Posted on 04/09/2007 8:43:01 PM PDT by jazusamo
April 10, 2007
Can you remember seeing a Republican expressing outrage?
Democrats express outrage 24/7. Ted Kennedy alone has expressed more outrage than the entire Republican Party.
Democrats can lie their way around the world before Republicans can manage to mumble the truth.
The case for conservatism cannot be too hard to articulate. Talk radio is dominated by articulate conservative talk show hosts.
Even the liberal print media have some very articulate conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer and others. There are also very articulate and conservative editorial pages at the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, as well as similarly articulate conservative periodicals like City Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary.
Only where it counts -- in Washington -- are conservatives tongue-tied. Why is one of those mysteries that may never be solved.
Even some Republican leaders recognize it. Former Republican whip Tom DeLay said as much during a recent interview on the Rush Limbaugh show.
After rattling off a list of achievements by the House of Representatives when it was under Republican control, DeLay was asked why nobody knows about those achievements. He admitted that Republicans did a poor job of getting their story out.
Something similar was implicit in remarks by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, when he pointed out that there are Congressional districts where most people have conservative values but where they are represented in Congress by a liberal Democrat.
The Republicans' verbal ineptness would be just their problem, and the rest of us could let them stew in their own juices, except for one thing.
At a crucial time in the history of this country and of Western civilization, the Democrats are embracing foreign policies with a long track record of defeat, which can be punctuated by the ultimate defeat, terrorist nations and movements with nuclear weapons.
That is the background against which the many aspiring presidential candidates of both parties must be judged.
Among the Democrats, the various candidates all seem to be trying to outdo each other in advocating defeatist policies, as if we can unilaterally call off the war on terror by pulling out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, turning the country over to the terrorists as a base from which to destabilize the region and launch more attacks against the West -- including the United States.
That is why it is important, even for those of us who are not Republicans, that the Republicans come up with a candidate who not only has guts and brains but who also knows how to communicate.
Looking for an articulate Republican narrows the field considerably. The most articulate, though in different ways, are Rudolph Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a well-spoken gentleman, and would probably make a good president, but the Republicans already have well-spoken gentlemen, many of whom have never expressed a moment of outrage in their whole careers.
There is no question that Newt Gingrich is politically savvy and, at the same time, is someone with a real grasp of the larger historic issues at home and abroad. He might well make the best president of all the candidates in either party.
But what kind of presidential candidate would he make? He is certainly very articulate, but in the low-key and sometimes ironic manner of a college professor, which he once was.
It is hard to recall Newt Gingrich expressing any outrage, even when he was falsely accused of abandoning and starving the poor by not appropriating enough money for programs to help them -- even after he had in fact increased the spending for such programs.
Rudolph Giuliani is a New York street kind of guy, who doesn't respond to lying attacks with professorial detachment, irony and understatement. He is a fighter.
Maybe a presidential ticket with Gingrich and Giuliani, or Giuliani and Gingrich, would be the Republicans' best hope -- and the country's. It would certainly be a big improvement over some of the candidates the Republicans have put out there in the past.
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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
Yep.
Betcha Dr. Sowell wrote this column before this happened.....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1814739/posts
the pubbie potty doesnt have a tv network to express outrage on.
they need some fat chicks like rosie or oprah to express outrage.
I’ll bet he did too, Justa. Thanks for that link.
That is the background against which the many aspiring presidential candidates of both parties must be judged.
Among the Democrats, the various candidates all seem to be trying to outdo each other in advocating defeatist policies, as if we can unilaterally call off the war on terror by pulling out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, turning the country over to the terrorists as a base from which to destabilize the region and launch more attacks against the West -- including the United States.
That is why it is important, even for those of us who are not Republicans, that the Republicans come up with a candidate who not only has guts and brains but who also knows how to communicate.
The stakes are very high.
I did not get the impression Dr. Sowell had concluded that Newt Gingrich was perfect.
We definitely don’t need one like Rosie. :-)
ping!
NP! Thanks for the Sowell post. ;*)
Lame excuse.
Most Republicans are spineless. They could express the truth if they felt like it. Instead they whine and yelp like a kicked dog.
If any of them had any guts, when a democrat was caught in a lie, they'd call that person a liar.
They could arrange tv and printed interviews and react to unfounded lies and inuendo. But they don't.
I'd bet that if their wives or daughters were raped, they'd just keep mumbling and stumbling.
Even Frenchie Kerry, the ultimate surrender-meister (dork), has more guts than most Republicans.
IMO
I'm ready for the flames from the (R) bots.
No flame from me. While I agree that the conservatives lack even one leader who has effectively articulated their principles, policies and, yes, successes, the problem is much deeper. They have no huevos! Perhaps they don’t really believe their own platform. Whatever the reason, unless one strong leader with credible conservative credentials and an ability to communicate emerges from the presidential primary process, I see little hope for the GOP in the next two years. It could be a long, long, six years!
Sooo... is the problem that 'Pubbies don't drink enough?
For decades, those places were in Tennessee, where the newspapers were so liberal that folks like algore, Jim Sasser, and Jim Cooper could go off to Washington and be liberal heroes, then come home to campagin, practice up on their accents again, and tell folks how conservative they were.
Then came talk radio and the internet, and only Jim Cooper could get re-elected, and then only after his home county ran him off and Nashburg took him in.
“Most Republicans are spineless. They could express the truth if they felt like it. Instead they whine and yelp like a kicked dog.
If any of them had any guts, when a democrat was caught in a lie, they’d call that person a liar.
They could arrange tv and printed interviews and react to unfounded lies and inuendo. But they don’t.
I’d bet that if their wives or daughters were raped, they’d just keep mumbling and stumbling.
Even Frenchie Kerry, the ultimate surrender-meister (dork), has more guts than most Republicans.
IMO
IMHO too!
Disgusting.
I guess Thomas Sowell will soon be thrown under the bus too.
Thanks for the TS ping, jazusamo.
Sowell is positively disposed toward Giuliani. Sowell is a treasonous liberal.
There’s no doubt that talk radio and the internet have helped the conservative cause, it’s hard for those like them to hoodwink the people now.
We have to figure out a way to convert a lot of the flaming libs now. :-)
“Sooo... is the problem that ‘Pubbies don’t drink enough?”
No, the probem is the party has been taken over by big business that want quasi-slave labor, and a President, and Senate all too ready to whore us out.
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