Posted on 05/29/2002 8:44:38 AM PDT by Zack Nguyen
Why should Republicans bother to vote GOP next November 5? Inexplicably, President Bush and congressional Republicans are giving their party base myriad reasons to go fishing on Election Day.
Republicans and Democrats have proven to be pigs in a bipartisan pen on pork-barrel spending. While some Republicans still treat taxpayers' dollars with reverence, too many more stand gleefully at the trough, snout-by-snout, with their Democratic colleagues.
This Congress is set to hike federal spending by 15 percent over just two years, more than quadruple the inflation rate. Most of this does nothing to fight terrorism.
On May 13, Bush signed a $191 billion farm bill that boosts agriculture subsidies by 80 percent. Congress even included $100 million to provide rural consumers "high-speed, high-quality broadband service." The Heritage Foundation estimates that this 10-year bill will cost the average U.S. household $180 in new taxes annually.
Bush's education department budget grows from $35.75 billion in 2001 (when he arrived) to a projected $57 billion in 2005. That is a four-year, 59.5 percent increase in federal school outlays. Bush's Leave No Child Behind initiative promotes testing and higher standards, but does little to advance school choice.
Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law. It treats the disease of legal bribery with a prescribed overdose. As if there were no First Amendment, it will restrict political activists from purchasing ads critical of political incumbents within 60 days of elections.
Bush dropped an anvil on free-marketeers this spring when he imposed 30 percent tariffs on imported steel and a 27 percent tax on Canadian softwood lumber. This has created throbbing headaches among world leaders who have grown weary of Bush's self-mocking free-trade rhetoric.
Bush has applauded a Senate bill by liberal Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico and arch-liberal Democrat Paul Wellstone of Minnesota that would force company health plans to insure mental illness and physical ailments equally. Costs will soar as employers underwrite medical care for anxiety atop angina.
Enough.
A popular conservative president should steer Congress starboard. A May 14 - 15 Fox News poll of 900 adults found Bush's job approval at 77 percent (+/- 3 percent). Alas, like his father (who achieved 90 percent favorability after the Persian Gulf War), G. W. Bush guards his political capital like an heirloom rather than invest it for even greater gains.
When Democrats smeared appellate-court nominee Charles Pickering as a racist, Bush, for instance, should have held a press conference with Pickering and his prominent black supporters from Mississippi. As Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, said: Pickering "was standing up for blacks in Mississippi when no other white man would." Bush avoided such bold action. A thousand cuts later, Pickering's nomination fatally hemorrhaged in the Senate Judiciary Committee last March.
Bush could have enhanced the prospects for petroleum exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He could have invited local Eskimos to the Rose Garden and let them explain how oil development would lift them from poverty. Better yet, Bush could have taken the White House press corps to ANWR to unmask its potential oil acreage as a barren mosquito farm. Bush avoided the ANWR fray, thus clinching that proposal's Senate demise.
Beyond speaking softly in his bully pulpit, Bush never has touched his veto pen. Had he threatened to reject some of this absurd legislation, fence-sitting GOP congressmen would have yielded and defeated (or at least improved) these bills. Absent Bush's leadership, they climbed atop the gilded bandwagon rather than fall on their laissez-faire swords. Republicans should worry that their demoralized stalwarts will do what they did in the last midterm election: Stay home.
The proportion of self-described conservatives at the polls fell from 37 percent in 1994 to 31 percent in 1998, Voter News Service reports. Frustrated with a "Republican Revolution" turned free-spending self-parody, the party faithful sat on their hands just enough to cost Republicans five House seats.
If they don't reverse this parade of white flags, Washington Republicans similarly may shrink or lose their House majority and dash their plans to capture the Senate — not because they advanced their free-market principles but because they betrayed them and thus surrendered their claim to power.
Yes, but Reagan got re-elected in a landslide and Bush I, who caved to the Dems and passed a tax increase, lost his second attempt.
Reagan used to tell his cabinet that if they haven't made anyone mad that week then they weren't doing their job. Some people (conservatives and regular people, not Democrats)like and vote for leaders with principle.
I agree Bush II needs to fight with a smile on his face, but he needs to fight if he wants to get re-elected.
Huh if that was true Goldwater wouldn't have had such a stinging deafeat in 1964.
Maybe in some congressional districts and a few of the smaller populated states, but a principled real conservative stands little chance in a national election. Reagan and Bush are the closest we can get, like it or not. Reagan was about as much of a compromiser as Bush, although Reagan was far superior in voicing true conservative views.
I disagree. There are huge differences on foreign policy, abortion, tax cuts, gay rights, gun control, property rights, state rights, and national defense, to name a few.
Yes, those two never managed to get Republican support in any great numbers. GWB has tons of it for his largely Democratic agenda.
So, if I understand the other poster whose words you are using --- Even if the "R" candidate advances the agenda of my enemy, I should vote for him because he has an "R" next to his name? Is that really what you are saying?
Sorry, but I can't get on that bus.
I'm outta here now.....debate time is over for me.
That never happened. Go do some more drugs and dream up some more hallucinations.
Jim Jeffords, Pat Leahy, Tom Daschle and the 'Willing accomplices' in the media and education establishments are the 'Worst Enemies'. Until we servants 'lead' the GOP the GOP cannot lead us. Where is the 'RIGHT' press? Where are the 'RIGHT' teachers? Where IS the 'tax-controlled' church? Giving up freedom for security, having neither.
LOL! You are hilarious when you can't defend a point.
Ya see Sunday, err.. Thurs... dang it! monday, you must have a problem with reading comprehension. I'm not the one asking for this. But if you vote third-party, YOU are.
So, how does it feel?
Thanks! Glad I amused you, but then again they tell me when someone is high they laugh all the time, so it's no big deal.
What about Goldwater's loss disproves what I said? Did we not get a huge tax cut under Kennedy? How about this statement from a leading Dem in the '60's?
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
-- Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978, D-MN), in "Know Your Lawmakers,"_Guns_magazine, February 1960, p.6
Which means, of course, that Clinton was a better President, right?
Well, it sure is working on me, so I guess he's on track.
You brought out the tax cuts of Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's defense of the 2nd amendment. Both were mainstays of Goldwater's platform and yet he went to a stinging defeat to LBJ.
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