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.
The "best" candidate is the candidate that can WIN. Look at the polls - poll after poll - say that Rudy can beat either Obamalama OR Hitlery.
They do not say that about Romney or Thompson.
The President has not power over "gays" or abortion. Those on the Right who would allow the dems to take the White House and put this nation in danger are very dangerous.
No candidate is going to please everyone - what we need to look at is the candidate who can win.
I could go for Rudy/Watts or Rudy/Tancredo. I’d prefer the candidate who’s not yet a candidate.
This is not going to be an easy sentence to convince people of.
Sowell is, in my opinion, one of the smartest, most insightful and broadest thinking Americans to come along in the last 200 years. His book "Knowledge and Decisions" contains so much highly condensed wisdom that most of the people who have read it still don't appreciate how far ahead if it's time it really is. It's a work that will continue to be appreciated and to add substantive value to economic and political discourse well into the next century. In the information era (which is really still just beginning) it will be viewed as a work as important as "The Wealth of Nations."... in my personal opinion, maybe even more so.
The man has a 40+ year career of telling the truth to communities so filled with bias that they summarily reject him out of hand. His perspective and views are as well documented (and for that matter consistent) as any man alive, and you suppose to accuse him of treason because he didn't say anything bad about Rudy Giuliani? (He didn't officially even say he supported him, only his tactic of fighting back)
You had better a be a bit less "knee jerk" where Dr. Sowell is concerned. It's tough to find a conservative voice who has more credibility, and by attacking him that way you've lowered your own.
Apologies.
Flamethrower set to Crispy: check.Release flame!
Seriously, the Republicans don't have the same "outrage machine" for the simple reason that the Republicans are the only party which defends the practical middle class against the combination of the demagogues of the lower class and the panderers of the rich.Another and probably better way to put it is that Big Journalism exists to promote itself and attract attention - and since it doesn't do anything useful, it does so by criticizing those who do do useful things - such as create jobs or do those jobs, and such as doing law enforcement or military. Big Journalism promotes itself, and at the same time promotes non-journalists who help promote journalism.
"Progressive" is simply the positive label journalists use to describe non-journalists who promote journalism; "objective" means the same thing in a journalist's mouth, but is used only to describe journalists. It's easy to say that as an anonymous poster, but hard for a politician to get elected telling the truth when journalism lies.
Same thing happened to Lil Tommy Daschle.
No problem! I love Tom Sowell - he is one of the great intellectual lights of our age, and one of my mentors and heroes.
Romney is the one the Democrats are afraid of and they have little on him which will resonate with the average person. He is handsome, sharp, articulate and extremely likeable to boot.
The cleanest candidate in this race who CAN win is Romney. If Thompson enters the race, he will be another strong candidate.
Those who think Guiliani CAN win are dreaming, and ignoring many RED flags.
Amen.
Thomas Sowell somewhat disappoints me in his article. He seems to be taken in by the MSM’s strangle hold on what they think should be viable GOP candidates.
But EVERYBODY should read your Profile page, JAN. Very informative, very true! God bless!
I don’t know why the democrats would be afraid of him. I would think that they are going to make a very fair comparison of him with John Kerry easily!!! The only hope we have to win the Presidency is Fred Thompson or Duncan Hunter. There will be people who will NOT vote for Romney, McCain or Guiliani period. I have read this many times on this website alone.
Romney isn't anything like John Kerry a most vicious and inaccurate comparison. And he doesn't have the personal baggage of many of the candidates.
Duncan Hunter has no charisma whatsoever and therefore hasn't a prayer.
It is likely that their hands are so dirty that they dare not speak up.
Thanks Pd. Glad you enjoyed it.
While some of what Sowell says is reasonable I don't buy his conclusions. I think Romney is a much better communicator than Guiliani. But he's right in that Romney is not one to express outrage forcefully. None of those candidates do that well. They could all use some training from Rush on that.
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