When it comes to politics, I like to think of myself as a moderate. As an economics major, I find conservative economic policy to be both logical and appealing. At the same time, having spent 18 years in Madison, Wisconsin, I recognize the importance of social programs and civil liberties.
Even though I was unable to vote in 2000, I thought John McCain was the best candidate in the final four. Fast-forward eight years, and I would have been equally happy (or unhappy) with him or Barack Obama. But, among other things that cemented my opinion in the end, Obama didn't have Sarah Palin on his ticket.
Perhaps because I have no party affiliation (currently), I would like to see both parties at their best. In an ideal world, these opposing factions would prevent the poor legislation from being passed while agreeing and compromising to bring effective policy to the people. That's how our founders envisioned our government and that is how it functions in its finest hours.
However, right now, the Republican Party is weak. As such, it is in our nation's interest for their party to get their act together.
In a great piece for Newsweek entitled "Why Rush is Wrong for the Right," David Frum, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, makes the case that the Republican Party must face the simple fact that the world has changed in the last 30 years. He argues for an intelligent and rational conservatism rather than the populist garbage emanating from talk radio behemoth, Rush Limbaugh.
Why target Rush? As Mr. Frum puts it:
As for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party.
But what is the solution?
Look at America's public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it's inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It's health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.
We need an environmental message. You don't have to accept Al Gore's predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.
Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility. Even ultraliberal states like Massachusetts would elect Republican governors like Frank Sargent, Leverett Saltonstall, William Weld and Mitt Romney precisely to keep an austere eye on the depredations of Democratic legislators. After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.
Among those in the party, his message is controversial. Yet I agree wholeheartedly. To regain its strength, the Republican Party must return to its conservative intellectual roots. It needs to focus on solving the problems of our day. It needs to listen to the George Wills and Andrew Sullivans out there (even if they don't always get along with each other). And it needs a leader as dynamic and inspiring as Barack Obama.
Will the Republicans get their act together? For all our sakes, I hope so.
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