Rush is Right:Why repeat the Specter mistake

RUSH: Try this headline in the Boston Globe today: "GOP Embracing its Maverick." I said, "Oh, is the GOP getting friendlier with McCain?" Then the subhead says, "Tough Race Makes Chafee an Asset." You know, this Specter experience is a mistake. Why do you keep repeating history here? "Senator Lincoln Chafee hopped out of the driver's seat of his beige Toyota Prius..." I was really hooked after that line. "Senator Lincoln Chafee hopped out of the driver's seat of his beige Toyota Prius, a car with a dent on the side and 'I am electric' blazoned across the back window, and dashed through the rain. He'd forgotten his umbrella at the office, so he was soaked before he made it inside the Meadowbrook Farms Elementary School. Then for the better part of an hour, Senator Chafee talked with a classroom of third graders about the importance of saving the rainforest. 'The challenges to balance between the animals and our needs,' Chafee told the children. 'We're all part of the earth ourselves. We have to share it.'" (Laughing.) The challenge is to balance between the animals and our needs. "With the Republicans..." Let's cut to the chase here.

"With the Republican Party's hold on the Senate looking tenuous," remember, now, this is the Boston Globe, "the party of Wall Street and the religious right is suddenly chummy with its most prominent environmentalist. With a tough race looming, and a solid conservative challenging Chafee in the primary, Republican elites are sending checks to Rhode Island -- to help Chafee. And the Democrats, eager to regain control of the Senate, are targeting the one Republican to the left of much of their own caucus. 'Chafee can deny that he is the elephant in the room until he is blue in the face,' said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, 'but he'll never be able to hide the degree to which he is beholden to George Bush and the Bush agenda.' Chafee's response to partisans on both sides has been to make an asset out of his quirkiness. He is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite. He insists on driving himself around town. He rarely delivers speeches on the Senate floor, and rarely raises his lilting voice. As Chafee, 52, is the first to acknowledge, his reliance on the Karl Rove political machine means he is choosing his battles with the president a bit more carefully these days; he calls it a 'mutual nonaggression pact' with the White House. Chafee says he'd rather have Rove and company working for him than against him."

Let's take this story here: Republicans apparently embracing their maverick and going to the mat here to get Lincoln Chafee reelected -- and we've heard this before. "Yeah, once these guys benefit from Bush and Rove and all that campaigning for them and helping get reelected, they'll be more loyal." Ahem. Right. We've heard this. Now, it is Rhode Island, and there may not be, you know, a perfect alternative to Lincoln Chafee, but nevertheless Dick Armey has a piece yesterday in the Wall Street Journal's web page, OpinionJournal.com called, "Why Are Republican Leaders Governing Like Democrats?"

He says, "In all my years in politics, I've never sensed such anger and frustration from our volunteers--those who do the hard work of door-to-door mobilization that Republican candidates depend on to get elected. Across the nation, wherever I go to speak with them, their refrain is the same: 'I can't tell a dime's worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats.' Our base rightly expects Republicans to govern by the principles--lower taxes, less government and more freedom--that got them elected. Today, with Republicans controlling both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, there is a widening credibility gap between their political rhetoric and their public policies. What will happen to Republicans if these freedom-loving, grassroots activists don't show up for work next fall? The elections earlier this month may be an indication of the answer. Colorado's Gov. Bill Owens, once the future presidential nominee of choice among smaller-government conservatives, teamed up with liberal Democrats in the Legislature to expand the state budget by billions of dollars and grab taxpayers' refunds for years to come. The Democratic big spenders got what they wanted, but it has left the Republican Party fractured and effectively ended Gov. Owens's future as a Republican leader. Here is one of Armey's Axioms: Make a deal with the devil and you're the junior partner. At the national level, where President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are presiding over the largest expansion of government since LBJ's Great Society, things are no better. Our political base expects elected leaders to cut both tax rates and spending, because they know that the real tax burden is reflected in the overall size of government. Instead, we have embarrassing spectacles like the 2005 highway bill. Costing $295 billion, it is 35% larger than the last transportation bill, fueled by 6,371 earmarks doled out to favored political constituencies. By comparison, the 1987 highway bill was vetoed by Ronald Reagan for containing relatively few (152) earmarks. Overall, even excluding defense and homeland security spending, the growth rate of discretionary spending adjusted for inflation is at a 40-year high. All of our leaders are complicit in this spending spree. President Bush has yet to veto a single spending bill. The House leadership refuses to rein in appropriators, claiming, as one of them preposterously put it, that 'there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.'" That's DeLay that said that. Armey started getting a-hem in without mentioning his name.

Now, I'm going to stop at this point and ask you: Why does this happen? We explore this all the time, but in the example that Armey gives her of Colorado governor Bill Owens, why did Bill Owens want to go make a deal with the Democrats in Colorado when he was considered such a strong asset and was said to have such a rosy future as a conservative Republican? I have no idea, not living in Colorado, and not being around the circumstances there on a daily basis, but I can only guess. I can only guess that in some of these Republicans' minds -- and remember, this is just pure speculation, but in some of their minds I think there's a notion that the American people are tired of all the fighting and we want everybody to get along. So I think Republicans actually think they're going to be given credit by voters for being cooperative and not being "obstructionist." They're not stopping things, not vetoing bills, and when you're the governor, of course, you're one person, and the press can zero in on you. The legislature is a whole bunch of people, and an individual is not going to get the same scrutiny in the legislature as a governor is, and even when the whole body of the legislature gets scrutiny, it's not going to come under as vicious an assault as a governor is. It's the only thing I can think of, but it still astounds me, because the election returns are the evidence that all these Republicans should be looking at. When you run as a conservative, you win. When you run on conservative ideas and principles, you win. It's after you get to wherever you serve, be it a state capital, or Washington, and you don't continue to try to implement all that, that you run into trouble.

Now, Armey says, "I have always believed that good policy is good politics for Republicans. Reagan won against an incumbent president in 1980, declaring in his first inaugural address that 'government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.' I beat an incumbent Democrat in 1984, against the dire predications of my party's political experts, on an aggressive agenda of smaller government and Social Security reform based on large personal retirement accounts. In 1994, Republicans took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, running on the Contract with America, a clearly articulated public policy agenda based on smaller, smarter government. Conversely, when we let politics define our agenda, we get in trouble. The highway bill is one example in which the criterion of choice was politics. An even better example was 2003's expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. This was an explicitly political effort to take health care 'off the table' for the 2004 elections. I said at that time that the proposed legislation was 'a case where bad politics has produced a bad policy proposal.' I predicted that the deal was 'bad news for senior citizens and possibly even worse political news for the Republican Party.'" And they're still having trouble with this. People aren't signing up for it because they don't want it. It's not needed.

"Here is another one of Armey's Axioms: You can't get your finger on the problem if you've got it in the wind. Bad policy is bad politics. The 2003 expansion of Medicare enacted by Republicans has dramatically increased the financial pressures on an already broken program, and it has become a political albatross around the necks of Republicans who voted for it. As the party of smaller government, Republicans will always have a more difficult job governing than Democrats do. Government naturally wants to expand. It is always easier for politicians when both you and your political base truly believe that there is a new government program to solve any problem, real or imagined. We will always have to work harder and be more entrepreneurial than our political opponents when it comes to implementing reforms. To succeed in the future, the Republican Party must get back to basics. We need, in effect, another Republican takeover of Congress, reaffirming a commitment to less government, lower taxes and more freedom. As in 1994, this revolution will be driven by the Young Turks of the party--the brave backbenchers more inspired by Reagan than the possibility of a glowing editorial on the pages of the New York Times. Indeed, this is already happening."

Then he quotes Mike Pence, Jeff Flake and Jeb Hensarling, all people we've talked about and praised on this program. He says, "None of this will be easy. The good news for Republicans willing to do the heavy lifting is that the 'ideas' of the left are bankrupt. Notice that the brightest liberal politicians, like Hillary Clinton, always move toward our policy ground as they prepare to run for national office." Oh, Mr. Armey, we have noticed this, and it is frustrating as it can be. Every election, Democrats start talking about some form of economic growth, tax cuts or whatever. They know what it takes to get elected but they only do it the last minute, so as not to anger their base. It just adds to the frustration level everybody has. "Why would Republicans want to act like them when they act like us in order to win?" Why do we want to act like liberals after we get elected when it's the liberals who act like Republicans when they have to win elections? "One final Armey Axiom: When we act like us, we win. When we act like them, we lose." When we act like us and win, and then act like them as we govern, we lose. I added a little bit to the Armey axiom.

I do not like the libertarians, but I will vote for them in 2006. Spenders deserve to be voted out of office, even if they have an [R] after their name.

I am a conservative first and a Republican second.

Never trust a man in an electric vehicle. What a loser!

'We're all part of the earth ourselves. We have to share it.' Then let the d@mn animals pay taxes.

Then for the better part of an hour, Senator Chafee talked with a classroom of third graders about the importance of saving the rainforest. 'The challenges to balance between the animals and our needs,' Chafee told the children. 'We're all part of the earth ourselves. We have to share it.'"

One of the greatest losses for Republicans and the country was Dick Armey's retirement from public service.

He had a way with words that skewered liberal noxious nostrums and kept Republicans in synch with their ideals.

..."Tough Race Makes Chafee an Ass..."

Small editing needed, though he doesn't need a tight race.

No reason to get too excited, the "republican" challenger to Lincoln the Commie, is much worse than he.

Laffey is an open borders police state goon.

Sort of an untalented uncharismatic Rudy Guliani.

He made Cranston a santuary city(for illegals and commies). Honored Guatemala matricula cards to give licenses to illegals. Big advocate for open borders and instate tuition for crimaliens.

Put unmarked vans with video cams along roadways to send tickets to motorists driving by. Rumors of kickbacks from the private company that provided the vans and cameras. (illegal) The Democrats had to reaign him in on that one.

Rhode Island democrats had to stand up for the law.(?)

Put in more stop signs purely to raise revenue. Rhode Island has more stop signs already than half the country combined. Traffic is utterly terrible because of it. Increased road rage considerably.

He won't get reelected mayor. No chance for senate.

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