The Republican Who Can Win : Someone who know Americans are more worried about jobs and savings

Wall Street Journal ^ | 06/03/2011 | Dorothy Rabinowitz

[SeekAndFind]

The candidate would know Americans are more worried about their jobs and their savings than abstractions like 'big government.'

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.

From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it's impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.

[Jim Noble]

The Republican party is fundamentally divided between those who think taking your labor (or the fruits thereof) and giving it to someone else is RIGHT and those who think it is WRONG.

This is no longer a pragmatic argument about HOW MUCH of your money it is right to take, or about whether or not the race of the looters makes a difference.

This is not going to end well.