Posted on 03/13/2009 1:08:18 PM PDT by pissant
I read David Frum's cover piece in this week's Newsweek magazine, "Why Rush is Wrong: A Conservative's case against Limbaugh," and I've been thinking about it ever since. Frum is a former Bush #43 speechwriter, and has started a great website, newmajority.com, that I found on Michael Barone's recommendation a few weeks back. Frum's article is the must-read of the week for Republicans. I agree with most of what he says, and here's the part that makes the most sense to me:
Look at America's public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it's inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It's health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.
We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain's only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania's most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he's pro-choice ...
Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility ... After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.
Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don't appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn't that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than ... not listen? It's not as if they can vote against him.
But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.
I couldn't agree more on that last point. It's time to move past Rush Limbaugh, on many levels, and I think there are a lot of conservatives who feel the same way. For Republicans, it's time to evolve.
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Conservatives must change and hope.
Another intimidated conservative who thinks the way to beat the left is to look more like it. It’s watered down, milque toast conservatism that cost us the White House and that may cost us the country, but that doesn’t make kowtowing and compromise the right thing to do. I don’t want “He couldn’t beat ‘em, so he joined ‘em” carved on my headstone.
Why can't Republican candidates run as center-left candidates to get elected, then govern as far right conservatives?
Their opponents have been winning by campaigning as center-right candidates, then governing as far left liberals for years.
They seem to be succeeding with their strategy while the "principled" conservatives are losing.
Evolve beyond David Frum. I hate getting personal, but he does have a “missing link” look.
Blah blah blah. This idiot Mary Kate Cary could have summed it up in one phrase: “The parasites now outnumber the hosts and unless the Republicans become “Democrat-lite”, they are doomed.”
America is dead and gone. What’s left is a land mass populated by cretins and parasites who have absolutely no respect for the military and who vote for big government to confiscate money from their neighbors and “redistribute” it to them.
It is not an America worth defending anymore.
Every man for himself.
Screw the GOP before it screws you!
Sorry, you are either for reason, pursuit of one's own individual happiness, individual natural rights, independent nonparasitical mentality, limited government, and capitalism or you're not. There is no compromise with these principles of the Founding Fathers.
Maybe it's all that "modulatin'" they've been doing.
Damn! Where’s my slingshot. There are too many of these dragoons running around out there. God, I think I’m glad to be living in Texas, in the middle of a forest.
Actually Bill Weld, former governor of Mass. was a fiscal conservative and social liberal.
But only in the corrupt liberal garbage dump of Massachusetts politics could such a bizarre hybrid survive. And we haven't seen another one like him.
Well, unless they convinced the GOP to run McCain or somehow sank the economy on purpose, I'd say "nothing".
For people that are concerned more about a political party than political ideals, maybe this makes sense. It your primary goal is to win elections, regardless of the means, then we don’t need political parties at all. Just let the pollsters pick the office holders.
On the other hand, there are those that are more concerned about a political ideology or a philosophy than a political party. Does the GOP stand for anything? That is the question that needs to be asked, not how can we win elections.
Mary, you evolve.
The rest of us will stick to our principles.
Sorry, wrong answer.
You want to fix health care? Several things must be done.
1. Tort reform.
2. Stop treating illegal immigrants.
3. Significant update of medical billing codes to increase the number of codes so the right procedure/right kind of person can get billed at the right rate.
4. Stop forcing doctors and hospitals to have language translators for patients (per Clinton’s EO) driving up costs no matter how big or small the practice is.
5. Allow doctors and nurses to continue to have opt-out conscience clauses on procedures they believe are immoral.
There are other things but these are ones that come to mind first.
If you want to get right down to it, conservatism is really about slowing the pace of change. Conserving. And since things in the universe progress from order to chaos it’s probably a good thing that someone is trying to slow the deterioration.
I’m talking about core cultural changes like our current progression away from personal responsibility. Not about changes such as the Internet or using alternative energy.
Someone has to do this since once the change has become ingrained in society it is damn near impossible to reverse it without some traumatic societal upheaval.
And look how well it works for the people who think that is the way to go.
Their only core belief is that conservatives must moderate themselves.
No wonder why we cannot stand these morons.
No, sorry, Mary Kate. When it comes to conservatism I prefer intelligent design, and on that score, David Frum is not smarter than Trig Palin.
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