httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrjOLKRi7wg

Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney: Will the Republican Please Stand Up?
By Larry Elder

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney make me think of Dorothy Jones.

“Aunt” Dorothy, my mom’s closest friend, was a warm, smart, comedienne-quick funny woman from a large family. Unlike my mom’s other friends, Dorothy was single and remained so until she died. I once asked her, in the rude way only children can, why she never married.

“You know,” she said while pointing, one by one, at four imaginary men lined up in front her, “if you took the best qualities from all my sisters’ husbands and rolled them up into one man — you’d still come up short.”

This describes how it feels when trying to find a GOP presidential candidate. What are we small “L” libertarian, tea-party-type, low-tax, low-regulation, serious-about-entitlement-reform, non-”climate-change”-hysterical voters looking for?

For starters, how about someone who believes that the Constitution means what it says and says what it means, and won’t abide the “principled” Republican politician who wanders off the page in search of “compromise” to “get things done” to “do the people’s business”? Not too much to ask.

This brings us to the declared and confused GOP presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the soon-to-be declared, and confused, GOP candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Gingrich masterfully engineered the 1994 GOP takeover of the House. He came up with the Contract With America, and once called Sen. Bob Dole, the party’s 1996 presidential candidate, “the tax collector for the welfare state.” He is bright and knowledgeable, which makes some of his positions all the more indefensible.

Did Gingrich really write off Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s gutsy Medicare reform idea as “right-wing social engineering,” after having praised Ryan’s debt and deficit reduction ideas just two months earlier? Yes, he did.

Did Gingrich really cut a video with global-warming fanatic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in which they pledged to work together to fight “climate change”? Yes, he did.

Did Gingrich come out in favor of ethanol and the federal boondoggle that pays farmers to convert farmland producing edible corn into land devoted to corn for ethanol — a product that, but for mandates and subsidies, would have no market? Did Gingrich support ethanol even after Al “Mr. Environment” Gore renounced his previous support and admitted that he only supported ethanol to secure the 2000 farm vote? Yes and yes.

Did Gingrich team up with race hustler extraordinaire, the Rev. Al Sharpton, to tour the country to raise awareness of the education “race gap”? Did Gingrich team with the man who not only opposes vouchers — a serious attempt to provide alternatives to and competition against government schools — but who calls vouchers “racist”? Yes, he did.

Romney, for his part, ran in 2008 as a fiscal conservative elected in a liberal state and who, therefore, represents someone who “can reach across the aisle” and appeal to independents and “conservative Democrats” — whatever that means. Unfortunately, his signature achievement is the statist RomneyCare, a Bay State “universal health care program” that includes a mandate. It served as a model for ObamaCare.

Believers in limited government, to put it mildly, intensely dislike ObamaCare and reserve a special place in hell for the mandate that forces every man, woman and child to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. The Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily point out that RomneyCare fails to control premium costs, exceeded budget projections and “works” only because of money from the federal government.

Many Republicans encouraged Romney to call RomneyCare a blunder, and use it as an object lesson of yet another well-intended but wrongheaded government intrusion that produced unintended and hurtful consequences.

Did Romney not only refuse to apologize for RomneyCare, but praise it as a “state solution”? Did Romney defend the Massachusetts mandate while criticizing Obama’s federal one? Did Romney thus support the concept of allowing government to force people to purchase health insurance or face a fine, so long as it does so at the state level? Does Romney therefore disagree with conservatives who call RomneyCare a disaster that other states emulate at their own peril? Yes, yes, yes and yes, he does.

So much for Gingrich and Romney. Now what?

What about Thomas Sowell? The economist/writer/philosopher/limited government/free-market advocate, the most clear-headed opinionator in America, is 80. The 80 is not the problem. It is the clear-headed part that made Sowell double over in laughter when he was asked about running for office. Former left-wing David Mamet partially credits Sowell with turning him from being “a brain-dead liberal.” Yes, Sowell is that good.

Who else?

What about Margaret Thatcher, the 85-year-old fiscal conservative British ex-prime minister? Could we persuade her into renouncing her citizenship and running for president here in the States? Alas, that requires an amendment to the Constitution, which currently allows only a “natural born citizen” to become president.

What would Aunt Dorothy do?

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.

Trump Is for Real
By Matt Towery

I’ve listened over the past few weeks as the mainstream GOP establishment and pundits have tried to demean the possibility of a presidential candidacy by Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump, take it from me, someone who has run for and held elective office, and has been involved in more campaigns, from presidential on down, than I care to count: They are scared of you.

Let’s look at some of the criticisms of a Trump candidacy that have been leveled.

It’s commonly said that he’s too much into promoting himself and his products. Gee, seems as a kid, I recall a guy named Ronald Reagan riding on a horse and promoting some sort of soap product. Even before he launched his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan starred in a miniature radio version of Trump’s current TV show, in which Reagan essentially delivered a Paul Harvey-like message on stations across the nation.

At the time, Reagan’s show brought on the same condescension from the GOP establishment that all of Trump’s projects and media exposures do now. So let’s take that silly argument and throw it in the trash. What’s essential is that Trump has huge name identification, and that’s worth gold (another commodity that I presume that Trump owns).

Next is the experience factor. Does anybody recall that our current president had precious little political experience when he was elected? It consisted of a few years in a state legislature and three years in the U.S. Senate, two of which were consumed either by laying the groundwork for a presidential run or actually running. The experience President Obama lacks is real-world experience in business. He’s never run as much as a Popsicle stand.

Now, don’t say I am trying to compare my small world to “The Donald’s.” But in my last years of service in my state legislature, I was also CEO of one of the nation’s largest printers of corporate annual reports. I was simultaneously dealing with hundreds of employees and also continuing as then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s campaign chair, plus serving in the Georgia House of Representatives.

To their credit, most of the legislators I served with had businesses or notable professional careers. But there were some who had no apparent job other than to be a lawmaker. With some exceptions, these were the least capable of my colleagues.

I believe Trump’s business experience might be just what the GOP — and maybe the nation, too — wants to see in a president.

The next argument against Trump is that he is politically naive. This is partially true. But I can remember serving as chief strategist for a multi-millionaire who was running for governor of Georgia. On the other side from our team was a strategist named James Carville (whom I like immensely).

“My” candidate in that race had nowhere near the experience with the media that Trump has. And yet, to this day, I believe the man I worked for became one of the best candidates with whom I ever worked. He listened to the pros, didn’t take offense at criticism and grew as a candidate. In my opinion, if he runs, Trump will do the same.

I’m not saying Trump will be the next nominee of the GOP or that he could necessarily defeat Obama. I still believe that if Gingrich stops talking about every subject under the sun and instead starts reminding the public of what he accomplished as speaker, he could rocket to the top. He needs only to stop replying to the “baggage issue” and stick to his message.

Then there is Mitt Romney, who has enjoyed both business and political success. He remains, in my mind, the best-organized candidate in the early going.

But as someone who knows the GOP from more than 30 of experience with it, I have to say to Donald Trump: Those in the Republican establishment are playing you down because they are afraid of your potential to catch on fire and become someone they cannot control or use for their own benefit down the road.

Here’s the bad piece of news, Mr. Trump: People often tell me I look like you. If that’s the case, you have my sympathies!

Rocky and Republicans
by Thomas Sowell

Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight champion who never lost a single fight in his whole career– and, at the time, he seemed the least likely fighter to do that. In many a boxing match, he was battered, bruised and bleeding.

One of the reasons Marciano took so much punishment in the ring was that he had shorter arms than most other heavyweights. It was easier for others to hit him than for him to hit them.

In a sense, Republicans today are in a similar position in the political arena. With most of the media heavily tilted toward the Democrats, Republicans are going to get hit far more often than they are going to get in their own punches.

The difference is that Rocky Marciano understood from the beginning that he was going to get hit more often, and prepared himself for that kind of fight. His strategy was to concentrate on developing punches powerful enough to nullify his opponents’ greater number of punches.

Republicans take the opposite approach from that of Rocky Marciano– and often with opposite results. That may be why they managed to lose both houses of Congress and the White House in recent years, in a country where there are millions more people who call themselves conservatives than there are who call themselves liberals.

Knowing that they are going to get hit more often in the media, you might think that Republicans would put extra time and effort into developing a knockout message. In reality, however, Republicans seem to invest much less time and thought into getting their political message across than is done by the Democrats.

First of all, Democrats develop words and phrases that they all use, so that the public hears those same words and phrases over and over again, until they sink in. Republicans have nothing to match the Democrats’ catch phrases like “social justice” or “tax cuts for the rich.”

Back when George W. Bush first emerged on the national political scene in 2000, Democrats said that he lacked “gravitas.” The media kept repeating it. People who had never used the word “gravitas” in years were suddenly saying “gravitas” 24/7 on news programs, interview shows and in the newspapers and magazines.

When have you ever known the Republicans to be that coordinated?

Not only do Republicans fail to take the initiative when it comes to political rhetoric, they are not very good at counter-punching when they are hit.

How often have you heard “tax cuts for the rich” from Democrats– without the Republicans saying anything to counter the implication that they are just looking out for a relatively few wealthy people, while millions of other people are losing their jobs and their homes?

The facts are all on the Republicans’ side. But, unless someone articulates those facts, they will be like the proverbial tree that falls in an empty forest.

What are called “tax cuts for the rich” have been reductions in high tax rates under four different administrations, including the Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy. In each case, going all the way back to the 1920s, the reduced tax rates have led to increased tax revenues for the government.

“The rich” have ended up paying both a higher total amount of taxes and a larger share of all taxes than they did before what were called “tax cuts for the rich.” The reason is very straightforward: high tax rates that people don’t actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay.

High tax rates drive investors into tax shelters like tax-exempt bonds or drive their investments out of the country altogether, costing Americans jobs. This is not rocket science– and the data are there to prove it. But somebody has to say it.

Unlike Rocky Marciano, Republicans don’t seem to see a need to work on their punches. They are going to need some knockout punches if Barack Obama calls their bluff on raising the national debt limit, and there is a government shutdown that will be blamed on the Republicans. A few light jabs will not save them.

Today’s GOP Lives in Reagan’s World
by Byron York

On May 2, Republicans will gather at the Reagan Library in Santa Barbara, Calif., for the first GOP presidential debate of the 2012 campaign. It’s not clear which candidates will be there, but here’s a safe bet: Each will declare himself, or herself, a Reagan Republican.

Such is the hold of Ronald Reagan on the Republican Party that it is simply impossible to imagine a candidate not reaching for the Reagan mantle. And such is the hold of Reagan on our politics as a whole that, on the eve of the State of the Union, President Obama felt compelled to praise Reagan’s leadership and “unique ability to inspire others to greatness.”

Just 15 years ago, Obama condemned what he called the “dirty deeds” of “Reagan and his minions” — not an unusual opinion among Democrats. Now, the political world as a whole is coming to recognize, at least a bit, the greatness in Reagan that Republicans have admired for more than a generation.

One reason for Reagan’s evolving image is that we know much more about him than just a few years ago. “There’s been a stunning change in the view of Reagan since 2000,” says Annelise Anderson, who with her husband, Martin — both former Reagan aides — has done pioneering research in the Reagan archives. “The publication of his radio commentaries, letters from throughout his life, and the minutes of his National Security Council meetings — we see the extent to which he was formulating strategy and defining, directing and pursuing his objectives.”

Reagan was indeed the sunny public presence of memory, but the Andersons’ books — “Reagan: In His Own Hand,” “Reagan: A Life in Letters” and “Reagan’s Secret War”– show how his accomplishments were the result of a lifetime spent studying, thinking, writing and preparing for leadership. The newly released papers show how Reagan mixed his personal qualities — an unmatched determination, desire to learn and optimism — with a deep belief in liberty, free enterprise and American exceptionalism. Together, they formed the foundation for the specific policies — lower taxes, strong defense — that changed the United States and the world.

For today’s Republicans, the problem is that it’s easier to talk about lower taxes and strong defense than it is to guess what Reagan would do were he alive now. What would he do about health care, the deficit, immigration and terrorism? Even his old confidants can’t say for sure.

That uncertainty is one reason we see so much yearning among Republicans for another Reagan. “I’m always asked, ‘When will we see somebody like Reagan again?’” says Peter Hannaford, a longtime Reagan aide and author of “Recollections of Reagan.” “My answer is never. He was sui generis. Someday, you’ll have somebody with some of his qualities and with that bigger-than-life aspect — but not yet.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are very much living in Reagan’s party. For Craig Shirley, the longtime conservative activist and author of “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” today’s GOP still reflects the man who was elected president more than 30 years ago. Back then, so-called “country-club Republicans” were a powerful force in the party. “All these moderate-to-liberal Republicans considered conservatism the province of Neanderthals,” recalls Shirley, who is a consultant to The Examiner. Now, it’s the moderates who are virtually extinct. The result, Shirley believes, is “a more vigorous debate and a more honest choice for the American people.”

Starting soon, state and county Republican parties will be holding their yearly Lincoln Day dinners, the way Democrats hold Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners. In recent years, many of those GOP events have become Lincoln-Reagan Day dinners, or just Reagan Day dinners. That trend will likely continue as the party seeks an even closer identification with past greatness.

And Republican politicians will continue to seek that elusive mix of attributes that made Reagan Reagan. Perhaps there is another great leader out there right now, and we don’t know it. After all, no one knew what Reagan would accomplish until he moved into the Oval Office.

So on May 2, the GOP candidates — a group that could include Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, John Thune, Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin and others — will take the stage at the Reagan Library and try to convince Republicans that they are worthy heirs to Ronald Reagan. The audience will undoubtedly be skeptical, but inwardly hoping that at least one of them will be right.

On The GOP’s Message Going Forward
by Hugh Hewitt

None of the candidates who seek this weekend to replace Michael Steele as chairman of the Republican National Committee are household names. Reince Priebus is the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, Saul Anuzis is the forrmer chair of the Michigan GOP, Ann Wagner is a former ambassador of Luxembourg, and Maria Cino is a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration.

Whichever one emerges as chair will almost certainly define their first tasks as the repair devastated morale at the RNC and the rehabilitation of the donor rolls and the party’s operations.

The most important job of the new chair will not be those mundane but crucial tasks, however, but rather to stay away from the spotlight and leave the news cycle over the next nine months to Speaker Boehner and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. This is especially important over the next two months. The new GOP chair will have the right to remain silent on the budget debate that is about to begin. We have to hope he or she will use it.

This is also the task before every would-be GOP presidential candidate and nearly every GOP senator and representative as well. The crucial agenda for the next nine months is the Congressional agenda, and since the House goes first on matters of budget and since the Republicans have a huge majority there, the necessary discipline that is required from all conservatives in and outside of the Congress is to support the Speaker’s effort to frame the unfolding debate over the size and direction of government.

The House GOP gathers in Baltimore this weekend, and it it will return from there to D.C. next week to vote the repeal of Obamacare and to begin the oversight of the Obama Adminsitration that has been completely lacking for two years. At the top of the latter agenda is the overdue effort to cabin the Environmental Protection Agency before its diktats on cap-and-tax begin to power down the struggling recovery. As the House GOP awaits the president’s budget its most pressing tasks will be these oversight hearings and those hearings will help set the stage for the budget and the big argument over job growth. Each of these hearings will be heavily covered, and responsibility in the execution of the oversight will be a key ingrediant to the success of the effort. Wild charges or fabricated evidence will boomerang, and there is no need for any histrionics as the record of Team Obama is so dismal to begin with. As oversight begins, the task of every Committee and subcommittee chair will be to let the Obama Adminsitration officials talk. And talk. And talk. Pose the right questions –”Exactly where was the stimulus spent?”– and the debate will unfold exactly as it needs to.

After the president’s budget arrives and the State of the Union address is given, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and his colleagues will take the center stage and will have to fashion, announce and defend deep, deep cuts in federal spending. As the howls from the left will be high-pitched and long no matter what is proposed, there is no sense in going half way, and Ryan knows this and is prepared to carve away at the mass of subsidies that has flowed out of D.C. over the past four years of Nancy Pelosi’s rule. The House GOP gets one chance at laying out its budget, and one chance to make the case for the massive downsizing that the international credit markets are waiting for. The difficulty in making this argument is that the Democrats know this will be their best chance to define the debate and with it Speaker Boehner’s agenda, and thus the House GOP leadership has to impress on all of its members this weekend that the dumbest thing any of them says in the next four-to-eight weeks will be grabbed by the Democrats and the allied MSM and used to define the entire GOP and the budget debate. Each House member, in effect, holds the ability to destroy the messaging about the budget debate, and the message in Baltimore ought to be that if any member does so, he or she will be stripped of future position and authority in the caucus.

Although there may be a “selective shutdown” of the federal government ahead as the House GOP and the president fail to come to an agreement on spending, it will not be for the House rank-and-file to declare the inevitability of such a impasse.

There is an elected House GOP leadership, which includes besides Boehner and Ryan, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Jeb Henserling, Pete Sessions, Michelle Bachmann and Tom Price. When the debate over the budget begins in earnest, the plan laid out has to be defended by these voices, and primarily by Cantor and Ryan. The new RNC chair and the would-be GOP presidential nominees have to stand back and back them up, as do the GOP senators and the rest of the House caucus. If any “free agents” show up with any excuse to divert attention from the big debate, the effort to focus and execute the agenda will be compromised.

The president can and will use surrogates to try and blow holes in the GOP’s budget, and the president’s numerous allies in the networks and among the newspapers will provide him every assistance even as they did in the campaign of 2008 and throughout the debate over the stimulus and Obamacare.

These are just givens, just the rules of the road inside the Manhattan-Beltway media elite.

The GOP from top to bottom has to realize that in order to win the argument they have to stay on their message and not be diverted from the key facts and the central proposals in the House GOP budget.

The debate will take many weeks, and even after the Budget Committee and then the full House passes the budget, it will then pass to the Appropriations Committee to live within the caps set, and to the Senate to respond to the House budget.

But the next few weeks will decide whether the public buys into lay the GOP’s arguments over the future. To do that the public must first hear and then understand those arguments.

This requires repititon and more repitition. It especially requires clarity and discipline in the messaging. The Speaker and the senior leadership have to be available to all media and especially to those outlets which have a multiplier effect, and their surrogates have to stay on message as well.

The new GOP chair and the would-be presidential nominees will not vanish from the headlines and they should not go into hiding, but they can and should for a season take their cues from the House GOP budget and support it or remain silent. The very worst thing that could happen would be for some high-profile Republican to seek to grab some media leverage via an opportunistic attack on that budget.

Speaker Boehner has made it clear that the 112th Congress will not be a replay of the rule-of-one that defined the Pelosi years. Hopefully his colleagues will return that respect by allowing him and his lieutenants the chance to propose and pass a budget that returns America to a path of fiscal responsibility.

The Republican Senate
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Republicans gnashed their teeth in frustration as the national tide of GOP resurgence washed up against the massive Democratic fortresses in Nevada, Washington state, Colorado and California. When they neither toppled nor faltered, most conservatives resigned themselves to a divided Congress with the Republican House and the Democratic Senate forever at war.

Not so. The vote on the extension of the Bush tax cuts reveals that the Republican Party has, in fact, gained effective control of the U.S. Senate. We are facing the same situation Ronald Reagan confronted in 1980 when his revolution brought him control of the Senate, but left the House under the nominal reign of Tip O’Neill and the Democrats. But, in fact, as the new president soon discovered, the House Democratic majority was subservient to the tide that had swept the Senate. Terrified by the Republican sweep, the Democrats were unable to muster a coherent opposition in the chamber they controlled. So it will be in 2011.

The Democrats will keep the corner offices in the Russell, Dirksen and Hart Senate office buildings and retain their committee chairmanships, but their ability to summon a majority to sustain their president on crucial votes is gone. The defection of Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut indicates that the 53-47 Democratic tilt of the Senate is more apparent than real.

Webb, Nelson, Manchin and Lieberman are all up for re-election in 2012. Each is very good at reading the handwriting on the wall left by Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Bob _Bennett, R-Utah, and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., on their way out the door. It reads, “The conservatives are coming!”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., could well afford to lose four votes while he controlled the Senate 58-42, but he can ill afford four defections when his margin is only three. And Sens. Nelson, Jon Tester, D-Mont., Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. — all from red states and all facing close re-election battles — cannot be far behind these four in considering periodic abandonment of the ship on key votes. Only the likelihood of retirement saves Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., from a similar fate. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Herb Kohl, D-Wis., Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., also vulnerable in 2012, probably think they can ride out the tide in their more Democratic states. (And in any event, Brown, Stabenow and Menendez are too liberal to notice what has just happened.)

So, on key votes, the endangered Democratic senators are likely to dodge the bullets coming from the House and defect from Reid’s majority. Why should they take the rap for blocking conservative legislation when they have a presidential veto backing them up at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? “Let the president take the rap; why should I have to?” they will ask as they lend their assent to House-passed bills. The inability of President Obama to re-elect those who supported him hardly encourages others to risk their careers doing so.

Indeed, Reid can only regain his functioning majority if more Democrats choose to retire rather than face the music in 2012. If Kohl, Bingaman, Webb and Ben Nelson decide to retire after this term, the Democrats could have enough lame ducks to keep control of the Senate floor for one more cycle — hardly a pleasing prospect for their party.

The result of the functional _Republican control of the Senate is that the forum for decision-making in a divided Washington will not be the conference committee, but rather White House negotiations between the two political parties.

It remains to be seen whether the endangered Democrats can save their Senate seats from the likely GOP tide of 2012 by switching in time to pretend to be moderates. What is clear is that they are not going to block the Republican bills coming over from the House.

The Democrats will still control the committees in the Senate, but the Republicans will own the floor.

What the GOP Landslide Means for America
by Terry Paulson

P. J. O’Rourke said it best, “This is not just about an election – It’s going to be a RESTRAINING ORDER!” Just what does the Republican landslide mean to America, to Washington politics, and to you?

Elections have consequences. Voters make choices. But a campaign is like dating—it’s the sales phase of the relationship. Once an election is over, citizens are watching to see how candidates live up to the promises they’ve made. Will the “love” and “trust” be earned and re-earned month after month?

This vote was more a rejection of President Obama’s changes and failure to right the economy than it was an endorsement of the Republican Party. The last time Republicans were in control of Congress, they spent more than the Democrats in the previous administration. America will be watching to see if Republicans have learned their lesson and have the backbone to live the principles they so frequently espouse.

The media will harp on the importance of “getting along” and working together to find “non-partisan” solutions. President Obama will call for compromise, but you’ve promised those who voted for you smaller government, lower taxes and a return to the Constitutional principles. Compromise on these promises is not what America needs or voters expect.

The solutions that President Obama brought to Washington involved more government stimulus spending, more expensive entitlements, more intrusive regulations and an exploding deficit. Conservative solutions come from decreasing the size and cost of government so that citizens have the capital and the incentives necessary to unleash the innovation and entrepreneurial strength of this great country.

Conservatives want government to stop punishing producers who have played by the rules and succeeded. America won’t have economic private sector growth and the jobs that creates until investors know that such investment and hard work will pay off. Instead of punishing success by raising their taxes; the investors, entrepreneurs and workers need to be honored, supported, championed and encouraged. Other countries are bouncing back from the recession because they’re cutting entitlements and incentivizing business growth. We must do the same. That involves change, not compromise.

Republicans don’t need the Senate or President Obama to make an impact now. The House, alone, is given the Constitutional power of the purse. Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution clearly reads: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives . . .” And Section 9 states, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Republicans should use the power they’ve earned.

There’ll be costs. You can’t cut government spending without cutting some government agencies, some government jobs, and some government benefits. That involves real people losing jobs at a time jobs are hard to find. You can’t cut or reduce benefits to people who have learned to be dependent on government and expect everybody to applaud. Conservatives will be called “mean-spirited” by every government addict cut off.

Call on Americans to help their neighbors. Tough times are part of the cure on the way to much better times. With the right incentives, there’s private sector money waiting to be unleashed, but jobs will remain scarce until new companies find their markets. It’s a hand up over a handout.

Republicans must lead. That means facing difficult early choices like refusing to extend the debt ceiling and fighting the Fed’s efforts to monetize our debt which devalues the dollar and triggers inflation. Will they take spending back to 2008 levels and initiate zero-based budgeting for the next budget cycle? Will they actually lower the bar on what constitutes poverty so that only the truly poor receive government funds? They must call on communities and charities to once again be the first line of support instead of creating further government dependency. They must become the party of NO to excessive big-government spending and the party of YES to free market solutions and individual responsibility.

While talking about landslides, California voters gave total control to the Democrats. With no viable Republican opposition, California will put liberal solutions to the test while remaining disconnected from the center-right country in which they reside. But if they look to Washington for their “too big to fail” bailout, expect no blank checks with Republicans now holding the purse strings in the House.

Take heart; solutions can be found. The fast-rising GOP star, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, has shown that fiscal responsibility and true budget-cutting can be popular. He recently warned his own party, “If Republicans win the Congress we’ve got to put up or shut up.” Voters are watching. Give us a party with a backbone that we can be proud to support for years to come.

Wow. Just Wow. Could The Wave Grow Larger Still?
by Hugh Hewitt

I was talking to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza on my radio show Wednesday when the story broke that Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann had raised $5.4 million dollars in campaign contributions in the third quarter of 2010. Cillizza took in a deep and very audible breath, as did I. It is an astonishing amount of money for a single Congressional candidate to raise.

A day earlier the GOP Senate nominee in Nevada, Sharron Angle, had announced that in the same period she had raised $14 million dollars!

I asked Cillizza what these sort of totals meant, and he stated the obvious fact: The intensity and breadth of the grassroots opposition to the president, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid is difficult to overstate. These contribution totals are the best evidence of the country’s mood. This isn’t just about an intention to vote or an opinion given to a pollster, Cillizza noted, it is about a deep passion that is opening pocketbooks in a way that has never been seen before.

Democrats are of course praying that the surge to the right breaks before 11/2 and begins to recede, but as every day goes by the evidence of a growing wave accumulates. Whatever the president and Joe Biden might have done to stop the Republican trend, they instead chose to launch a foolish and instantly dismissed attack on Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie as a sort of pair of Sith lords of the campaign finance world. Even Democratic pundits were left scratching their heads and wondering what madness had overcome the “brains” behind the Democratic campaign.

The fecklessness of the president’s campaign rhetoric combines with the near invisibility of Democratic candidates at public events from coast-to-coast to reinforce the electorate’s emerging collective decision to make a major change in Washington, D.C. When no Democrats are willing to defend Obamacare it is very hard for the public to do other than conclude that a giant mistake was made when Obamacare was jammed down the throat of the country.

And when the president himself admits to the New York Times, as he does in this Sunday’s edition, that “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” he is confessing to a naivete that is as surprising as it is frightening. This admission of error by the president undermines the last claims of the Democrats to effectiveness via the so-called “stimulus.” It is so stunning a concession that most of the Beltway press is still staggering backwards trying to spin the president’s own words.

Less than three weeks to the vote and the Republican grassroots are pouring on the money and the energy, the Democratic candidates are in hiding, and the president is apologizing for his wrong-headed belief in the efficacy of the so-called stimulus.

There is no reason to believe that trends will not continue, and perhaps they may even accelerate. The country wants a U-turn, and even the base of the Democratic Party has got to be wondering if that isn’t the best thing for their directionless, poorly-led party as well. When no one, from the president to the speaker to Harry Reid and lefty Beltway pundits can come up with a persuasive argument to vote Democratic, then it is time to give up and give way.

Republican Trend Continues
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The mainstream media is peddling the line that the Democrats are staging a comeback, slicing Republican leads. It is absolute nonsense. A close review of polling in every close House race in the nation indicates that Republicans now lead in 53 seats currently held by Democrats and are within five points in 20 more.

And the trend is Republican, not Democrat. Of the races where comparative data over the past few weeks is available, Republicans have gained in 33 while Democrats have gained in only 10.

On the Senate level, Republicans now lead in all ten states that are necessary for GOP control of the Senate, the smallest margin coming in Nevada where the Rasmussen Poll has the Republican, Sharron Angle, four points ahead. In West Virginia, Wisconsin, Washington State, and Illinois, the Republican has surged ahead dramatically in recent days and only in Colorado and California has there been slippage. The ten states which are now represented by Democrats where Republicans have the lead are:

North Dakota = +45

Indiana = +18

Arkansas = +18

Wisconsin = +12

Pennsylvania = + 7

West Virginia = + 6

Colorado = + 5

Washington State = + 5

Illinois = + 4

Nevada = + 4

Republican gains should be even greater than this polling indicates. The trend lines are decidedly in the GOP’s favor and Gallup Poll indicates that Republicans are twice as likely to be enthusiastic about voting as Democrats are.

The only note of caution for Republicans is that their leads in Democratic House seats are not substantial. In only 14 seats does the Republican candidate lead by more than ten points and most of those are open Democratic seats. But the Republican turnout machine – animated by Tea Party activists — will likely outperform its Democratic rivals.

And the Democratic Party has no message. Its campaigns are a hodgepodge of personal negatives and fabricated issues. No Democratic candidate is even trying to defend Obama’s health care legislation or argue that his stimulus program is working. Cap and trade is never mentioned by Democrats on the campaign trail. We have the spectacle of the most substantive legislative program in generations having been passed by Congress and now finding that it has no defenders in the election campaign, only Democrats scurrying to prove their independence.

All signs point to a growing Republican landslide.

The gigantic Republican gains of the past week indicate that party trend is now beginning to kick in big time. The Republican leads until this past week are largely due to the voting decisions of people who closely follow the process. The surge in Republican support in the past seven to ten days indicates that the less educated voters who do not follow politics as closely are breaking for the Republicans. Normally, these downscale voters are Democrats, but the economy and the alienating values of the Obama Administration (e.g. Ground Zero Mosque) seem to be driving them to the GOP.

Also boosting Republican prospects is the absence of social issues in the national debate. These elections are turning on unemployment, deficits, the economy, health care, and the national debt, not on gay rights or abortion. So, social liberals and libertarians see no reason not to vote Republican. Only in California are these traditional issues working in driving voters to the Democrats.

A landslide without precedent appears to be in the making.

The GOP’s Ante
by Jonah Goldberg

On the political gimmickry scale, the GOP’s new “Pledge to America” is worse than some, better than others. Let’s say it falls somewhere between the Federalist Papers and a Harry Reid press release — which, admittedly, pins it down as much as saying you lost a cufflink somewhere between Burkina Faso and Cleveland.

First and foremost it promises to focus on job creation, vowing to stop all scheduled tax hikes (i.e., the expiration of the Bush tax cuts). It offers a steep tax deduction for small businesses and a renewed commitment to curbing business-stifling regulations.

The Pledge also stands athwart the Obama agenda, promising to “repeal and replace the government takeover of health care,” cancel the unspent portion of the stimulus, and drive a stake through the heart of TARP. The Republicans also promise to “roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels” and disentangle the government from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That’s hardly all of the substance, but the politics are more interesting. Naturally, Democrats attacked the Pledge before they read it as a mean-spirited, irresponsible return to the boneheaded and miserly policies of the Bush years. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn insisted it would “visit a plague on Americans.”

Compared to what many Democrats said about the Contract With America, this is a ringing endorsement. Rep. Charlie Rangel said of the 1994 Republican platform: “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” And though that is technically true — Hitler wasn’t talking about term limits for committee chairs or demanding an independent audit of Congress’s budget — the insinuation was a good deal more sinister. Indeed, Rep. Major Owens said that the ‘94 Republicans were hell-bent on “genocide.” Meanwhile, Clyburn’s biblical-sounding Republican “plague” might invite worries about locusts or, at worst, the killing of the first-born male child in every household.

On the right, reactions were mostly positive, with a healthy mix of skepticism. “I love it,” wrote blogger Michelle Malkin, “provided the words jump off the paper and into reality at some point soon.” Erick Erickson of the conservative website Red State stood out for his rage against the whole thing, calling it a “series of compromises and milquetoast rhetorical flourishes in search of unanimity among House Republicans because (they do) not have the fortitude to lead boldly in opposition to Barack Obama.”

Meanwhile, others, like Charles Krauthammer, argued that the substance was fine, but it was politically dumb to offer any substance at all. The Democrats are self-destructing like a tape-recording in “Mission: Impossible,” why get in the way?

My take: They’re all right.

Malkin is absolutely correct that the GOP must prove it is born again on fiscal responsibility. If the Republicans don’t prove it, then the Tea Party will swoop in like the Shadow Host of Dunharrow in “The Lord of the Rings” and mow down the Republicans like so many dimwitted orcs.

Krauthammer, I think, is uncharacteristically shortsighted. Politicians not only need mandates, they need to understand what their mandates are. Otherwise they tend to think they were elected for their sheer personal awesomeness. President Obama, somewhat understandably, thought he had a messianic mandate to push a hard partisan agenda from the left. In reality, voters thought his mandate was to be “not Bush” and to then govern from the center. He fulfilled the first part and ignored the second entirely.

It’s true that running on something rather than nothing might cost the GOP some campaign victories, but running on nothing would deny them even more policy victories. Sending Republicans back into power without a clear mission is like sending teenagers to Vegas for a school trip without a chaperone. Sure, they’ll check out the museums.

As for the argument that the Pledge doesn’t go far enough, that’s obviously true. But it’s also true that the Pledge is far, far more ambitious than the Contract With America was.

Moreover, the fact that it garners support from across the GOP caucus is a good sign, not a bad one, not least because it shows that the GOP can reach out to both the tea parties and to independents. Obama and Pelosi’s alienation of independents is destroying the Democratic Party right now. Why should the GOP emulate that strategy?

Conservatives shouldn’t look at the Pledge as the sum total of the Republican agenda. They should see it as the opening bid.

The Myth of Conservative Vulnerability
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

This week’s primary victories of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe DioGuardi in New York illustrate how the tea party is cleansing the Republican Party and installing true believers over professional politicians. It is a healthy trend that will continue to recreate the Party of Reagan.

But the conventional media, instead of hailing this trend, warns that conservatives cannot be elected and bemoans the victory of true believers saying that it is equivalent to handing seats to the Democrats and the liberals. This reasoning, which made sense in other times, is badly flawed in today’s political climate.

When social issues like abortion, gays and guns dominate the political discourse, moderates have a big advantage. Voters in these times tend to measure themselves on a left to right spectrum and find those flanked sharply to their right to be extremist on these issues and reject their candidacies.

But these days, social issues are in remission and economic/fiscal problems have, understandably, taken center stage. In this environment, purists of the right have a big advantage because nobody doubts the sincerity with which they embrace the goals of limited government, low taxes and reduced spending. Politicians of all stripes — including most Democrats — vow allegiance to them, as does the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

In this environment, the distinctions of left and right give way to the difference between sincerity and insincerity, leaving the voters to judge. With candidates like Sharron Angle in Nevada or O’Donnell in Delaware or DioGuardia in New York, voters don’t have to guess. They know real conservatives when they see them.

Of course, Rep. Mike Castle had a big advantage in the Delaware Senate contest because of his name recognition and voter support after having run successfully statewide more than a dozen times (congressmen in Delaware serve at large). But don’t count O’Donnell out. She is the real thing — a conservative small-government devotee whose advocacy of low taxes is sincere and heartfelt. The national Republican establishment was stupid and short-sighted in the negatives they threw at her during the primary. Now they will have to eat their words at great financial and political cost.

But, in a way, their obduracy gives O’Donnell a great opportunity to run as the anti-establishment candidate, putting a plague on the houses of both parties and calling attention to the corruption of each. By separating herself from the Washington Republicans, she is able to embrace the values of small government and low taxes without doubt about the depth of her commitment. She is free of party labels and can luxuriate in that liberty.

For his part, DioGuardi has a very good chance to defeat Kristin Gillibrand. The appointed Democratic senator has not used the primary period, when she had a monopoly of the airwaves, to solidify her incumbency and generate familiarity among voters. Now she opens the general election likely at or even below 50 percent of the vote.

DioGuardi has a great chance to close the gap between them if he can get enough funding. Republicans looking for a lock on the Senate should send him plenty of funding. The Republicans running in Wisconsin, California, Illinois and West Virginia are largely self-funded. It should be possible to concentrate resources on those states where the need is the greatest, and if the GOP is smart, Delaware and New York will be high on the list.

Do journalists overseas have a better understanding of American politics than our own mainstream media?  I certainly think so.  Enjoy this animated video depiction of The Tea Party Express running wild with Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRXu4wna11I

The Year of the GOP Women
by Hugh Hewitt

Analysts across the MSM are still trying to figure out how the GOP comes up not just with Meg Whitman and from a so-called “progressive state” like California, but also Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Susana Martinez in New Mexico and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.

Three of these women are seeking the top jobs in their state –Whitman, Martinez and Haley– while the other three –Fiorina, Angle and Ayotte– want to join the U.S. Senate.

All six mark a sharp break with Republican Party politics of the past.

There have always been high profile Republican women, dating back to 1938, when Gladys Pyle won a special election in South Dakota to become the first GOP woman to be elected to the U.S. (Margaret Chase Smith, whom many wrongly believe was the first elected woman GOPer, won a general election in 1948. Democrat Hattie Wyatt Caraway was the first woman elected to the Senate, in 1932.)

Sarah Palin is of course the highest profile Republican woman of the moment, though if Meg Whitman succeeds in her quest to become the governor of California, she will quickly become as significant in the life of the GOP as Palin.

Palin’s endorsement helped Fiorina and Haley breakout from the packs in their races, and Palin’s “mama grizzlies” movement is a powerful fund-raising tool among the conservative grass roots. The GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee’s example of good natured give-and-get-without-flinching on the stump and the trail has set an inspiring example for scores of female conservatives across the country.

There is no sign yet, however, that MSM wants to draw attention to this unique year of the GOP woman. In 1992, when four Democratic women won their high profile races, the lefties in the nation’s newsrooms couldn’t stop proclaiming the sea change under way in the Democratic Party. Now that the GOP is having its banner year of gender breakthroughs, the story is getting nearly as much play.

Part of the reason –the obvious part– is that MSM remains overwhelmingly populated by liberal boosters of the Democrats, and they are never in a hurry to write a script that helps Republicans.

But less obvious is the media’s indifference to the story as a consequence of the enormous hostility found among the media elite to Sarah Palin, who is to them a sort of continuing nightmare in newsrooms across the land. The Manhattan-Beltway media and political elites have never figured out Palin, and they are even more confounded that she continues to draw enormous crowds and sway important races. That Palin is playing an important role in the careers of other women politicians is upsetting to these elites. They have yet to grasp the fact that Governor Palin is immensely popular because of her beliefs, ideals and accomplishments. That popularity isn’t going to decline no matter how often she is insulted on MSNBC or by late night comics.

Palin, unlike many of the analysts and insiders who dismiss her, is a growing force on the American political stage, part of a vast restructuring of American politics occurring before our eyes.

There is a rolling earthquake shaking and remaking American politics. It began as a rejection of Barack Obama’s enormous lurch to the left, but it has gone far beyond that. One consequence is this new cohort of new women, and among November’s biggest headlines will be their collective success.

httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6EAD3188313F4813

Great Scott!
by Thomas Sowell

Some of the most melancholy letters and e-mails that are sent to me are from people who lament that there is nothing they can do about the bad policies that they see ruining this country. They don’t have any media outlet for their opinions and the letters they send to their Congressmen are either ignored or are answered by form letters with weasel words. They feel powerless.

Sometimes I remind them that the whole political establishment — both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the mainstream media — were behind amnesty for illegal immigrants, until the public opinion polls showed that the voters were not buying it. If politicians can’t do anything else right, they can count votes.

It was the same story with the government’s health care takeover legislation. The Democrats have such huge majorities in both houses of Congress that they could literally lock the Republicans out of the room where they were deciding what to do, set arbitrary deadlines for votes, and cut off debate in the Senate. The mainstream media was on board with this bill too. To hear the talking heads on TV, you would think it was a done deal.

Then Scott Brown got elected to the “Kennedy seat” in the Senate, showing that that seat was not the inheritance of any dynasty to pass on. Moreover, it showed that the voters were already fed up with the Obama administration, even in liberal Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia and New Jersey. The backtracking on health care began immediately. Politicians can count votes. Once again, the public was not helpless.

One seat did not deprive the Democrats of big majorities in Congress. But one seat was the difference between being able to shut off debate in the Senate and having to allow debate on what was in this massive legislation. From day one it was clear that concealing what was in this bill was the key to getting it passed.

That is why there had to be arbitrary deadlines– first to get it passed before the August 2009 recess, then before Labor Day, then before the Christmas recess.

The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government’s takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late.

Although even the members of Congress who voted on this massive legislation did not have time to read its thousands of pages, just the way it was being rushed through in the dark should have told us all we needed to know. For many voters, that turned out to be enough.

Even after Scott Brown came out of nowhere to make a stunning upset election victory, there were still some cute political tricks that could have been pulled to save the health care bill. But enough Democrats saw the handwriting on the wall that they were not going to risk their own re-election to save this bill that Barack Obama has been hell-bent to pass, even when polls showed repeatedly that the public didn’t want it.

President Obama’s desire to do something “historic” by succeeding, where previous presidents had failed, was perfectly consistent for a man consumed with his own ego satisfaction, rather than the welfare of the country or even of his own political party.

As for the public, it doesn’t matter if your Congressman answers your letter with a form letter, or doesn’t answer at all. What matters is that you let him know what you are for or against and, when enough people do that– whether in letters, in polls or in an election, politicians get the message, because they know their jobs depend on it.

As for what is likely to happen to health care, neither the bill passed by the House of Representatives nor the Senate bill can be expected to be enacted into law. Meanwhile, Obama’s reaction to his political setback has been to respond rhetorically and to call on the political operatives who helped engineer his successful election campaign in 2008. But the public did not know him then, and his rhetoric may not fool them again, now that they do.

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.

Off-The-Cliff, But Catching On
by George Will

You know the foreboding you feel while watching the steamier Greek tragedies, when dynasties are falling and sons are marrying their mothers and everyone is behaving badly and you are thinking: Really, things cannot continue like this.

Washington feels that way on the rare and fleeting occasions when it really thinks about the nation’s looming crisis of public finance. The crisis, which is obvious and inevitable, combines unfulfillable entitlement promises and unsustainable budget deficits. So Washington is succumbing, yet again, to an idee fixe, which is usually, and in this case, scary.

The awful idea is for Congress to divest itself of the core competence that the Constitution vests in it — the power to make the taxing and spending choices that shape the nation. This power would be given to an 18-member panel assigned to solve the budgetary crisis.

Under legislation drafted by Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and endorsed by 33 other senators, the Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action would be composed of 16 members of Congress (four each selected by the House speaker and minority leader, and the Senate majority and minority leaders) plus the Treasury secretary and someone the president selects. The panel would propose spending cuts and tax increases to put the government on a glide path to solvency. The menu of proposals would be guaranteed an up-or-down vote — no amendments permitted — in both houses of Congress.

This is patterned on the commissions that were charged with deciding which military bases — more of 300 of them, it turned out — would be closed after the Cold War, a problem deemed too threatening to local sensibilities for Congress to cope with it. The Conrad-Gregg task force is the latest iteration of the “let’s-all-hold-hands-and-jump-off-the-cliff-together” school of government, with this difference: Closing bases is small beer compared to the task force’s sweeping mandate.

There are two objections — each is sufficient — to the task force. One is procedural, the other is substantive.

Regarding procedure, consider a sentence in a Fiscal Times story in The Washington Post on the task force idea, a sentence that seems bland only because of this city’s advanced state of constitutional decadence: “The White House has been talking to Congress to try to craft a proposal that would not wholly relinquish congressional control over major decisions on taxes and spending.” Wholly? The oath of office for representatives and senators does not commit them to partially or occasionally or when convenient “support and defend,” and bear “true faith and allegiance” to, the Constitution and “faithfully discharge the duties” of their offices.

Substantively, the task force would be a means of conscripting Republican participation in huge tax increases. There are precedents. The 1983 Greenspan Commission that “fixed” Social Security permanently (permanence is not what it used to be) involved large and immediate tax increases and small and delayed trims to benefits. The year after the 1990 budget summit, which resulted in President George H.W. Bush’s renunciation of his “no new taxes” pledge, the budget deficit almost doubled.

Were the Conrad-Gregg task force to come to a consensus, it almost certainly would be that Congress must make the supposedly “difficult choice” of spending more of other people’s money. Fortunately, the task force probably would be paralyzed by the requirement that its proposals must be endorsed by at least 14 — 78 percent — of its members. Given the difficulty of getting 60 percent of the Senate to agree on anything important, a 78 percent consensus on raising taxes and cutting entitlements will be extremely elusive.

Year one of the Obama administration was devoted to deliberately exacerbating the fiscal crisis. The gusher of spending, combined with the new multi-trillion-dollar health care entitlement, is half of liberalism’s plan to radically and permanently increase government’s grasp on the nation’s wealth. As a response to the crisis, the task force would produce the other half.

Armies on the march are supposedly no match for an idea, especially a bad one, whose time has come. But what armies cannot defeat, monetary incentives might. So, the Gregg-Conrad legislation should be amended to include this language:

“During the life of this task force, which will perform Congress’ fundamental duties, all senators and representatives will be considered on vacation and will not be paid. If the task force’s recommendations are accepted by Congress, there will be no congressional pay until 2050.”

This would be a Madisonian measure, altering incentives in order to encourage responsibility. Let’s vote.

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.