A Sharper GOP Field
By Jonah Goldberg

The Republican presidential logjam has finally broken.

Donald Trump, who believes not only that he would make the best president but that he could win, declined to run because making money is his true “passion.” It’s as if Cincinnatus loved his plow too much.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also bowed out, with class and dignity even his friend Trump could not buy.

Ron Paul, the libertarian Harold Stassen, is in for another go, presumably on the mistaken assumption that America has turned into Tea Party Nation. (If only!)

And then there’s Newt Gingrich.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the former House speaker — a man who has spent much of the last decade declaring the need for radical transformation of this, that and the other thing — denounced Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals as too “radical” and nothing less than “right-wing social engineering.” He also came out in favor of an individual mandate for health insurance.

This last bit of news was no doubt greeted with jubilation in the Mitt Romney camp, given that Romney had only days earlier given a speech defending his own landmark achievement — a state-based individual mandate that helped inspire “Obamacare.” By my count, Romney’s speech bombed with 9 out of 10 conservatives (the 10th being influential conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt).

To have Gingrich out there defending the mandate — and by extension Romney — had to have the former Massachusetts governor jumping for joy so high his hair might actually have moved.

By midday Monday, however, Gingrich was reversing himself in response to a deluge of criticism. But the damage was done. The simple fact is that despite Gingrich’s immense talents and achievements, Ryan — who’s not even in the race — is more popular than Gingrich among conservatives. It’s hard to throw someone under the bus when it’s not your bus. More to the point, Gingrich reinforced the impression that his mouth deserves a patent as a perpetual motion machine.

Still, the real significance of the last week or so is not the breaking up of the political logjam of candidates but of the policy logjam.

Not only did Romney and Gingrich blur the lines between the GOP and Barack Obama, they also sharpened the distinctions between themselves and the rest of the GOP field.

In this, they were playing catch-up with Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s extremely effective governor and putative front-runner among conservative policy wonks, the Bush family and insomniacs. Daniels yanked away collective-bargaining rights for public workers years ago, without the Sturm und Drang that accompanied Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s more tepid reforms. Just this month, Daniels successfully withdrew all state funding of Planned Parenthood, a holy grail for social conservatives.

Daniels, however, also steadfastly refuses to sign anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes. He famously called for a “truce” on social issues, which social conservatives translate as “surrender” to the left since they rightly believe that the left is the aggressor in the culture war. And last week he playfully suggested he might tap former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate. Floating a pro-choice veep is not the way to reassure social conservatives.

For those paying attention, these should be fascinating developments given the perennial claims that the GOP base is too right wing, extremist and closed-minded to tolerate such philosophical diversity. (And with the exception of Gingrich and Paul, there are no Southerner candidates in a party allegedly captured by the South.)

Does all this mean that the GOP has re-embraced its Nelson Rockefeller roots? Of course not.

But it does hint that this year’s primary season won’t involve a replay of the dreadful 2008 debates in which the candidates auditioned to play the part of Ronald Reagan in the school play.

It also suggests that the front-runners — a group that includes former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — might be ahead of the rank and file of the GOP.

Come November, it is very unlikely that conservative voters will stay home. So, barring a truly fringe GOP nominee, they will vote against Obama no matter what. Already, the conversation on the right is moving toward the all-important question of “electability” — i.e., which candidate can peel off the handful of moderates and independents needed to win in an election that will be a referendum on Obama and his record.

Pelosi Could Guarantee Destruction of Democrats in 2012
by Matt Towery

It was the dumbest thing the Democratic members of the U.S. House could have done. And it is already jeopardizing the chances of President Obama to reverse the fortunes of himself and his party. “It” was making Nancy Pelosi the minority leader of the House, and thus the head of what is now an even more liberal delegation of lawmakers.

I find it interesting when a veteran news/talk celebrity like Barbara Walters asks President Obama to respond to Sarah Palin’s comment that if she runs for president in 2012, she believes she could win. Obama at first gracefully dodges the question, only to have Walters laugh and condescending suggest that surely he believes he could defeat Palin. So we’re to assume automatically that Palin is a lightweight, but that someone like Pelosi is a political pro and an asset to her party.

If Pelosi is such a pro, she should realize that her hard stand of opposing an extension of tax cuts for so-called “wealthy Americans” as part of an extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts is placing what few moderates she has from her own party in Congress in political hot water. Moreover, this puts her at odds with the president. That’s not to say he wants to extend these cuts for those who earn over $250,000 as a family. Rather, it’s to say that, at least for the short term, he desperately needs to do so.

The problem is that Pelosi, who at one point was known vaguely by the public, is now becoming the left-wing spokesperson and a potential obstructionist to compromise. This will only hurt her own party and the president as she rises in name identification. It was Pelosi who was unapologetic for the beating her colleagues took in the elections. Now even major national newspapers are reporting that she is becoming a huge thorn in the side of a president who desperately needs to appear more moderate in order to have a prayer of re-election in 2012.

I have drawn the comparison between the Obama administration and that of Jimmy Carter’s more than once. Now history truly is repeating itself. In the 1970s, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill was a powerful Democratic speaker of the House. At first, he and Carter worked together. But when Carter began challenging pet projects of O’Neill’s, and also failed to push for universal heath care, O’Neill turned into the Nancy Pelosi of his era.

Many forget that while the Democrats held onto the House in 1980, O’Neill was used as a major weapon by the GOP in that year’s presidential election. They argued that the Democrats were too liberal and that Carter had to go. And so Jimmy Carter went. Doubtless he was painfully aware of the large target O’Neill had placed on his back.

It seems likely that the more soon-to-be Minority Leader Pelosi opens her mouth, the more she will appear out of touch with political reality. For example, she never flinched over the use of government planes to fly her across the country, to and from her district. Did it ever dawn on her that the Republican speaker that Democrats most loved to hate, Newt Gingrich, generally flew commercial airliners to and from his district, most often in coach, unless he had earned a legitimate “frequent flier” upgrade?

This was before Pelosi’s party got spanked on Election Day, of course. Her refusal to acknowledge the consequences of the elections, and her desire to soldier on with a pure leftist agenda, create not just problems for Obama with the public, but potentially within his own party, as well.

While Hillary Clinton has emphatically denied that she will seek the presidency, a recent PollPosition national survey showed her basically tied among likely voters in a Clinton-Obama contest in 2012. And recent surveys have shown Clinton’s favorable polling percentages are higher than Obama’s, while the president’s unfavorable percentages among voters are higher than Clinton’s.

Could this explain why, throughout the early days of the recent North Korea-South Korea crisis, Secretary of State Clinton has been nowhere to be found? Can you say “Bobby Kennedy in 1968″?

With President Obama having to deal with an inflexibly leftist Democratic House caucus, and at the same time needing to recapture the support of moderate voters who abandoned the Democrats in the recent election, the last thing he needs is a louder, shriller and more stubborn Nancy Pelosi. It could spell doom for him in the next presidential contest. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

A New Generation GOP Is Good News for Conservative Future
by Michael Medved

It’s true that the November elections brought prominent winners in both parties, but the contrast between Democratic and Republican victors is highly revealing.

The biggest Democratic success stories involved re-elected Sens. Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid, and new California governor Jerry Brown – all age 70 or above! The GOP, meanwhile, hailed breakthrough victories for 39-year-old Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, 43-year old Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, 38-year old Governor Nikki Haley in South Carolina, 42-year- old Sen. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, 47-year-old Sen. Rand Paul in Kentucky, and many other youthful candidates bringing fresh, conservative perspectives to high office. Moreover, with Hillary Clinton ruling out a future presidential race, Joe Biden reaching age 74 by 2016, and John Edwards utterly unthinkable, what younger generation Democratic star could plausibly succeed Obama?

The Democrats, in other words, have become a party of shop-worn retreads while the GOP bench is full of next-generation leaders of potential national stature, including Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Senators John Thune of South Dakota, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and many more.

Looking toward the future, the rising stars of the GOP not only look more vibrant and dynamic than the Pelosi/Reid Democrats, they also count as increasingly diverse.

After the recent elections, skeptics can no longer deride the GOP as an all-white party of grumpy old men. Marco Rubio, 39, became the new Senator from Florida while fellow Latino Republicans Bryan Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico became the nation’s only two Hispanic Governors. Jaime Herrera, age 31, captured a Democratic Congressional seat in Washington State, while Raul Labrador did the same in Idaho. Two more Hispanic Republicans– Bill Flores and Quico Canseco—knocked out incumbent Democrats in Texas. In South Carolina, Indian-American Nikki Haley won for Governor while black conservative Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son (among others) for a Congressional seat. Alan West, an African-American Iraq War hero, trounced an incumbent white Florida Democrat.

In the new Republican House of Representatives, eight members of the GOP majority will proudly qualify for a potential “Republican Hispanic Caucus.” Geraldo Rivera may dismiss such victories as “window dressing,” (as he did recently on Fox News) but they have changed both image and substance of the GOP.

Liberal Crackup
by Walter E. Williams

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post column (8/27/10), said, “Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed,” pointing out that overwhelming majorities of Americans have repudiated liberal agenda items such as: Obamacare, Obama’s stimulus, building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, redefinition of marriage to include same-sex marriage, lax immigration law enforcement and vast expansion of federal power that includes unprecedented debt and deficits.

The nation’s elite and the news media see being against the Obama-led agenda as being racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, mean-spirited and insensitive. Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, has a different twist expressed in “It’s Witch-Hunt Season” (8/29/10). Krugman says that the last time a Democrat sat in the White House, Bill Clinton, he faced a witch-hunt by his political opponents. “Now,” Krugman says, “it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse,” asking, “So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?”

Professor Krugman and others among America’s elite blame some of the rage on talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. They are only partially correct. What talk shows have accomplished is they’ve ended the isolation of many ordinary Americans. When the liberal mainstream media dominated the airwaves, Americans who were against race and sex quotas were made to feel as though they were racists and sexists. Americans who were against big government were portrayed as mean-spirited and uncaring. What talk radio and the massive expansion in non-traditional media have done is not only end the isolation, but more important, the silence amongst ordinary Americans.

Krugman says that what we’re witnessing is “political craziness.” Therefore, the overwhelming majority of Americans who think our borders ought to be secure and think we should have the right to determine who enters our country are politically crazy. Americans who can find nothing in the U.S. Constitution granting Congress the power to take over our health care system are politically crazy. Americans who think a mosque should not be built in the shadows of the Muslim-destroyed World Trade Center are simply religious bigots. By the way, those who oppose the building are not saying there’s no legal or constitutional right to do so any more than they would say a person has no legal or constitutional right to curse his parents, but neither is a good idea. In Thomas Sowell’s column on the topic (8/31/10), he reminds us that “If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society.”

Krugman predicts that political craziness, and by inference crazy Americans, will result in a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and play chicken with the federal budget. Chicken with the budget is precisely what Defundit.org has called for. Already they’ve obtained the pledges of 165 congressional candidates not to fund any part of Obamacare.

While America’s liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others.

Their agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Free markets imply voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning control and regulation.

Why liberalism has become an ugly sight, as Krauthammer claims, is because more and more Americans have wised up to their agenda.

An Epic Dem Disaster
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The magnitude of the catastrophe facing the Democratic Party in the fall elections is only gradually becoming clear to the leaders of both parties. The Democrats will lose both the Senate and the House. They will lose more House seats in 2010 than the 54 they lost in 1994, and they will lose the Senate, possibly with some seats to spare.

In state after state, the races that were once marginal are now solidly Republican, those that were possible takeaways are now likely GOP wins, and the impossible seats are now fully in play.

Colorado offers a good example. Betsey Markey was supposed to be a marginal new Democratic member. But Cory Gardner, her Republican opponent, is now more than 20 points ahead. John Salazar, the brother of the interior secretary and a well-established Democratic incumbent in a largely Republican district, is now almost 10 points behind his GOP challenger Scott Tipton. And Ed Perlmutter, a solidly entrenched Democrat in a supposedly nearly safe district, is running 1 point behind his GOP opponent, the unusually articulate Ryan Frazier (a black Republican with Obama-esque charisma). The Republicans will probably win all three seats.

Or take Arkansas. Blanche Lincoln is clinically dead, trailing John Boozman 65-27 in the latest Rasmussen poll. In the race that was supposed to be close for the open seat in AR-2, Republican Tim Griffin is massacring Democrat Joyce Elliott by 52-35. In the race that was thought to be a likely Democratic win — AR-1, the East Arkansas district — Republican Rick Crawford is running seven points ahead of Democrat Chad Causey. And, in the district that was considered a safe Democratic seat, the home of Blue Dog leader Mike Ross, Republican Beth Anne Rankin is showing surprising strength and may topple her opponent.

In the Senate, Republicans are solidly ahead in Delaware, North Dakota, Indiana and Arkansas. They have good leads in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington. The Democratic incumbents are perpetually below 50 and basically tied with their Republican challengers in Nevada, California and Wisconsin. Illinois is tied. Connecticut and New York (after the primary) are in play. That’s a gain of up to 13 seats!

And, then consider West Virginia, where the hugely popular Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin — who boasts of a 70 percent job approval rating — looked like the certain successor to Robert Byrd. But, in the latest Rasmussen poll, he leads Republican challenger John Raese by only 48 to 41. When 22 percent of the state likes the job you are doing as governor but doesn’t want to vote for you for senator, you are in deep, deep trouble. That’s 14!

Why the disaster? Obama’s poll numbers alone don’t account for it. With a job approval in the low 40s, he is not as radioactive as Bush was. He still has a ways to fall to reach those depths. So why the unbelievable wipeout in the congressional races?

Obama has a lot to do with it. But so does Congress itself. With congressional approval at 23 percent in the realclearpolitics.com average, the Democrats in the House and Senate have contributed mightily to their own demise. The Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters investigations and the impending decision to let each keep his and her seat does a lot to undermine Congress’ image. So did the deals surrounding health care reform, as the public watched sausage being made in Washington. The spectacle of Congress voting on bills the members have not read adds to public discontent.

In most off-year cycles, it is the president’s party that is judged in the voting. But, this year, Congress has been in the forefront of most of the legislation — up to actually writing the stimulus and health care bills — that the body itself is attracting its own negatives. Republican insurgents’ success in derailing incumbent senators in Alaska and Utah attest to the bipartisan nature of the disaffection.

But, for whatever reason, the only mistake either party can make as 2010 approaches is to aim too low. It is not the marginal seats that are in play, it is the safe ones!

It’s the Economy, Dems
by Donald Lambro

The economy is tanking. Economists say it has slowed to a near comatose 1.5 percent growth rate, unemployment claims were at a nine-month high and jobs are scarce, yet President Obama is focusing on corporate campaign donations.

While the economy is the clear overriding issue in the midterm elections, threatening to topple Democrats from power in Congress, Obama was devoting his weekly radio address last Saturday to an issue far from the real concerns of workers, families and employers struggling to survive.

If anyone is looking for signs Obama is completely disconnected from the failing economy, his radio address blaming Republicans for blocking his legislation to place restrictions on corporate campaign donations delivered that in spades.

With polls showing Obama’s job approval rating slipping to 43 percent last week because of the economy, Democratic strategists grumble privately that the White House has a “tin ear.” Republicans said Obama’s focus on campaign politics instead of policies to get the economy growing again showed how much he wanted to change the subject in this year’s elections.

“Americans want us to focus on jobs, but by focusing on an election bill, Democrats are sending a clear message to the American people that their jobs aren’t as important as the jobs of embattled Democrat politicians,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in response to Obama’s remarks.

But the Obama administration remained in deep denial about the declining health of the U.S. economy, insisting that it was “moving in the right direction,” dubbing it the “Recovery Summer” and declaring that economic growth was “growing at a good clip.”

A few weeks ago, Vice President Joe Biden predicted the creation of between 250,000 to 500,000 jobs was just around the corner.

But as the summer draws to a close, and with the elections a little more than two months away, those jobs are nowhere to be seen. If anything, the economy’s health was worsening, and this administration didn’t seem to have a viable plan to pull the country out of its economic decline.

Among recent developments:

– Last week the government reported that more American workers had filed for jobless benefits than at anytime since last November. Unemployment-benefit claims rose by 12,000 to 500,000 for the third straight weekly increase — the first time claims had hit the half-million mark in nine months.

– While the official unemployment rate stood at 9.5 percent in July, the real jobless rate is much higher than that. Factor in the 1.2 million unemployed who have given up looking for work and have dropped out of the labor force, plus those who want full-time work but can only find part-time jobs, and the national unemployment rate is 16.5 percent.

– The housing industry has sunk into a deeper slump, with nearly half of homeowners who enrolled in Obama’s mortgage relief plan dropping out — raising fears that foreclosures may increase in the second half of the year.

– Other troubling signs point to growing economic desperation in the workforce. Longterm unemployed Americans are forced to apply earlier than they planned for Social Security benefits in an attempt to make ends meet. And a record number of workers are withdrawing funds from their 401(k) retirement accounts to pay their household bills and put food on the table.

Meantime, the Obama administration is planning to slam the U.S. economy with the largest tax increase in American history by letting President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 top income tax rate cuts expire at the end of this year.

Beleagured businesses, both large and small, have been saying all year that this will deeply hurt the economy, risk-taking investors and job creation, but the White House and Democratic leaders are stubbornly determined to go ahead with their big-spending tax-hike plan.

It isn’t just the business community saying higher taxes will weaken the economy: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is saing it, too.

A CBO analysis released last week said permanently extending the Bush tax cuts would give the country a “considerable” economic boost over the next few years.

“Under that… scenario, economic growth would be stronger next year; unemployment would be lower next year,” said CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, who was appointed to his post by Democratic leaders in Congress.

Moreover, “under current law, both the waning of (Obama’s) fiscal stimulus and the scheduled increases in taxes will temporarily subtract from growth, especially in 2011,” CBO added.

Notably, a growing number of Democratic candidates are also urging Obama and their party to keep the lower tax rates in place, saying it would be the height of economic folly to raise income taxes on the people who create jobs at a time when the economy is in a steep decline.

Some of the don’t-raise-taxes Democrats are Senate candidates in critical battleground contests, including Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, Rep. Brad Ellsworth of Indiana and Rep. Charlie Melancon of Louisiana.

When Ronald Reagan cut tax rates across the board in the 1981-82 recession, the economy surged into a spectacular recovery, with quarterly rate increases of between 4 percent and 9.3 percent over the next several years.

There’s a message there somewhere for the stubborn Obama Democrats to consider.

The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010
by Charles Krauthammer

“I am not an ideologue,” protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted (BEG ITAL)dissent(END ITAL). And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.

After Massachusetts, What’s Next for the GOP?
by Star Parker

Have you ever watched as a dear friend becomes smitten with someone you know is not for them?

You listen as they swear how Mr. or Ms. Right has finally arrived, wondering how they cannot see the obvious. Your only option is to watch and wait for the inevitable, knowing that when it’s over you’ll be there to help pick up the pieces.

So, yes, independent voters, who were key to electing Barack Obama, are now falling out of love with him. But, I ask, what were you folks thinking a year ago?

You didn’t realize that the post-racial candidate with the magic wand was a classic, boilerplate liberal? You were so sick of Republicans that you didn’t bother to think about it? But you do know about these rebound relationships, don’t you?

It’s not like we haven’t had our experience with liberalism. That experience made the liberal label so politically deadly that liberals renamed themselves “progressives.”

So, what can we expect now in the wake of the miracle in Massachusetts?

Democrats are between a rock and hard place because Barack Obama is not going to change. This is a date that you know after five minutes is not going to work and you have the whole evening ahead of you. In this case, it’s three more years.

Pundits are talking about the Bill Clinton model. When Bill Clinton I was repudiated by voters, he morphed into Bill Clinton II.

But Bill Clinton is a not an ideologue. Bill is a pragmatic man. He’ll do whatever it takes to keep the party going.

It’s hard to fathom Obama doing the equivalent of signing welfare reform, promoting a free trade treaty like NAFTA, or cutting the capital gains tax.

Obama is a liberal ideologue. To change would require him to become a different man. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.

Democrats, under this president’s leadership, will continue to push a left wing, liberal program. This means that the door will be open for Republicans to make hay, as independent voters nationwide wake up and recall why the “liberal” label became so deadly.

Over the last ten days, the probability of Democrats retaining control of the House in 2010 dropped from 85 percent to 59 percent, as reflected in contracts traded on Intrade.com.

Economic recovery will continue at tortoise-like speed as result of the prevailing culture of high taxes, expanding government spending and deficits, and welfare state bailouts that encourage non-productive behavior.

It will be tempting for many Republicans to take the easy way and campaign to exploit prevailing unhappiness. This would be irresponsible. The problems facing the nation are too great.

Republicans must offer now a concrete alternative vision, Contract with America-style.

Return to a low tax, limited government environment. Address escalating health care costs with market, enterprise-driven reforms. We are drowning in the red ink of entitlements. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid must be transformed into models of ownership and choice. Parents must be given freedom to choose where to send their children to school.

A bold Republican agenda would aim to unite our deeply divided nation by reaching into black and Latino communities to show that ownership and personal responsibility — not the welfare state — is the key to the American dream.

And let’s not shy away from the truth that this is a nation under God.

Some say that a free society has no religious absolutes. Stephen Douglas argued this when, in his debates with Lincoln, he claimed it was the American way for each state to be free to decide if it would permit slavery.

Current polling shows that less than one in three Americans feel the country is on the right track. It’s time to get back on the path of freedom.

Leader Hints At New “Contract With America”
by Jillian Bandes

Heading into the 2010 mid-term elections, House Republicans want to re-focus their efforts towards providing solutions to failed Democratic policies. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), has said that could include a new version of the the 1994 “Contract with America,” which led to Republican electoral success in all levels of government.

Their timing couldn’t be better: a new poll released yesterday showed that a full 50 percent of American voters wouldn’t re-elect Obama if another election was held right now. That poll, conducted by Allstate and National Journal, also found “growing dissatisfaction among Americans regarding the state of the country,” and that a strong plurality thought America was on the wrong track.

That means it’s time to seize the moment. Boehner said the new “contract” or “agenda” would “involve members of the conference and our candidates,” meaning that it could be a sort of litmus test for all House GOPers during the mid-terms. It would likely include agenda items such as lowering taxes and decreasing deficits, as well as addressing the issues of immigration and bailouts.

The House Republican Conference’s annual retreat, which starts in two weeks, is expected to provide a forum for Republicans to talk about policy objectives – key during the last two years of President Obama’s first term.

“At our annual retreat, House Republicans will be working on solutions to fix the failed Democrat policies enacted over the last 12 months,” said Mary Vought, press secretary for the HRC.

Vought said that House Republican leaders chose Baltimore as the location for the retreat “because it is a working class city that has a 10.8 % unemployment rate.”

President Obama is slated to speak at the conference, and attendance is expected to be at record levels.

“As Americans in growing numbers are turning to House Republicans for solutions to our current crises, we expect another large gathering,” said Vought.

The Democrats held a parallel gathering this week, but didn’t “retreat” anywhere – their annual conference was held in the Capitol, during a series of meetings that focused on jobs. Reports said they were trying not to appear as though they were leaving on a retreat while the rest of America was hard at work.

About 170 out of the House’s 257 Democrats attended that meeting, where President Obama spoke along with former President Bill Clinton.

If the National Journal poll means anything, it’s that the Democrats have a lot of ground to cover. Solid majorities of Americans said the government needs to make government programs more effective while reducing wasteful spending, and that they wanted the government to force financial institutions to pay back bailout money. Democrats, meanwhile, contemplate a second stimulus and increased government programs, as opposed to improving existing ones.

That could help Republicans in 2010, especially those who failed to get elected in years prior. Politico reported that a half-dozen legislators who did not win election in 2006 and 2008 were contemplated a return to the ballot, or had already announced that they would do so. A reinvigorated policy effort, and perhaps even a revised Contract with America, could be just the ticket.

Palin Stays One Step Ahead of the Political Class
by Jillian Bandes

One of the biggest questions for conservatives right now is whether Sarah Palin will run for president in 2012.

Palin just announced that she would speak at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in April – the second-most important GOP political gathering behind the Republican National Convention. While it’s not guaranteed that an appearance at the event means an individual will enter the GOP primary, it’s virtually impossible to enter the primary without having appeared.

Arguing with Idiots By Glenn Beck

“Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s decision to attend — and speak at — the SLRC… transforms that event into the first legitimate cattle-call of the 2012 Republican presidential sweepstakes,” wrote Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post.

Palin’s SLRC speech will happen right after a keynote address at the National Tea Party Convention, which has a goal of consolidating the movement’s “multiple organizations.”

Matthew Continetti, author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin, says that the dual appearances are good news on the heels of Palin’s abrupt exit from the Alaska governorship, and that they could indicate 2012 Presidential aspirations.

“Palin began her rehabilitation with her book launch and media tour. Now, with the SRLC appearance, she’s continuing to lay the groundwork for a presidential run,” he said.

“I happen to think her more important appearance will be at the national Tea Party convention next month — Palin, unlike many prominent Republicans, understands the GOP must capture the Tea Party message, enthusiasm, and supporters if it wants to return to power.”

Continetti’s assessment is right in line with a National Journal poll last month, which put Palin dead last as the “GOP political insider” choice for the Republican nomination – that’s coming from party leaders, political professionals and pundits. Ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was their pick.

But Palin’s tea party appeal can’t be denied among the GOP rank-and-file. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans and forty-one percent of all voters currently see Palin as “representative of a new direction for the Republican Party,” and many put her approval ratings on par with Obama’s. Palin does well in indicators of “shared values” and “trustworthiness” among all voters.

Combine those favorability ratings with her record-breaking book tour, and hopes are pie-in-the-ski for her nomination as the GOP presidential candidate. Her autobiography Going Rogue has sold over a million copies, with record turnout at her book tour events.

“This book tour has been an amazing and inspirational experience for me and my family as we crisscrossed the country and met so many wonderful Americans,” said Palin, via her Facebook page.

More Dems Will Call It Quits
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Other than the H1N1 virus, the most contagious disease in our nation’s capital is retirement. It is catching. The more Democrats that quit, the more others are also encouraged to hang it up. Retirements like those of Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., turn off donors to Democratic incumbents, encourage viable Republican challengers to get in races around the nation and lead other incumbent Dems to think about spending more time as lobbyists making money in Washington.

And the retirement bug is in full reign in Washington. In the week before Christmas, three Democrats from red districts retired (two from Tennessee and one from Kansas) and a fourth, Parker Griffith of Alabama, became a Republican. Now, with Dodd’s and Dorgan’s retirements, we can expect the blue legislators from red states to start falling ever more quickly.

But these retirements also send a signal to voters that is anything but helpful to President Obama: They signal that Democrats expect to lose. Nobody buys that these folks are leaving to spend more time with their families. Voters all realize that Democratic senators and congressmen are reading the handwriting on the walls, which sends the same message as the polls — that voters are fed up with the Obama administration and with the Democratic Party.

To see Democrats stand up and, in effect, admit defeat is a bit like watching repentant sinners confessing at a revival meeting. One outburst triggers another. And the specter of Democratic leaders running from having to face their constituents again convinces swing voters that maybe there is something rotten in the party and in its congressional delegation.

Dorgan and Dodd both retired because they felt they would lose. But each had new scandals to fear had he actually run.

Dorgan never had to account to the voters of North Dakota for his role in accepting almost $100,000 in campaign contributions from Jack Abramoff’s firm or the Indian tribes it represented. In return for these funds, Dorgan interceded on behalf of one tribe in Massachusetts and another in Mississippi, both far from his home state. Because his involvement came out after the 2004 elections had been held and he was safely returned to Congress, he never had to face the voters.

Indeed, he was the ranking Democrat on the Indian Affairs Subcommittee and led the investigation of the Abramoff bribes, never mentioning that he was one of their recipients. It would have been fun to watch him try to escape the criticism.

Dodd, at last being held to account for his role in fronting for AIG for his entire career, also faced issues related to his wife’s employment by a subsidiary of AIG at the same time that Dodd was running errands for it in Congress. Dodd, of course, was the largest single recipient of AIG funds in Congress, getting more than twice as much as the next largest recipient.

The scandals that attach to Dodd and Dorgan would have injured the party and cost them angst not only in Connecticut and North Dakota but throughout the nation.

Obviously, the North Dakota seat will go Republican, probably to the North Dakota governor, John Hoeven.

But the Connecticut seat is hardly the automatic Democratic seat most pundits predict. While State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is quite popular and enjoys broad support, Connecticut voters are fed up with the Democratic agenda and opposed to the health care bill. The more all Democratic senators march in lockstep to pass legislation the people of America oppose, the more voters are willing to look past the candidates and vote based on party labels.

Rob Simmons, a former Connecticut congressman, would be a strong challenger to Blumenthal and, with the tide as pronounced as it is becoming for the GOP, who is to say that he can’t pull it off?

Ditto, by the way, for anyone who challenges Kristen Gillibrand. Her record of flacking for the tobacco companies and her flip-flops on most major issues since her appointment make her very vulnerable to any GOP challenger who steps up to the plate.

When a tsunami is coming, it’s very hard to predict how high the tide will go. Will it just lap over the swing states like Arkansas and Nevada? Will it go up to the lean-Democrat states and cost them seats in Delaware and Colorado? Or will it surge so far that it takes away Democratic Senate seats in solid Democratic states without elected incumbents like New York with Gillibrand, Illinois and Connecticut? Or will it so swamp the nation that even where Democratic incumbents are running in blue states, they are not safe in states like California, Washington, Indiana, Oregon and Pennsylvania?

Our bet is that the rising tide will swamp all their boats.

What the GOP Can Learn From a Pizza Chain
by Jonah Goldberg

This is one of those rare moments when the conventional wisdom in Washington is right. The Democrats are poised to have a bad year; the only argument is over how bad it will be. And that question rests on whether or not the Republican Party crafts an agenda voters will support.

So far the GOP has shrewdly been the “party of no.” Since I disagree with so much of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda, I happen to think that “no” is the correct position on the merits. But that’s not the point. Saying “no” has worked because that’s what most Americans say, too.

The trick for the GOP is to figure out what it will say yes to. Republicans are a bit like the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. Americans were sick of Bush and the Republicans back then, so they threw their support behind the Democrats by default. The Democrats over-read this support as a sweeping mandate for their agenda.

This has given the GOP an opportunity many Republicans feared just a year ago might not come for a generation.

Now comes the hard part: seizing the opportunity. Fortunately, I’m not a political consultant. But if I were giving my two cents — and whaddya know? I am! — I’d tell the GOP to look not to Reagan in 1980 or Gingrich in 1994, as so many pundits suggest.

I’d look to Domino’s in 2010.

You may have seen the commercials or the four-minute YouTube video touting the iconic pizza-delivery chain’s reinvention. But if you haven’t, Domino’s new campaign can be summed up easily enough: “We blew it.”

Focus groups and consumer surveys revealed something pretty much everyone outside of Domino’s has known for years: Their pizza stinks. It tastes as if aliens tried to copy real pizza but just couldn’t capture its essence.

In their four-minute video (search YouTube for “the Pizza Turnaround”) executives, employees and chefs at the company confront their harshest reviews head-on. They talk about how much it hurts to hear that their product “tastes like cardboard” and is worse than microwave pizza. But they admit the truth and commit themselves to starting over with more flavor, better crusts, and cheese that doesn’t taste like discount weather caulking. Domino’s says that the American palate has improved, and they want to update their recipe to take account of that fact.

The appeal of the campaign should be obvious: honesty. Domino’s admits they lost their way, and they want a second chance. They’re confronting the criticism head-on rather than denying it.

Obviously, the analogy to the GOP isn’t perfect. For example, last I checked, Domino’s didn’t get bogged down in an unpopular war.

But the GOP’s troubles over the last decade have a lot to do with the fact that Americans didn’t stop liking what the Republican Party is supposed to deliver. They stopped liking what the GOP actually delivered.

As a conservative who cares more about policies than partisan success, I would hate to see the GOP abandon conservative policies in order to be more popular. That would be like Domino’s listening to critics and then deciding to get into the Chinese food business. Indeed, by my lights, that’s what George W. Bush tried to do with his “compassionate conservatism.” He surrendered to liberal arguments about the role, size and scope of government on too many fronts. In effect, he said you can have your pizza and Kung Pao chicken all in the same dish. That’s not a good meal, it’s a bad mess.

Moreover, abandoning conservatism would be silly. According to Gallup, Americans identify themselves as conservative over liberal by a margin of 2-1, the same proportion as just after 9/11.

So what would a GOP-turnaround recipe look like? That’s a subject for any number of other columns. But for starters, I’d look to young political chefs like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). He’s been the leader in attacking “crony capitalism” — the corrupt merger of big business and big government, a hallmark of the Obama administration. For too long Republicans confused supporting big business with supporting free markets, when big business is often the biggest impediment to fair competition. Other fresh new ingredients would almost surely include pro-family tax policies and the de-linking of legal and illegal immigration as interchangeable terms.

But first, the GOP needs to admit it screwed up. That’s what Democrats did with Bill Clinton, and it gave the “New Democratic Party” a new lease on life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t have been more wrong when he said there are “no second acts in American lives.” More than any nation on earth, America is about second acts. We love contrition and redemption. We love it in pizza companies and politicians alike.

Fall eyes on Virginia
by Salena Zito

Virginia will be the center of political attention this fall, thanks to the first statewide election in a battleground state since the 2008 presidential election.

“Here we go again,” said Larry Larsen, an independent voter accustomed to the national attention that Virginia races attract.

November’s gubernatorial race matches former state attorney general Bob McDonnell, a Republican, versus state senator Creigh Deeds, a Democrat.

A SurveyUSA poll last week gave McDonnell a 15-point lead. RealClearPolitics shows McDonnell as 6.3 percentage points in the lead, based on aggregate polling data.

“If McDonnell were to win this, the message it sends back to Washington is to slow down,” said John Morrison, a Deeds supporter.

Morrison was busy planning a fundraiser for his candidate last week while taking orders at Piccadilly Print Shop, a business he has owned for more than 25 years.

Larsen, a stockbroker and father of six, leans Republican. His issues, not surprisingly, hinge on the economy: “My income is not what it was last year, and right now it seems that none of the spending solutions are working.”

Both Virginia and New Jersey will hand a report card of sorts to President Obama and the Democrats controlling Congress with their governor’s races this fall. Both are leaning toward Republican wins, but in politics, anything can change.

For about 40 years, since Richard Nixon’s 1968 run, Northern Virginia favored Republicans until it began shifting to Democrats in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

Located near Washington, D.C., it is home to lots of tech companies and their employees, along with a healthy proportion of people who work in government (and government has been expanding since Obama became president) and who lean left.

The Virginia Beach and Richmond areas also have favored Republicans since Nixon. Unlike their northern cousins, people in those areas have become redder.

Obama’s victory in Virginia was hugely related to high black voter turnout, especially in the Virginia Beach area. If that voting bloc does not show up for Deeds, he is in trouble.

It does not help him that the nation’s first elected black governor, Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, is cool to him – so much so that Wilder told the Washington Times last week that Deeds risked becoming a “me too” candidate. Wilder then complimented McDonnell for reaching out to Virginians who don’t traditionally vote Republican.

Despite a push from the White House, Wilder is miles from endorsing Deeds. While McDonnell has made numerous calls on the former governor, Deeds will have his first meeting with Wilder sometime this week.

McDonnell is well-positioned as a state official. He beat Deeds for the attorney general’s job by about 300 votes in 2005, in what was a more favorable year for Democrats. (Hurricane Katrina had hit and wiped out Bush’s approval ratings, just as the Iraq War’s unpopularity heated up and Social Security reform fell apart).

Obama’s 2008 victory in Virginia, while impressive, was many years in the making, built on demographic changes and the election of three Democrats – U.S. senators Mark Warner (also a former governor) and Jim Webb and Gov. Tim Kaine. They were successful because they built a new brand for Democrats, one that was fiscally responsible and focused on improving people’s lives rather than on divisive social issues.

That begs a question: With a healthy party brand and three popular Democrats in statewide leadership, why is Deeds languishing in the polls?

“Washington’s policies, plain and simple,” said Philip Charles, a retired D.C. firefighter from Front Royal, Va. “Obama’s charisma won this state last fall. His policies may cost his party a seat in the governor’s mansion this fall.”

Charles, another independent, is both under- and overwhelmed by what Congress has put on the table since January: “It is too much. People wanted change – well, they got it, and now they want to stop it.”

With its counter-cyclical election, Virginia is poised to serve as a check on government’s role in everyday life, its expansion and its spending.

Part of Deeds’ problem is that voters are exhausted after 2008’s “change” hype and discouraged because they don’t feel that things are getting better – changing – fast enough.

The 2010 mid-term elections will hinge on the economy and on spending. Either the economy roars back and Democrats can claim they made the difference or 2010 could be another 1982, when Ronald Reagan took a mid-term hit because the economy had not yet pulled out of its recession.

One thing is certain: No way will the economy be better this November, when Virginia and New Jersey vote – and when it comes to the relationship between politics and the economy, jobs matter more than all other measures.

Stumbling Governors Signal Trouble for Dems
by Michael Barone

With polls showing a drop in Barack Obama’s job rating and sinking support for the Democrats’ health care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it: in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania’s Ed Rendell suddenly is getting negative job ratings in both the Quinnipiac University and the Franklin & Marshall College polls — his lowest marks in seven years as governor. Ohio’s Ted Strickland, who has spent most of his first term working amicably with Republican legislators, scores less than 50 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll and has only tenuous leads over two Republicans, John Kasich and Mike DeWine, who may run against him next year.

In the two gubernatorial races being contested this year, Republicans seem to have advantages. In Virginia, Republican Bob McDonnell has led Democrat Creigh Deeds in all but one poll and picked up the support of Black Entertainment Television billionaire Sheila Johnson, one of the biggest contributors to the incumbent, Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine. New Jersey incumbent Jon Corzine, who spent more than $100 million on narrow wins for senator in 2000 and governor in 2005, is 15 points behind Republican Chris Christie. Corzine will not be helped by the indictment of multiple Jersey pols, most of them Democrats, in a case initiated by Christie when he was a U.S. attorney.

There’s an argument that these results hold little relevance to the standing of the national parties. Almost every state faces severe fiscal problems, and standoffs between a governor and a legislature can drag the governor’s ratings way down, as in the case of California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Moreover, a governor’s personal strengths and weaknesses can override party identification; one of the nation’s highest-rated governors is Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat in very Republican Wyoming.

Even so, these numbers should be troubling for Democrats. Rendell and Strickland are attractive personalities with some penchant for centrist policies. Both were suggested as possible running mates for Barack Obama. (Both sensibly swatted away those suggestions.) Corzine is running in a state that, with a rising immigrant population and an outflow of affluent residents, has been solidly Democratic for a dozen years. Altogether, these states have 69 electoral votes, and Obama won all four by comfortable margins last November.

Democratic governors in other important states also have been getting low marks from voters. North Carolina’s freshly elected Bev Perdue has only 26 percent of voters willing to re-elect her. Colorado’s Bill Ritter, Washington’s Christine Gregoire, Oregon’s Ted Kulongoski, Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick and Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm have been getting sub-majority voter approval most of the year.

These governors are mostly able and attractive people, and every one of their states voted for Obama. None of them is tarred by scandal or not up to the job, as seems to be the case with the nation’s lowest-rated governors, Nevada Republican Jim Gibbons and New York Democrat David Paterson.

I take all this as evidence — not conclusive evidence, but significant evidence — for the proposition that economic distress does not predispose voters to favor bigger government. Not all the reasons for these governors’ negative job ratings arise from debates over the size of government, but many do — and voters clearly are not hankering for more government.

When you put these results together with Obama’s slide in the polls, they suggest trouble for big-government Democrats. Pollster Scott Rasmussen now shows Obama with only 49 percent job approval; when he asked voters which party they’d like to represent them in the House, Republicans came out ahead of Democrats.

Some analysts will point out that Rasmussen’s results tend to be more negative for Democrats than those of other pollsters. That’s because, as Rasmussen explains, he uses a likely-voter formula that tends to assume that first-time voters in November 2008 will not turn out in force in 2009 or 2010.

That seems to have been the case so far in most 2009 special elections and primaries. In off-year elections without Obama on the ballot, it seems unlikely that young blacks will turn out in larger proportions than young whites, as the Census Bureau reported happening in 2008. Democratic candidates will have to make their own cases, and the governors’ job ratings suggest their prospects may be dicey.

The Republicans Look Ahead
by William Rusher

It seems as likely as anything in politics can be that the Democratic candidate for president in 2012 will be President Obama, seeking re-election to a second term. But who will the Republicans put up to oppose him? It may seem a little early to be worrying about that, but you can bet that that is already the question on a lot of the nation’s best political minds.

And already there are a number of names in the hat. For a party out of national power, governorships are the logical place to turn, and, happily, a number of them are available for consideration by the GOP.

One, certainly, is Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor of Minnesota. Elected in 2002 and now in his second term, he is 48 years old and previously served as majority leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives. He probably deserves to be listed as a moderate among possible Republican presidential nominees.

Then there is Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who, at 37, is also in his second term as the state’s chief executive. He is somewhat more conservative than Pawlenty — not surprisingly, in view of his Southern roots — but not overwhelmingly so.

Another possible source of presidential candidates is, of course, the Congress, and the current one doesn’t lack for possibilities. Still on the Republican side, one name often mentioned is that of Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, At 57 and serving his first term in the Senate after six years in the House, he is an outspoken conservative, rated at 100 by the American Conservative Union in 2006.

These names, of course, by no means exhaust the list of those mentioned for possible nomination by the Republicans in 2012. But it is probably fairer to stop naming names now rather than try to list everyone and risk omitting somebody who deserves to be included.

And never overlook the possibility that a major contender might emerge, not from Congress but from the ranks of business or the military, both of which have produced powerful candidates in past decades. Witness Wendell Willkie, who in 1940 moved from a career in business to the Republican presidential nomination and gave FDR a thoroughly credible battle for the White House.

History Points to GOP Gains in 2010
by Donald Lambro

Signing the Republican Party’s post-election death certificate is risky business, but Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg did so last month — predicting the GOP will remain in the political graveyard for many years to come.

Perhaps one can forgive the head of the New Democrat Network (NDN) a moment of irrational exuberance when you consider that until Barack Obama’s decisive victory, Democrats had won just three of the previous 10 presidential elections. Simon has suffered a lot of Democratic defeats, so when his party scored big on Nov. 4, well, let’s just say his euphoria flowed over the top.

“Absent huge Democratic mistakes in the next few years, the Republican Party’s road back could very well be a long one,” he wrote in the GOP’s obituary.

“Their coalition no longer works in the changing demography of the day, and is dangerously old; their Southern strategy, so critical to their ascension, has become a relic of the past; their tech and media tools have not kept up with the times; their ideas have become spent and discredited; their leaders, particularly in Washington, seem content to ankle bite rather than lead. They are an aging and frayed bunch, living off the fumes of a day and politics gone by,” he said. Phew! That’s quite a mouthful. But the wish may be father to the thought. As Winston Churchill once said, “In war, you can be killed only once, but in politics, you can be killed many times.”

Many Democrats have predicted the Republicans were finished after some devastating defeats, only to see them quickly recover and win again.

No one gave the Republicans a snowball’s chance in hell after Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in a landslide in 1964. Democrats said the GOP was finished, perhaps for a generation. But the Democrats’ archenemy, Richard Nixon, took back the White House in 1968 and won re-election in a landslide four years later.

Then came the Watergate scandals that pundits said would sweep the Democrats into power by a landslide in 1976, but Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford by an eyelash, though the elections swept an army of Watergate Democrats into Congress.

Democrats said the Watergate scandals had consigned the Republicans to the wilderness for many years to come. In their dreams. Ronald Reagan rode out of the West four years later to easily beat Carter and recapture the White House for the GOP, which made significant gains in Congress.

But Rosenberg and his fellow Democrats think this time it’s going different. “I really believe there is a strong argument to be made that the GOP is further from power, more discredited and more out of touch with the American people than any time since the days of FDR and Truman,” he wrote in his coroner’s report.

Well, maybe not. In politics, timing is everything. It can work for you or against you. Barack Obama was running in a perfect storm that gave his candidacy three things that would have swept any challenger to power: a deeply unpopular president, an unpopular war in Iraq and an economic catastrophe of a very high order.

But his presidency still remains a high-risk work in progress. He is one of the most inexperienced presidents in U.S. history. Economists say his Old Deal, pump-priming, big-spending prescriptions for economic recovery haven’t worked anywhere. He is about to enter the White House at a time when global terrorism is flexing its muscles and plotting to strike again.

The Republicans, meanwhile, are going back to square one, focusing on controlling spending, reducing the size of government, and cutting tax rates to get the engine of the economy running again.

The 2008 election resulted in a change in administrations, but recent polls show it didn’t change the nation’s ideological balance, which is still very much right of center.

A post-election Pew poll finds that while the Democrats’ advantage in party identification has risen, “the share of Americans who describe their political views as liberal, conservative or moderate has remained stable.”

Pew says that just one of five Americans say they are liberal (21 percent), while 38 percent call themselves conservative, and 36 percent say they are moderates — a ratio that has remained unchanged over the past eight years. “For the GOP, it sure looks like a long road back,” Rosenberg said in his celebratory analysis.

But it may not be as long as he thinks. About a year from now, we will be in the beginning stages of the midterm-election cycle when the political history books tell us that the party in power almost always loses seats in Congress. That record has been broken only twice in our history. The last time was in 2002 when President Bush was riding high, the Republicans had cut tax rates across the board, and the GOP made substantial gains in Congress.

The chances are extremely high that the GOP will gain congressional seats in November 2010, dealing Barack Obama the first political defeat of his presidency.

Republicans need to get back to business
by Star Parker

There are now nine capable candidates vying for the chairman’s job at the Republican National Committee. The day of reckoning will be Jan. 29, when 168 committee members from around the country will vote their preference.

The stakes are high this time around. It’s different when you are looking for a caretaker – someone to keep a good thing going – as opposed to a turnaround specialist – someone to transform a loser into a winner.

Clearly after consecutive electoral shellackings led to Democratic takeovers in both houses of Congress and the White House, and significant drop-off in the number of self-identified Republican voters nationwide, it is the latter type of executive that the RNC needs. What kind of leadership talent should the RNC seek?

Republicans think of themselves as the party sympathetic to free enterprise. But the party has gotten off track applying sound business principles to its own operation.

The three most important management questions, according to famed management guru Peter Drucker, are: What is our business? Who is the customer? What does the customer consider value?

What is the business of the RNC? Some might say it is to get Republicans elected. I’d say that’s inadequate. Clever marketing techniques can move product in the short run. But if customers are not happy, they don’t come back.

If the party does not have a clear agenda, and is not making a positive sale based on that agenda, it’s a sign of weakness. Republican national campaigns of recent years that have been defined by Willie Horton and Swift Boats may have defeated the other side. But they brought candidates into office with no clear mandate and eroded party definition and discipline.

The RNC business model must be based on positive marketing of its platform of traditional values, limited government, free enterprise and strong national defense. Candidates must be groomed who genuinely believe that it’s this agenda – all of it – that keeps out country great and candidates who don’t shouldn’t be nominated.

Who is the customer? The RNC must genuinely view the full spectrum of the American electorate as its target market. What business can possibly grow by only focusing on customers who have already bought its product? Only going after low-hanging fruit is not a business plan that any venture capitalist would finance.

Republicans must get their message to the many diverse communities that make up our great country that they have ignored. Yes, I am certainly talking about black and Latino communities.