data with us. One of the more interesting results was that 20% of self-identified conservatives voted for Barack Obama. On the other hand, only 10% of self-identified liberals voted for John McCain. Between this and some other results it was clear that conservatism was not the problem; authenticity was. The public wants politicians who practice what they preach.

So it's not that the GOP needs to become more moderate, or boot the social conservatives. What they - we - need to do is live up to our ideals, and not insist on ideological purity among all of our candidates.

From History to the Future

We've got some rethinking and reorganizing to do, but I'm not too worried. It may take awhile, but we'll be back. The idea that the GOP or conservatism is dead is silly.

I've been around awhile, and so have seen a lot of twists and turns in the political landscape. In the mid-70s, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate the Democrats nearly destroyed the Republicans. Reagan changed all that in 1980. After 12 years of mostly GOP rule, the public was ready for a change and voted the Democrats back into power. But a mere two years after that, the GOP captured Congress. The GOP staged a sort-of resurgance in 2000, but steadly lost ground after 2004 to our present debacle.

From the 19th century to the mid-20th, one party or another held power for long periods of time. After the Civil War the GOP railed against the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion!" and waved the bloody shirt, and except for a few periods mostly ruled the nation. The Great Depression ushered in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his New Deal coalition brought Democrat assendancy that lasted until 1980.

So in our modern age no one party has been able to hold absolute power for very long. This is probably a good thing, and being a conservative certainly gives me hope. I don't blame my liberal friends for celebrating since they're up, as i'd do the same. I'd also advise them not to become too despondent when we take back the presidency and congress, because I've been there too.