The Republican party needs to use what worked before, The Contract With America. But why did it work?
1) It wasn’t so much what it said, but how it said it. Most of us probably don’t remember a single item on it.
2) How it said it was simple, clear and honest. No hesitation, no conflicting statements, no hedging, no qualifications, no voting both ways. It was a transparent agenda. You either signed on to it, or you didn’t.
3) Most of the people who signed up were new candidates, not incumbents who had become comfortable with the Washington way of doing things. As such, they were there to break the two party “monolith of stagnation”, not to become part of it.
4) The public loved it. Not just Republican voters, but Independents, and even a lot of moderate Democrats. Finally, a simple checklist to determine who *should* be running the country, and those who just *wanted* to run the country.
5) Conversely, the professional politicians and bureaucrats hated it. It was like light shined on cockroaches, forcing them to flee. They *couldn’t* sign on to it, because it would ruin so many of their schemes and plots.
“The chief problem of American political life...has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
~Carroll Quigley, ‘Tragedy and Hope’