Five Mainstream Republican Resolutions for 2010

Individuals like to make the most of New Year's Day, by taking the opportunity of a calendar-based fresh start, for one's career, one's household, one's personal relationships. We vow to lose weight, to write a book, to remodel the attic, to change jobs.

Public companies do this as well. That's what annual reports and fourth quarter stockholder guidance reports are, at the core: evaluations of the past year, and promises to investors and potential investors (and the SEC, while they're at it) of what they intend to do in the coming year -- which mistakes to correct and how, which new products to release, which existing but underperforming products to polish up and push harder, how to control costs while improving value. And they roll this focus down throughout their organizations, in the "bowling charts" and "personal goals scorecards" that management establishes for each employee.

If the Grand Old Party -- in its 156th year -- were to issue some reasonable, achievable resolutions along these lines, what should they look like?

1) End Election Fraud. Arguably the biggest uncovered story of the past few decades has been the rampant growth of election fraud across the country. While most Americans laugh this off as a charming relic of Chicago's yesteryear, nearly every state suffers some type of election fraud today, every year, often making the difference in state races, potentially even making the difference in congressional and presidential contests as well.

From "smokes for votes" in Milwaukee to the "graveyard vote" of Chicago, from judicially mandated late poll-closings in Missouri to busloads of repeat imposter voters in New Orleans, from motor-voter abuse in Oregon to illegal aliens voting in California, from Minnesota Indians casting ballots in South Dakota to double-homeowners simultaneously voting in person in Florida and by absentee in New York, from club-wielding Black Panthers blocking access to Pennsylvania polling places to a corrupt Attorney General quietly dropping their prosecution, it is impossible to estimate how severely the American franchise has been diluted, how many candidates rejected by the voters have been fraudulently elected by criminals.

All that is certain is that it is the most partisan and rampant form of campaign abuse, and is committed almost 100% to support Democratic candidates. If the GOP is to emerge from 2010 with the strength that the public wants it to have, it must combat election fraud with every arrow in its quiver. Winning the most votes doesn't help if we let the enemy stuff the ballot box enough to steal the day.

2) Educate the Public This party doesn't operate by feelings but by wisdom -- thinking with the brain rather than the heart, as it were. This was a problem for the GOP during the ascendency of the modern statist left, because it only takes a cheap 30-second commercial to appeal to a voter's feelings, but it often takes much more time to explain the complex reality of a political issue. In the days when we were limited to costly print, radio and television advertising, not to mention the expense and complications of direct mail, this put the thinking party at a severe disadvantage.

With the free circulation of information on the internet, however, this cost problem is largely mitigated. The GOP can produce good commercials that go viral on YouTube (even the lackluster McCain '08 campaign managed some talent on this front). The GOP can post and circulate its platform so that the public knows where it stands. The GOP can enlist its members in email trees like the phone trees of old. It must learn to do so.

We already do this on our own, as individuals, forwarding articles and links to private websites to our less-ideological friends and contacts, but almost exclusively outside the party apparatus, because the party is identified with parliamentary procedure, not with visionary thinking, high technology, and modern social networking tools. If Democrats can use the tools of Meet-Up and Twitter, so must the GOP.

The party can't rely entirely on private sector conservative media to do its educating for it. The party needs to be the educator, to tell the public not only that the GOP will take certain positions, but also why these are the only right positions to take.

3) Learn From Past Successes The GOP has had only two great years in our lifetime: 1980 and 1994. Sure, we've won in a lot of other cycles, had scattered successes here and there, but those were the only two dynamite years the modern GOP has enjoyed.

The GOP must learn from those years. What worked was the nationalizing of issues and campaigns. It was turning Tip O'Neill's famous mantra (all elections are local) on its head: yes, every campaign must have a well-run local effort, but we mustn't make every candidate run entirely on his own. We can only hope for broad sweeps up and down the ticket if we demonstrate to the public that "this is what every Republican stands for." Otherwise, they're all on their own; the focused Bushes' successful presidential campaigns had no coattails for the underfunded county commissioner and state rep candidate. We must make people want to pull a straight ticket, even in states where automatic straight-ticket voting has been eliminated. We must build the brand.

In 1980, the great Terry Dolan's marvelous TV commercials for NCPAC, and the RNC's great companion commercials for the party, such as the classic limousine in which the chauffer keeps warning the Tip O'Neill lookalike "Congressman, we're running out of gas...," enabled a unified message that demonstrated to independent and even Democrat voters across the country that the problem wasn't just with individual politicians; the whole Democrat party philosophy had failed. We beat not only Jimmy Carter that year, but also nine incumbent Senators, including Birch Bayh, Frank Church, George McGovern, even Gaylord Nelson.

In a more targeted way, Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract With America focused on just a few very specific issues, and took back the House for the first time in forty years.

2010 is a year ready-made for such an approach. The tea party movement has shown that the public is furious and ready for change. We don't need a Ronald Reagan on top of our ticket (though it would be nice!). We just need a party that stands proudly for its platform, and clearly tells the voters that they don't need to specifically analyze every candidate; the GOP candidates all share the same philosophy of limited government and responsible individualism that served our great country for so long.

4) Understand Compromise Democrats understand both the value of, and limits to, compromise. Traditionally, Republicans haven't, either opposing any compromise at all, or destroying all negotiating advantage by leaping into compromises with both feet.

Compromise is necessary in politics, but there's a limit. Start with your position, and anything that moves more in the direction of your position, and away from your opponent's position, is a good compromise. Any deal that moves more in the direction of your opponent's position is a bad one. It's the direction that counts.

Too often, Republicans have forgotten this rule in an effort to be included in a deal, any deal. If a tax rate is 50%, the Republican position should be to lower it toward 10%, just as the Democratic position is to raise it toward 90%. Any drop below the existing 50% is a win; any increase is a loss. But too many in the GOP have told themselves that a mere reduction in the increase is a win -- they would join in the increase to 55 or 60, proud that they stopped it from hitting 90. The voters know better, and have punished the GOP time and again for such idiocy.

We must show the voters that we understand the true value of compromise, and that we understand its limits as well. Voters don't send people to the capitol to make deals, they send people to their state and national capitols to make things better. We have to stop putting the Republican seal on deals "just to be bipartisan." This country simply can't afford for anything to get even one percent worse.

In short, the party position must be not to make every Democrat bill that passes a little bit less bad; it must be to only support bills that will make the country at least a little bit better.

5) Learn When to Let Go In the 1950s and 60s, when National Review was building the conservative movement, they understood that a big tent was necessary, but there was a limit. To unite the social conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, and economic conservatives into a functioning majority, they had to be open-minded. But they also recognized that there were some types with whom they may have agreed on 80% of the issues, even 90% or 95%, but who had one or two issues that made them anathema, because these types would cost the movement other desirable recruits.

So National Review made some difficult decisions... they took a stand on anti-semitism, objectivism, conspiracy theorists. They read Ayn Rand and her Objectivists out of the movement; they ejected Robert Welch and his John Birchers. Even though these people were largely correct, and largely on our side, there were aspects to their core philosophy that jeopardized the movement. They had to go if the movement was to thrive.

A party certainly can be broader-minded than a focused ideological movement has to be. It has to win elections... So the Republican Party can accept groups and individuals that aren't 100% wedded to its platform; in fact, it must.

But it mustn't be so focused on every single electoral win that it allows the Republican brand to become meaningless. Sometimes, given the choice between losing a seat and gaining it with a millstone, we're better off ejecting the millstone.

The Jeffords and Specter seats in the U.S. Senate come to mind. The party supported these millstones for years, only to have them cause endless trouble for us, and then to convert to the Democrat party exactly when they could do the most damage to ours. With hindsight, we would surely have been better off jettisoning them years before. We might have lost their Senate seats for a cycle, or even for two.... but a party free of these renegades would have been able to spend its campaign funds electing others, in other states... and we probably could have won more congressional and state offices in their own states as well because their voters wouldn't have been given such mixed messages about wha the Republican Party stands for. Think of the elections we lose in Illinois, not because of dissatisfaction with unknown legislative challengers, but because of statewide embarrassments like George Ryan.

There are 100 seats in the Senate, and 435 in the House. No one seat is worth jeopardizing the rest, and that's what Republican support of the traitors Jeffords and Specter did for years.

We need to learn that lesson in 2010. Don't jettison everyone who is imperfect, of course, but jettison the ones who will clearly be more trouble than they're worth. As we enter our primaries, let's pick the people who will help us in the general and for years to come, looking beyond the seat itself to the broader issue of party growth. And if that means we may need to nominate someone we think looks "less electable" for an office or two, go ahead.

Besides, sometimes we get surprised: There was a time in each of their careers when people said Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama were unelectable. Let's focus more on supporting candidates we can be proud of, at every level, and less on supporting candidates who just look electable on paper... Voters do surprise you sometimes, for good or ill, when given the chance.

New Year's Day is a time when individuals rededicate themselves to learning from the mistakes of their past, and to work toward a more successful future. Let's encourage our Grand Old Party to do the same in 2010.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance trainer. A former county chairman of the Milwaukee GOP, he has been a recovering politician for twelve years and seven months. Permission is hereby granted to forward this article freely, as long as it is uncut and the byline is included.

Thanks for your comment, Dr. North, but since you’ve inferred an incorrect meaning to my line about not expecting 100% adherence, I have to defend myself, if you don’t mind...!

I completely agree with you that we need all three legs to the conservative stool: all our candidates should be economic, social, and foreign policy conservatives.

But we will always have some differences. No two humans are identical, and no two districts are identical. My point is that some districts will need a candidate who’s a little impure on a local issue like sugar supports, ethanol, or bilingual education, so we can’t be too rigid.

On the other hand, we must draw the line at too many such deviations. In my state, Illinois, a leftist Republican Congressman named Mark Kirk is being jammed down our throats as our US Senate nominee. We must realize that somebody like that is way too far over the line for even a moderate to support.

My closest friend in the legislature for years, now retired, was a wonderful libertarian lady who was right on absolutely every issue except abortion. She was the toughest in the state on economic, criminal justice, business issues... just wonderful... but a moderate on abortion, with us only on the easy issues like parental notification. We need to understand that one or two deviations like that have to be acceptable, but many (as in Kirk’s case) must not be.

Otherwise, we wind up with Spectors and Collinses and Snowes and Jeffordses; who render us impotent even when we have the majority.

JFD

John wrote a great piece, but I think he has missed the point.. We republicans had control
during the Bush years, but our guys crapped in their own mess kits. Now the democrats
are making us eat from the same mess kits.

Our guys had a chance to put an end to voter fraud, but they turned a blind eye to the
problem. Only after the Supreme Court put a stop to the corrupt recounting did Bush
narrowly defeat Gore. Those of us with common sense thought for sure voter fraud would
be on the top of the priority list of problems to fix. Not so, seems we cherish the thought
of crying voter fraud after each election in stead of fixing the damn problem.

Same thing with illegal immigration, we had our chance to fix that during the Bush years
but we relegated the fix to one each screwball named McCain to team up with Kennedy
and once again crap in our mess kits. Now the democrats will provide their fix and trust
me, we will not like it.

Health care is another issue left wide open for the democrats to screw with. Now, after
the fact, our republican friends have all the answers that were so elusive when they were
in power.

There are many more issues the republicans left unattended and now the democrats feast
upon those issues with all too much eagerness to use the destruction of America as their
fix.

No matter the political party in power, if they are not honorable people with honorable
intentions the mess kits are going to be left in a very unhealthy condition.

We need people with honorable values in every district, preferably republicans, but if we
find a void in some district I’ll take an honorable democrat over an insincere stump
speech spinning republican (McCain type) trying to gain election under the republican
banner.

Wipe Out The Corruption

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