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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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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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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More on the GOP “losing the middle”

NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru, in the New York Times, on how the GOP lost more of the middle this past election than it gained on the right:
Based on the exit polls from 2004 and Tuesday, Republicans have lost more ground among self-described moderates than among conservatives. Even if Senator McCain had won the same percentage of [...]

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David Frum on the GOP’s college-educated voter problem

David Frum’s National Post piece from last week talked about the problem the GOP has with college-educated voters, who went overwhelmingly for Obama last Tuesday
A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut – states that have been “blue” [...]

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What’s a Republican to do?

Got an interesting phone call today in response to my most recent column in the Camden Herald, entitled What is a Republican to do? The gentleman that called, a Camden resident, described himself as center-left politically, voting for Democrats, he suspected, about two-thirds of the time.  He volunteered that he had, however, voted for Susan [...]

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