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 [...]

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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? [...]

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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 [...]

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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.  [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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“Republicans Rebranded” from the Boston Globe

A thoughtful take on the future of conservatism, from a New England perspective:
The underlying problem for Republicans is the absence of a compelling conservative vision for the future that is aligned with New England’s more tolerant and civic-minded political sensibilities.
Typically, political observers say that the national Republican Party has moved too far to the right [...]

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David Brooks on the future of conservatism

From Brooks’ column today in the NYT:
It’s only been a week since the defeat, but the battle lines have already been drawn in the fight over the future of conservatism.
In one camp, there are the Traditionalists, the people who believe that conservatives have lost elections because they have strayed from the true creed. George W. [...]

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Things will be fine for conservatives…or not.

So was the recent election simply a repudiation of the Bush administration and its GOP allies in Congress, or a more substantive “realignment” of political philosophy by the American people?  Are we moving to the left, or not?
Depends on who you talk to.
In yesterday’s WSJ, pollster Scott Rasmussen suggests that President-elect Obama may not have [...]

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