Posted on 09/17/2013 5:44:43 PM PDT by markomalley
“This election will be about whose side you're on.”
The candidate saying that last week was New York City’s mayoral front-runner, Democrat Bill de Blasio, but it could have been nearly any Democratic politician. The de Blasio line reflects an important insight into politics: Many voters – especially those who are struggling – lean toward the candidate who appears to be on their side.
It's an insight the Right needs to absorb and make their own. Some conservative Republicans are beginning to get it.
“Today … we find the underprivileged trapped in poverty, sometimes for generations,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Tuesday. “We find the middle class caught on a treadmill, running harder every year. ...”
This may sound like basic common sense, but it’s not obvious to many Republicans.
Mitt Romney summed up his views on the working class in his famous 47 percent speech: People who don't make enough to owe income taxes (this could be a family of four earning $40,000) can't be convinced “that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
What effect did this mistaken view have on the presidential race?
Romney in 2012 won only 18 percent of voters who were looking primarily for a candidate who “cares about people like me.” Had Romney pulled in even 30 percent of this group, he would have won the popular vote.
Herman Cain was blunter: “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!”
The GOP isn’t monolithic on this point, though. In the Republican primaries, Rick Santorum presented a conservatism that didn’t equate material success with interior virtue, and he argued conservatives needed to gear their policies towards helping people who are struggling. These days, freshman Sen. Mike Lee is providing the contrast to Romney.
Lee, in his speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (where I am a visiting fellow), laid out a tax plan that smashes some GOP idols.
First, Lee’s plan isn’t a flat tax. He calls for a 15 percent rate and 35 percent rate. He puts much more emphasis on making the tax code clean and simple – eliminating deductions, streamlining returns – than on flatness. This tacitly accepts the notion of a progressive income tax code. He’s agreeing that the rich ought to pay a higher portion.
Along the same lines, Lee’s tax plan would cap the mortgage interest deduction at $300,000. Most homeowners would see no difference, but lobbyists living in Northwest Washington and Chevy Chase would see their deductions shrink.
Most importantly, Lee rejects the notion, persistent among some conservatives, that there’s something bad about knocking low-income families off the tax rolls. The centerpiece of Lee’s bill is an expanded child tax credit that would not only reduce income taxes to zero, but also offset payroll taxes.
In doing so, he explicitly rejects Romney 47-percentism: “Working families are not free riders.”
In short: Try to help the working class and the middle class by getting government out of their way.
But to prove to voters you are “on their side,” you also need to define “the other side,” and oppose it. For Lee, this means taking on crony capitalism.
“At the top of society,” Lee told the conservative crowd, “we find a political and economic elite that – having reached the highest rungs – has pulled up the ladder behind itself, denying others the chance even to climb.”
He continued in this libertarian populist strain: “From Wall Street to K Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, we find special interests increasingly exempted and insulated – by law - from the rigors of competition and from the consequences of their own mistakes.”
Lee said the U.S. economy is increasingly “rigged for big government, big business, and big special interests. And rigged against the ordinary citizens and forgotten families who work hard, play by the rules, and live within their means.”
Remember, this sort of talk isn’t coming from the squishy center, but from the Red Meat Right – from Utah, to be precise. And it could represent a much-needed libertarian-populist wave in the GOP because it comes from the same well from which the Tea Party sprung.
Lee came to Washington by beating the GOP establishment and K Street in his 2010 primary against “Bailout Bob” Bennett. Others who won in similar fashion – with the lobbyist and business PAC money aligned against them – include Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Pat Toomey.
If Lee's ideas gain steam, we could see a Tea Party for the People.
When Baraq won with $4 gas, 8% unemployment (really 12% plus), surging food prices, and forecast endless trillion dollar deficits, I realized the game was over. We is over the tipping point.
They haven’t been since Calvin Coolidge. Reagan was an anomaly.
Not with the current crop of nut less wonders. The moderate Republican power structure in the RNC will not allow for common sense, grassroots types of Americans.
Pull the plug the Rep party is dead in it’s current form.
Elite people? Lobbyist people? Moderate Centrist people? Pro-abortion people? Squishy on every issue people? They already are.
Very few people look up to people without principles.
SNORT! You're kidding! Right?
They haven’t since before Lincoln, except for Reagan.
markomalley, please note that the following critique is directed against the author of the referenced article, TIMOTHY P. CARNEY, and not you.
The article inadvertently overlooks the following imo. One of the few powers that the states have actually delegated to Congress, via the Constitution, to regulate intrastate commerce is the power to regulate, tax and spend to provide US mail services. This power is evidenced by the Constituton's Clause 7 of Section 8 of Article I.
In other words, neither federal RINOs or federal Democrats have the constitutional authority to prove their leadership skills on most aspects of intrastate commerce other than to regulate the quality of postal services, most federal spending programs actually based on 10th Amendment protected state powers which the corrupt federal government has wrongly stolen from the states.
So Mr. Carney is inadvertantly helping the pendulum of government power to serve the people to keep on swinging between the RINOs and Democrats in DC, imo, instead of helping to swing such power back to the states where the Founding States had intended for it to permanently rest.
The GOP rino leadership has always been unlikable men with nothing in common with normal people, or patriots, or the Christian right, or social conservatives, or any of the things that we flag wavers consider important, it has always been purely corporate economics and power to them.
Many in the GOP just don’t get it. I see it all the time when they make statements about the need for cheap labor while unemployment is still high. They think they are going to win while losing the vote of the working class citizen for the sake of cheap foreign labor. Its stupidity. They are playing pallbearers to the demise of our nation.
Mary had a little veal...
Maybe, if the Congressional RINOs replace the Boehner-Cantor wussy thinking with FIGHTERS WHO ACTUALLY THINK !
Not until they figure out how to successfully compete with Santa Claus.
I agree. When we get rid of the “Fraudulent Republicans” Republicans will be the party of the people. We’ll have to see how many of them go along with Feinsteins who is a journalist Bill.
I welcome some populism from the GOP. But I’d want that to include things like opposition to mass immigration (legal and illegal) and opposition to racial preferences.
“I welcome some populism from the GOP. But I’d want that to include things like opposition to mass immigration (legal and illegal) and opposition to racial preferences.”
I second that.
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