PJM’s Jennifer Rubin: School choice and card check good issues for GOP

Good post the other day from Jennifer Rubin of PJM.  As we start looking for issues around which we can win back some of the middle, Rubin picks two good ones – school reform and card check:Card Check

If the Republicans are looking to restore their credibility with the American people and differentiate themselves from the Democrats, they might do well to focus on two issues. Both relate to fundamental liberties, both put the Republicans on the same side as large majorities of American voters, and both have the Democrats trapped by virtue of their dependence on Big Labor. In short, these are winning issues, both on policy and on politics, for Republicans.

The first is school reform. The Republicans in Congress need look no further than out of their windows to see opportunity. In the horrid Washington D.C. school system, the Schools Chancellor, 38-year-old single mother Michelle Rhee, is struggling to upgrade standards, institute charter schools and school choice, and, if needed, break the back of the teachers’ union which has stood foursquare against her efforts to remove bad teachers…This presents a golden opportunity for Congressional Republicans … What better way to stand up for parental rights, take the side of minority and poor children, and make clear which party stands with Big Labor and which with educational reform advocates?

And this is not the only opportunity for Republicans to highlight the Democrats’ co-dependent relationship with Big Labor. High on the wish list for the union bosses is the Employee Free Choice Act, which would, in essence, abolish secret ballots in union elections. Even George McGovern has opposed the measure, declaring to Democrats: “To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.”

Card check is a no-brainer.  Susan Collins beat Tom Allen about the head and shoulders with that and trounced him, in a state with a lot of union presence.  No question education reform is a potentially huge issue.  NCLB data has parents all over the nation second-guessing how good their schools are.  Everyone knows modern union-dominated education policy is about the adults in the system, not the kids.  The GOP could and should  come forward with a whole suite of potential education reform measures – merit pay, school choice, charters, new assessment regimes, alternative teacher certification – the list is endless.

I am amazed how powerful the teachers’ unions are, though – we almost had charter schools here in Maine if the GOP had stayed together on it and not been peeled off by the MEA…Can we do better this time?

NYT on “Debate Over the Party’s Road Map Back to Power”

It pains me to say it, but this is a pretty good, if brief, synopsis from the New York Times on the debate amongst conservatives regarding how the movement might recover from recent events.

Nearly 30 years after Ronald Reagan ushered in a period of conservative ascendancy in American politics, how should the movement re-energize itself? And how can conservatives chart a path back to power after this month’s Republican defeats?

Some conservatives want a return to basics, arguing that President Bush abandoned conservative principles by expanding government and driving up spending. Others draw just the opposite conclusion, warning that Republicans have tried to appeal to too narrow a base and that the party must update the focus of conservatism, especially at a time when voters are thinking more about issues like jobs and health care than about abortion and gay rights.

The divisions are clearly there:

The chairman of the Florida Republican Party, James Greer, one of several likely candidates to lead the national party, called for putting less emphasis on some social issues and more on economic issues that he said could have broader appeal.

“I think we need to answer the questions that are asked by the conservatives: ‘Is it still my party for family values? Is it still my party for faith?’ ” Mr. Greer said. “Answer those questions, answer them firmly, ‘Yes it is.’ But then move on. And start talking about the issues that are important to Americans: the economy, job opportunity and education.”

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, scoffed at calls for the Republicans to move left, which he said had followed Republican defeats in 1964, 1976 and 1992. And he suggested that some calls to update conservatism — by taking global warming more seriously, for instance — were essentially disguised calls to move the party to the left.

“They will be cheerfully ignored,” Mr. Norquist said.

Ugh.

Interesting snippet at the end from Tim Pawlenty, speaking about Ronald Reagan:

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota told the group of fellow Republican governors that Reagan was one of his heroes, and recalled being spat at by a hippie while volunteering for one of his campaigns. “But Ronald Reagan was president a long time ago,” Mr. Pawlenty said. “A lot has happened since then. So the challenge for us is how do you take the principles from the late ’70s and ’80s and apply them to the circumstances and issues and opportunities of our time.”

Amen.

Rod Dreher on the Conservative Civil War

Our very own Sun Journal ran a good piece from conservative blogger Rod Dreher today, whose CrunchyCon blog is one I read regularly.  By this column, and some of his other posts, I’d put Dreher in the Ross Douthat/David Frum/Rammesh Ponnuru/Rich Lowry camp of conservatives, which is to say the camp that believes it is time for the conservative movement to embrace some new ideas and new approaches to governing if it is ever to recover from last week’s thrashing at the hands of voters.  While there is no question that Bush and GOP congress could have been a good deal more conservative than they were in terms of limited government and fiscal responsibility, we have to begin looking for ways to develop conservative policies that have more resonance with the working class, the young, the college-educated, and other groups whose affections we’ve lost.

Dreher:

The right has developed a vicious habit of tagging any dissenting conservative as a closet liberal. This folly has constructed an airtight bubble around the GOP and conservative leaders, not only depriving conservatism of constructive criticism from within its ranks, but also reinforcing the rank-and-file’s worst instincts. If the election results didn’t convince Republicans that they couldn’t afford to throw people out – especially their intellectuals and people who respect intellect – then their ignorance is invincible.

This election ought to once and for all teach conservatives that Ronald Reagan is dead, and he’s not coming back. The intellectual poverty of the GOP primary debates showed itself by the candidates’ ritualistic invocation of Reagan’s name, as if saying it often enough would compensate for the lack of new ideas among the sorry bunch.

Reagan and his popular brand of conservatism arose out of a particular set of historical circumstances – specifically, the challenge of Soviet communism abroad and welfare-statism at home. It’s a new day with new challenges, and the intellectually exhausted right is not up to meeting them.

Conservatives must return to the philosophical sources of our tradition and reinterpret its insights and truths for the world we live in now. Ideas really do have consequences as, obviously, does the lack of same. Yes, conservatives have to oppose the Obama Democrats when they overreach, but if the only response conservatives offer is defensive and obstreperous, they will not soon recover.

I’ve just started Ross Douthat’s book Grand New Party, which he wrote with Reihan Salam, and which discusses ways that the GOP can craft conservative public policy that speaks to the working class.  You can find an interesting discussion between Douthat and National Review’s Jonah Goldberg here.

My column in this week’s Camden Herald

I could not resist confronting voters about why on earth they would vote down a tax increase passed by the legislature, then re-elect the same legislators that passed the tax.  The Democrats have a near two-to-one majority in the Maine House, and a two or three seat margin, depending on recounts, in the state Senate.  Yet Maine voters tell pollsters they think the state taxes and spends too much. What is going on?

A 2008 Market Decisions poll found 60 percent of Mainers dissatisfied with the high level of taxes they pay, with 56 percent saying they did not feel they were getting their money’s worth from Augusta. When asked what should be done about the state’s budget shortfall, 70 percent said they supported spending cuts; 80 percent said they opposed any tax increase, even a temporary one, to balance the budget.

Yet on Election Day, Maine voters enlarged Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. In the House alone, Democrats will outnumber Republicans by an almost two-to-one margin, up from a margin of just one seat only four years ago.

So what is going on here? Do voters actually support high taxes and spending, but tell pollsters otherwise? Or, if they believe Maine is headed in the wrong direction, why do they keep re-electing the same people who have been running things in Augusta for more than 30 years?

I wish I had the answer to this.  We’re not getting the message out – we’re not getting people riled up and we’re not attaching the state’s manifest failures to the Democrats. Really need some new thinking here – desperately…

America a center-right nation? Not so fast…

It has become an article of faith among conservatives that we needn’t panic to much about the recent election. Yes we have work to do, but this is still, after all, a conservative country.

Or is it?  The Hoover Institute’s Tod Lindburg writes the following in today’s Washington Post:

We are now two elections into something big. This month’s drubbing is just the latest sign that the country’s political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.

In 2004, Republicans and Democrats each constituted 37 percent of the electorate. In the 2006 congressional election, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 38 percent to 36 and won big. This year, the Democrats made up a stunning 39 percent of the electorate, compared with just 32 percent for the Republicans. Add the painful fact that Obama outpolled McCain among independents, 52 percent to 48, and you have a picture of a Republican Party that has lost its connection to the center of the electorate.

The McCain campaign was not shy about letting voters know about the elements of Obama’s record that marked him as a man of the left. Perhaps voters simply didn’t believe a word of it, but a better explanation is that a majority of them heard McCain’s warnings and just didn’t mind. Center-left nation, anyone?

There is no question that the GOP is in real trouble.  I’m especially concerned about where we stand with regard to younger and college-educated voters.  But, being a policy wonk, I believe we can develop some policy innovations that may get us back in the game with some of those voters, especially around the issue of entitlement reform.

And, we need candidates.  Let’s not forget that much of Obama’s win can be attributed to his being a once-in-a-generation political talent.  He even said himself that people project their hopes on him. That is tough to compete with, even if you have policy approaches that people like.  So we need, to use Ross Douthat’s phrase, “populist wonks” who can speak to working class Americans but demonstrate an encyclopedic knowledge of policy innovation.

We have lots of work to do, and we need to keep Lindburg’s findings in mind. Let’s not take for granted that this may be a center-right nation.  Let’s work to make it one.

George Will on American-style “socialism”

George Will’s column today describes the extent to which “socialism” is already here:

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government.

The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary and nonpolitical. Well.

Probably as temporary as New York City’s rent controls, which were born as emergency responses to the Second World War and are still distorting the city’s housing market. The Depression, which FDR failed to end but which Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor did end, was the excuse for agriculture subsidies that have lived past three score years and 10.

In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do rent-seeking — bending government for the benefit of private factions. The difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become.

So can a revitalized GOP break the spending habit and win?  This is, again, the essential question.  Voters seem to want some spending, particularly on themselves – entitlement programs such as Social Security remain discouragingly popular – but, as bailouts continue, we will learn a lot about how much propping up of business the nation is prepared to tolerate.  If it appears to voters that the government is simply shoveling money down a hole to keep big businesses afloat that should fail, there may be a place for conservatives to talk about a return to more of a free-market model.

I think it may be time to reassess whether we want to be the party of big business – of near monopolistic multinationals – as opposed to being the party of small business and entrepreneurship – the party supporting the guy who just developed a more fuel-efficient engine in his garage, for instance – ensuring an economy that is supportive of innovation and ingenuity by backing off “rent-seeking” regulation and tax policy.  That approach, I think is much more in tune with the nation’s aspirational character.

Aren’t we better off with a hundred GM’s out there than just one?

PJM’s Jennifer Rubin on the GOP’s future

This is getting to be a familiar refrain…for all the talk about the GOP needing to move more to the right, it is hard to see how much space there is on that side, as opposed to the middle:

After the 2006 election losses Republicans did some soul-searching. They held conferences, gave speeches, and went on talk shows. They concluded: we were not conservative enough.

Again, in 2008, Republicans took losses across the board. They got a fraction of the Hispanic vote, lost their last New England congressman, saw more western Senate seats flip to the Democrats and watched their share of the electorate drop to 28.7%. They lost the independent vote by 8%. Yet once again you hear the call to return to “conservative roots” or to adhere more strongly to “core principles.” That seems to miss the mark — by miles.

Let’s be clear – the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans did indeed abandon timeless conservative principles such as fiscal discipline and limited government.  They turned off a lot of conservatives and deserved, in my mind, to get something of a comeuppance for it.

Still, the theme that seems to be developing among the reformist wing is that even a return to a limited government/fiscally conservative governing model will not be enough to win back independent voters.

More from Rubin:

The only place where Republicans are flourishing in national elections is the Deep South. There is reason to fear that if Republicans do not alter their present course they will be relegated to a permanent minority in Congress and be stuck below the 200 electoral vote mark in presidential elections.

Given all that, it is hard to see how “returning to core values” enhances the Republicans’ appeal.  If that phrase is code for “limited government,” it seems to lack an audience. At present, there is not much clamoring for fiscal austerity, at least not at the expense of other issues.

The challenge for Republicans is to maintain a distinctive alternative to liberalism but appeal to a broad cross-section of voters, both ideologically and geographically… It is not an impossible task but it will be that much more difficult if Republicans maintain a tone of class resentment, paranoia, and vitriol and adhere to policy positions which are either extraneous or offensive to large segments of the electorate.

That last part is a bit much, perhaps – I don’t think limited government is “offensive to large segments of the population.”  I think we do struggle with explaining how a limited government approach works better. You can’t veto SCHIP health insurance for kids without some kind of alternative that can be explained in a paragraph.  The real challenge is developing clear, coherent policy alternatives that are consistent with our governing philosophy.

We also need candidates who can campaign effectively for them, but that is for another day…