In my lifetime the greatest electoral achievements made by the Republican party were made possible by offering a choice rather than an echo. The Reagan Revolution and the ‘94 Republican take over of the House were both examples of this. Once again in 2010 we will be given the option of offering a choice rather than an echo in Senate and Congressional races around the nation.

With just 55% of conservatives considering themselves Republicans, 73% of Republicans believing our leaders in DC are out of touch with the base, and Tea Party candidates coming out on top of the GOP in a generic three way ballot test, I believe that people are actively looking for that choice and refuse to accept an echo.

In the race to unseat Barbara Boxer from the Senate we have two Republican challengers. One offers a distinct choice and the other offers up an echo. Below are some text and videos on the subject of climate change from Barbara Boxer, Carly Fiorina* and Chuck DeVore. Let’s take a look at these.

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We hear this all time — conservatives in the GOP have to play nice with the moderates.

We never hear the other, that moderates should play nice with conservatives. Why is that? Consider the facts:

In Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, conservative Tim Walberg challenged the very liberal Joe Schwartz in the 2006 Republican Primary and won. Walberg went on to win the general election.

In 2008, Schwartz endorsed Democrat Mark Schauer and Shauer used that endorsement to squeak out a win in this +2 Republican District.

In Maryland 1, conservative physician and state senator Andy Harris ran in the Republican Primary against Wayne Gilchrist. Harris defeated Gilchrist only to see Gilchrist throw his support to Democrat Frank Kratovil, who won with 49.12% of the vote.

In Arizona 5, conservative David Schweikert won the Republican nomination, but then lost to liberal Democrat Harry Mitchell. Why? Schweikert’s primary opponent refused to help him and sat on his hands rather than help Schweikert pick up his opponent’s primary support.

In Alabama 2, Jay Love beat Harri Anne Smith in the Republican Primary and ran against Bobby Bright in an R +16 district. Smith endorsed the Democrat and Bright went on to win 50.23% of the vote.

In New York 23, the liberal Dede Scozzafava drops out and instead of supporting the guy the GOP crawls on bended knee to, she endorses the Democrat.

All the time we hear “conservatives can’t win the general” and “conservatives should play nice with moderates.” The record shows that the moderates cannot take losing and conservatives don’t win the general because the moderate GOP stabs them in the back.

If we are a team, it can’t just be the conservative players in trouble for not passing the ball.

I have written about John Feehery before. He is the former Bob Michel and Denny Hastert employee who had to be bumped aside by the insurgents of 1994 before the GOP could take control of Congress and then weaseled his way back into power in Hastert’s office. Then we lost power. Hmmmm . . .

Feehery is the guy who gave Bob Michel and Bob Dole credit for the conservative revolution of 1994 and told Rush Limbaugh to shut up or the GOP would stay out of power.

Feehery’s wife is the Deputy Chief of Staff to Charlie Crist’s errand boy, Senator George LeMieux. In other words, he is most definitely not a conservative.

So let’s compare and contrast Feehery. It’s like he wants to be Andrew Sullivan in his inconsistencies.

Here is Feehery from October 21, 2009:

But in both races, conservative independent third-party candidates are running insurgent campaigns that just may give the election to the Democrats.

In fact, the Club for Growth, a nominally Republican-leaning but actually Republican-slaying organization, is pouring money into the third-party candidate in the New York race, attacking the Republican candidate. The third-party challenger has no chance of winning, so this seems like a conspiracy to give the Democrats another seat in a Republican district. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) weighed in, endorsing Scozzafava, making that very point. . . .

The hard-rock conservatives don’t seem to be in much of a mood to make accommodations to a broader base. And that could spell doom for Republicans as they try to take back the House and make inroads in the Senate.

The very same John Feehery today in James Oliphant’s Los Angeles Times article:

But John Feehery, a Republican strategist in Washington, said Hoffman may well have won the election even if Scozzafava had stayed in.

“That means that even in the Northeast, the country has become much more conservative than it was only 10 months ago,” Feehery said, suggesting that the Obama’s administration’s spending policies were responsible.

It is men like John Feehery who claim to be top GOP consultants, but will say or do anything as the wind blows, who have gotten us into the mess we are in. HIs opinion should count for what it is: crap.

We forget this anniversary at our peril.

As conservatives face off against their own natural party, the GOP, in NY-23, Florida, and elsewhere, we should remember Ronald Reagan’s famous speech.

“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism…

“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth…

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

The full speech is below the fold.

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One of the reasons I like the idea of our Great Books Program is because I think a lot of activists need to read for themselves the great ideas that shape the conservative mind. We need, each one of us, to know what we believe and why we believe it and when it is acceptable to compromise principles for pragmatism.

Each of us has a line we will not cross and principles we will not compromise. All of us also have principles and issues we will compromise and lines we will cross to serve a greater interest.

In saying all of this, we need also be mindful of the Judas Goat. The Judas Goat is a trained animal that is trained to lead other animals to pens or slaughter while sparing itself.

I do not go forth lightly to discipline, condemn, cajole, or badger people on our side who have decided to compromise an issue for some higher goal. My propensity is more to do so to elected officials who frequently want to compromise to show they transcend politics than to go after un-elected or previously elected leaders.

At the same time, many of the un-elected or previously elected leaders are more dangerous and more likely to be Judas Goats than the elected. We expect the elected leaders to compromise. Part of leading means being able to get 51% of the vote to pass an agenda.

Outside of office, conservatives and liberals tend to rally around “leaders” who articulate the principles of an ideology and act in ways to reflect that ideology. Even there, for various professional or personal reasons, they sometimes deviate from principle.

In both cases, among the elected and un-elected, there will always be people who think we should keep silent and fight the other side. On occasion, though, we must assess when our allies are really fighting for the other side.

The race for New York 23, like the Florida Senate race, is one of those times.

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Steven F. Hayward, writing in the Washington Post today, postulates that the conservative movement is currently brain dead.

It is a fashionable statement among those living in Washington, D.C. housed at think tanks. And I guess it is when think tannkers are pushing out columns on the lack of ideas rather than pushing out columns with ideas. Nonetheless, I generally agree with Steven Hayward that the movement needs to be reminded of its intellectual foundations. Hayward does, however, miss some critical points and flubs a few along the way.

I have a column on this in the Washington Examiner. My position is not that the tea party movement is brain dead, but that it reflects the conservative movement at an instinctual level.

What we see across the country are more and more people standing up realizing the direction we are headed is wrong. They are unorganized. They are unfocused. But they do not lack a “connection to a concrete ideology,” they just are not skilled or trained in the ideology.

There is no greater conservative sentiment than “stop.” Bernard Bailyn’s influential The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution laid out how conservative the American Revolution was.

The popular messages of “freedom” and “liberty” were not slogans of propaganda put forward by the 18th century equivalent of a 501(c)(4), but were very real and meaningful to the colonists on the street and in the fields.

While no one should expect a revolution against government from the tea parties, we should expect and hope for a revolution in conservative thought and an upheaval of at least the Republican Party as the tea party activists start putting down their protest signs and picking up campaign signs. Then, perhaps, they will move on to taking over their local political party.

“[T]he right must do better than merely invoking ‘markets’ and ‘liberty,’” Hayward writes. I agree. But I do not think it is the right per se invoking those words. Like the colonists in the late 1700s, it is the people invoking those words. The people have a fundamental understanding that those principles are good things and things on which the freedoms we enjoy in this country are premised.

You can read the whole thing here.

Not promoted from the diaries by anybody because we’ve promoted Aaron to the front page. Yes, yes, I know “My God, what hath thou wrought?” I’m asking myself the same thing. — Erick

Come, sit by the campfire while I tell you a story.

September 2000 I left the U.S. Army confident that Al Gore would be the next President of the United States of America. The next year passed quickly as I scrambled to find my place in civilian life. On Sept. 11th I was driving to work and heard the news. Thus began a fixation on current events that I have yet to shake.

The next spring I quit my job and took a contract in Kosovo as a Systems Administrator. I spent roughly two years living and working in Kosovo. In between trouble tickets, I diligently clicked refresh on Drudgereport, which I had only recently discovered. Once I returned to U.S. soil I began to notice that the country had changed while I was away. Drudge, despite his best efforts, had failed to clue me in to the degree of animosity that was bubbling up from the fairly new fever swamps we are now all so familiar with.

I was a foreigner in my own land.

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According to Gallup, despite the election of Barack Obama and the Democratic strength in Congress (or because of it), Americans say they are becoming more conservative. For those who may not have realized it, this again emphasizes the importance to Republicans of restoring their credibility as the party of conservatism. While the mainstream media continues to ask how Republicans will moderate their views to compete more effectively, the reality is that they need to demonstrate that they believe what they say about limited government, personal responsibility, and a strong national defense.

Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven’t changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left…

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I have a lengthy think-piece essay up over at The New Ledger on conservatism’s essential element.  Click, read, return, discuss.

I think not:

In early October, as the meltdown of the financial industry gained momentum following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 59% of U.S. voters agreed with Ronald Reagan that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Since then, the stock markethas fallen roughly 3,000 points, millions of jobs have been lost, nearly a trillion dollars has been spent so far to bail out the financial industry, an additional $787-billion government stimulus package has been approved, and a new president has taken office who has proposed spending billions and billions more.

Despite all that, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that the basic views of the American people have not change: 59% of voters still agree with Reagan’s inaugural address statement. Only 28% disagree, and 14% are not sure.

I have to think that all of this could pay dividends for Republicans if the GOP can win the public relations war over the size of the Obama stimulus package, the budget, the deficits the Administration is running up, the taxes they want to raise, and the way in which the Administration is working to bring back the era of Big Government. Ecstasies over a New New Deal notwithstanding, the public is not in the mood for bigger government and can be persuaded to give a big thumbs-down to the Administration’s efforts to expand government if only White House spin is not allowed to trump the facts of the Administration’s domestic program.

It may be Barack Obama’s White House. But it is still Ronald Reagan’s America. If the latter sees clearly that the Administration’s policy priorities are antithetical to its own, we will look back on talk of the GOP’s decline and laugh.

I thought that President Obama made clear that when we take prisoners, the United States must adhere to the guidelines in the Army Field Manual? Apparently when prisoners are taken for the cause of bigger government, officials sometimes have to resort to tougher measures.

On a more serious note, are the Governor and the California Legislature so desperate for tax increases that they have to hold legislators hostage to get them passed?

Despite a long night of frantic negotiations, legislative leaders are still struggling to find enough Republican votes to pass a bill that would close California’s $42 billion budget gap and end 102 days of partisan gridlock.

Only a single Republican, Senate Minority Leader Dave Cogdill, voted for the budget bill when it came up in the Senate Saturday evening, while state Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, did not vote. Senate leaders left the bill open for possible vote changes, but it will only pass if Cogdill can somehow find two more GOP votes.

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Dear Fellow Conservative:

Election Day 2008 produced a liberal governing majority that no one envisioned even as little as two years ago. The Democrats control both chambers of Congress as well as the Presidency. And while they are motivated by politics rather than solutions, Americans perceive them as the true agents of change and reform.

Buried within election data is troubling news. The Republican Party is losing grassroots support, and conservatives are peeling away from the party. According to exit polls, one-in-five self-identified conservatives voted for Barack Obama, clearly illustrating the Republican Party’s inability to project conservative values with credibility.

And this reality has been manifested into a set of greater truths: Americans in 2009 believe that Republicans are tied to the status quo, cannot be trusted on the issues that matter most to them, and are incoherent when articulating a positive vision for the future.

But in light of this, I believe Republicans, by firmly embracing conservative solutions-based traditions, can rise again and set the best course for America. From the desk of an eternal optimist, better days are ahead.

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