In 1993, disgusted with the GOP’s pusillanimous acquiescence on the Clinton Crime Bill (as gross an imposition on civil liberty as this country’s ever seen), I left the Republican party in disgust.

“What the hell was wrong with the GOP”, at that time, was that it had completely abandoned the notion of small government, and stampeded with a herd of Democrats to the left on a slew of privacy and civil liberties issues.

I figured that if the party actively subverted what I believed, and I didn’t have the capacity to change it myself or find enough people who believed as I did to change it, I shouldn’t be there.  So I joined the Libertarians.  I skipped the Gingrich Revolution (although I approved of it).  I even ran for office.  It was worth it; I developed an appreciation for what major parties are for; organization, mainly.

And in ’98, I came back. I figured I wasn’t going to win every battle, but it was worth fighting for in exchange for having a shot at getting what I believe actually in office.
———-
So after eight parts, I’ve said…what?

That the Minnesota GOP needs a message, one that attracts people.

Of course – as someone involved in party operations noted the other day – the party doesn’t put out messages.  The party works the people who do – the candidates and the groups of supporters who put them into contention.  The state party chairperson and the other officials elected by the Central Committee and, least of all, the party’s paid staff have very little to do with the message that candidates put out, other than making sure they don’t completely violate the platform.

All that’s true.

But there’s still a problem in the MNGOP.

As we all know, Norm Coleman trails in the “recount” process by something like 300 votes.  Leave aside for a moment the byzantine nature of the recount, or the  patchwork of “standards” (isn’t that an oxymoron?) that led to the 500 vote swing, or the danger this sort of uncertainty provides to democracy itself, what with not one in 100 voters being able to explain how we got here, and probably not one percent of those able to define the standards themselves.

Why is Norm Coleman behind by 300 votes?

Because he’s “too conservative?”  Please.  He was a DFLer.  He nominated Paul Wellstone in 1996.  He won two terms as mayor of Saint Paul as a moderate DFLer.

Because the opposition was so strong?  Well, it was a bad year for Republicans.  But the fact that such a relatively large number of people voted for Dean Barkley – the prickly wonk thrust into prominence by Jesse Ventura’s caprice and Paul Wellstone’s death – shows how little Barack Obama’s coattails were worth, even here.

All that is true.  But Coleman also lost because several “Republican party” factions actively campaigned against him, because of some of his votes (ANWR, among others). Did these factions bring up a viable alternative within the party?  Of course not. But they did actively sway people against Norm Coleman.  Was it 300 votes worth?  We will never know, but it’s not unreaonable.

These groups’ reasoning?  “The GOP needs to learn its lesson”. So what did we get for it?  If this recount wends its way to a Franken victory, we get an even more veto-proof Dem majority in Washington, to further grease the Obama Administration’s path, lubing up the skidway to hell.

So one of the things that’s wrong with the MN GOP is Minnesota Republicans themselves.  The party is crowded with people who are in it for a single issue (pro-lifers, God bless ’em, in many cases), or a single candidate (Ron Paul).  That’s good, as far as it goes – but here’s a suggestion:  if you’re in the GOP, then by all means try to influence the GOP in the direction you want. That’s what caucuses and primaries are for.  And an organized, well-motivated group can have quite an effect on the party, there; the Ron Paul supporters made quite an impact last year (and if they have the attention span, they can extend that impact into some real gains).

But if at the end of the day you call yourself a Republican but find yourself actively subverting the party’s candidates, you should ask yourself – is this where I belong?  Is the damage I’m causing to what I believe in by, de facto, helping get Democrats and their entire agenda into office really the goal I had in mind?

No, I’m not saying “your party, love it or leave it”.  Far from it; I applaud the Ron Paul crowd for the organizing and work they’ve done.

But I am asking; if you find yourself subverting the GOP after the caucuses and primaries, from either side – whether you’re a Coleman-hating paleocon or a Sturdevant-hugging Override-Sixer – then why are  you in the GOP? Don’t you belong in the Constitution, Independence, DFL, Libertarian or Natural Law parties?

You’ve got a little over a year to think about it.

Monday:  Summing up.  I think.

So what’ should the Minnesota GOP’s message be?

We’ve talked about prosperity – achieved through cutting taxes and spending – and education.

Today, Security.

Security means a lot of things; the Constitution refers to the people’s right to be secure in their homes and possessions.  National security is one of very few real clear mandates upon the federal government. Of course, if you’re a liberal, a complex formula of dairy price supports and support for the National Endowment for the Humanities are vital elements in national security.

But at a state level, it means a few really important things:

• Afflicting the lawless and comforting the law-abiding:  Law enforcement should be a burden on criminals and ne’er-do-wells, not on the law-abiding citizen.  Quit finding new ways to criminalize legal behavior.
• Laws are for enforcing: Dangerous people belong in jail.  End Minnesota’s revolving door for career criminals.  Quit subsidizing criminal behavior in this state.
• Police are not social engineers: if people break laws, any laws, then prosecute them.  That means everyone from CEOs to illegal immigrants. Focus on keeping streets safe, rather than canoodling about as government social policy enforcers.

This makes sense if you’re a Republican – or a citizen who may not be a Republican, but pays their taxes, works hard, and wants to know their neighborhood is their neighborhood, not the scum’s.

It’s easy to make the case that…:

Republicans: Common Sense and Safety.

…presuming we manage to actually embrace common sense: punish criminals, leave the law-abiding alone, quit tolerating (much less subsidizing) bad behavior.

So what’s the alternative?  Revolving door justice.  Criminals who should be in jail attacking, raping and killing people, and illegal immigrants soaking up our resources while the DFL legislature looks for ways to punish the law abiding citizen (the gun owner) and harass those who run afoul of their picayune social policies (Saint Paul’s dwindling number of small landlords).  Our streets grow more dangerous, as the DFL diverts resources away from enforcement and into subsidizing more bad behavior.
Democrats:  Chaos and Fear.

It should be an easy sell:

Republicans: Common Sense and Safety. Democrats:  Chaos and Fear.

Tomorrow: Getting along.

When figuring out messages for the Minnesota GOP, I limited my scope to things that elected officials and representatives in the State of Minnesota actually have some control over.

And the biggest single thing the State of Minnesota controls is education.  Along with building state infrastructure, education is the biggest bill the state pays, year-in, year-out.

Now, on the one hand Minnesota putatively has much to be proud of; our state’s education system ranks at or near the top of the nation in most categories that matter on the major standardized tests – for those of you who place lots of value in standardized tests (which, let’s remember, test the ability of kids to take tests more than anything).

But in whatever part of Minnesota you live, we’re slipping. As per-pupil education spending skyrockets faster than inflation, inner-city minority graduation rates are falling.  In the rural areas, traditional town schools are being consolidated into big consolidated districts, gaining many of the disadvantages of big urban districts – the maddening bureaucracy, the stunted achievement, the addiction to infrastructure and administrative overhead, the “I’m lost in a huge school” effect that makes urban education such a morass – while losing all the benefits of being a small school, changes made purely for the convenience of the administrative beast.  If you live in a ‘burb with a successful school district, mandates on curriculum and funding formulas are having more and more affect on the schools your communities have built.  If you’re a charter school parent, the education/media complex is trying to draw a big bullseye on your schools’ foreheads.  And if you’ve opted to secede from the school system – like so many inner-city black Charter School parents, Christian homeschoolers, Latino catholic-school parents and Asian kids attending school in the ‘burbs due to Minnesota’s Open Enrollment laws, the DFL majority is aiming the whittle down your choices even as it whittles up the bill we all have to pay for all of those diminishing returns.

And while Minnesota’s test scores – whatever they’re worth – are still strong, you’d be blinkered not to notice that neighboring North Dakota pays vastly less per student for about the same results.

Against this backdrop of failure and anti-parent recrimination, the GOP has consistently stood for the full range of answers to the problem:

• More accountability in the public system
• More choices for parents, within and outside the public system.

Or, to sum it up:

Republicans: Parental Control, Choice and Learning.

Against this, the DFL has consistently fought for what’s best for Education – with a capitol “E”, anyway.  This isn’t just bagging on the teachers’ unions; Institutional Education at all levels, from Big Adminsitration to Big Consolidation to Big Union all have their role.  Against this, there is no Big Parent; indeed, the GOP is the closest we’ve got to such a thing.

And the best the DFL can come up with is “the GOP wants to cut education funding”.  It’s a powerful argument – if you don’t dig beneath the facility of the numbers.  Minnesota’s “best” public schools in terms of student achievement are its cheapest; the state’s few remaining one, two and three-room country schools.  Its worst, overall, are the ones that are most “blessed” with resouces.

So we can sum it up:

Democrats:  Bureaucracy and Failure.

The truth is out there; the track record is clear:

Republicans: Parental Control, Choice and Learning. Democrats:  Bureaucracy and Failure.

Tomorrow, “Security”

So the mission is this: dispense with the careerism and backbiting and just-plain-doesn’t-matter buncombe that occupies so much of the MNGOP’s time, and come up with a message – a message that’ll not only unite the party, but reach out to people who aren’t especially affiliated with either party to begin with.  A message that will clearly frame the fact that there is a very clear choice between Republicans and Democrats.

Here’s the hard part; they have to be messages that even Republicans agree on amongst themselves.  And that’s a tough one; leaving aside the single-issue voters who might be completely ignorant about issues outside their turf (I can’t count the number of single-issue pro-lifers who’ve claimed to oppose, say, concealed-carry reform, just because they had never cared to learn about the issue beyond what the media told them), a lot of the messages that are absolutely vital to one group of Republicans can be anathema – or at least not very important – to others.

Good example?  Gay marriage.  It’s an issue worth taking up arms over to some Republicans; to the GOP’s tiny gay minority, it’s a goal; to a lot of us (the “Mitch Berg Bloc”, let’s call us), it’s various degrees of “important, but not the most important issue out there.  In any case, it’s an stance that serves more to ensure ideological purity within a movement than to win elections.

The goal here, once again: find messages all Republicans can agree on, and that can win people over to the party.  The idea is this; when we’re back in power, we can fuss about all the issues that divide us; if we’re out of power, we lose on all the issues, no matter what; the Democrats will gut-shoot every liberty that matters while they’re in power.

Last week, I suggested three of those messages:

Prosperity.

Education.

Security.

These are all make-or-break issues on the state level (these are not intended for the national party, although two out of three should be), both for unting the party and winning over voters.

We’re going to go over one of them per day.  We’ll start with prosperity.

America has a hard time not being prosperous.  You airdrop ten Americans in the desert with jackknives and plastic tubing and come back in a week and they’ll have built an ice cream machine, and a commodity market to trade ice cream futures and spin them into complex derivatives that they can sell to the Saudis and then short-sell when the Russians move extra capacity into the sherbet market, making money on the up and downsides.

Oh, business has up and down cycles – creative destruction isn’t just a great band name.  But as John McCain (and now Barack Obama) said, the fundamentals of the American economy – immense human and material resources, drive, constantly-replenishing intellectual capital) are more sound than in any econony on earth…

…provided government gets out of the way.  The most dismal periods in recent American history – the most extended swatches of misery – are the times when government opted to “help” solve financial crises with taxation, regulation and intervention.  Government intervention extended the Great Depression until the beginning of World War II (and, without the war, it’d have likely lasted well into the forties) when it would likely have ended on its own by about 1937-8.  And government regulation and aggressive taxation – the bastard children of FDR and LBJ’s policies – helped make the seventies the dismal morass they were.  And let’s not forget that the mortgage bubble grew out of the government’s mandates to expand sub-prime lending, socializing the risks of shoddy loans.

The more you leave government out of the equation (yes, yes, make sure  nobody’s making baby formula out of arsenic, and yes, the courts exist to an extent to help people get relief from business’ excesses), the better things are.  Any number of the world’s great philosophers and economics and economic philosophers, from Smith to Hayek, have shown how it works; all the greatest periods in American (and world) economic history have accompanied periods of enlightened deregulation.

Conservatives stand for “limited government” – but that’s another ephemeral concept to an awful lot of people.  How do you shrink government?  You starve it!
So how do you sum that up briefly?

Like this:

Republicans: Low Taxes, Prosperity and Freedom.

Low taxes lead to free markets lead to jobs, which leads to prosperity.  Low taxes mean you have more money; having more of the fruits of your labor at your own disposal is freedom – very likely the most-used freedom in our society today.  It’s the freedom to take a trip, donate to charity, put money away for your kids’ education, buy a car, change careers…whatever you choose (which benefit in turn the travel industry, charities, banks, car dealers…)

Republicans equal low taxes. Low taxes equal prosperity. Prosperity equals freedom.

So how does this compare with the alternative?

Democrats:  Taxes and Control.

The Democrats believe that your earnings belong first to government; that government’s mission, and keeping that mission funded, is the reason you work.  Anything left over?  Well, don’t spend it all in one place!

When government claims the fruits of your labor, you don’t control what you do with a third of your life.  You cede control of what you do to the government; you cede your freedom.

DFL Senator Cy Thao put it well at the beginning of the 2007 session; “When you guys win, you get to keep your money.  When we win, we take your money!”.  If the GOP doesn’t make up T-shirts with this saying emblazoned in white on black and distribute them througout the state, they don’t deserve to be a party.

The choice is simple; freedom to enjoy the results of your hard work versus being (in effect) government property.

It’s not just fuzzy-headed libertarian theory; Obama’s current spending mania is going to make you, your children, and your grandchildren into de facto government servants for their entire lives.

There’s nothing abstract about this.

Republicans: Low Taxes, Prosperity and Freedom.  Democrats:  Taxes and Control.

Tomorrow:  Education.

Yesterday, I noted that, from an activist’s perspective, the MNGOP seems to want to centralize control of its message – keeping activists and bloggers it doesn’t control at arms length – but at the same time, that it doesn’t seem to know what its’ message is.

It’s a real problem.  It’s easy for Democrats to get on message; most people learned the key points of Democratic/Liberal philosophy in kindergarten; “share and share alike! Take your fair share! Everyone is exactly the same (except your teachers, of course)!”.  Take these simple tropes, tack on the element of state force to get compliance, and you basically have the DFL message; “Share what we think we need, or we’ll take what we want”.  They word it more nicely, but that’s really about it.

It’s more complicated when you’re right of center; many of the tenets of center-right thought are harder, almost counterintuitive, to the things we were tought when we were five years old; merit, tough love, rights don’t impinge other rights, enumerated powers, individual responsibility.

And even with that, there are so many flavors of thought in the GOP:

• The Ron Paul crowd – basically Libertarians who saw a major party ripe for the picking.  They are largely hardcore civil libertarians, largely without the faintest interest in social conservative issues.
• Evangelicals – largely social conservatives; they focus (some of them almost to exclusion) on issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research; I’ve met not a few that were hard-core pro-lifers who were wobbly on Second Amendment and even fiscal issues (I’m talking to you, Mike Huckabee).
• Culture Conservatives – Similar to the Evangelicals, although not always motivated by faith; immigration, gay marriage and the near reaches of social policy motivate them.
• Fiscal Hawks – These range from Center of the American Experiment policy wonks to Jason Lewis’ hordes of tax hawks.  Many are social conservatives, but it’s no lock.
• “Reagan” Democrats  – There are not a few moderate DFLers – union members, blue-collar guys and gals, veterans – who are nauseated by some combination of Dems’ policies.
• Homesteaders – That’s my term for the small, but growing, groups of black Republicans who realize the DFL represents a tragic quackery on education and welfare, and Hispanics who are tired of having their conservative social beliefs piddled on, Asians who recognize the DFL’s threat to free enterprise, African immigrants who’ve already lived through third-world hell and don’t want to see Minnesota even start to flirt with more of the same, and even a few Gay conservatives who are tired of being treated as ripe voting sucks by a party that expects their votes in exchange for not a helluva lot but rhetoric in return.
• “Moderates” – These people used to control the party; the likes of Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman pine for the days when Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger were the voices of the MNGOP.  They[‘re still out there; the Override Six battle showed they’re still alive,well, and – this is important – a non-trivial force in the party.
• “Pragmatists”  – Moderate?  Conservative?  Fiscal Hawk?  Opportunist?  They may be a minority in your BPOU caucus, but they’re pretty prominent in the party leadership and, lest we forget, the governor’s mansion.
• Security Voters – Maybe they remember the joke that was the Democratic Party during the Cold War; maybe they recall the way the Dems giggled and skipped away as the Communists inflicted epic mass murder on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; maybe they’re sick of Minnesota’s catch and release criminal justice system; maybe they still see the Twin Towers burning when they go to the polls.  Whatever; they are Republicans because they see that the Dems are whores on the battlefieldand generals in the bedroom when it comes to security, at home and abroad.
• The Mitch Berg Bloc – This last bloc, of indeterminate size (from one to thousands; nobody knows for sure) represents people who are fiscal hawks, social libertarians, personal Christians, legal Constitutionalists and who are pragmatic yet absolutist on security.

To make it challenging, remember; without any of these blocs (Homesteaders and the Mitch Bergs might be expendable, sorta), the party will have a very hard time winning.  And that means any bloc; the RINOs, damn the luck, are as important as the fiscal hawks.
So what happens when you put a Taxpayers’ League wonk, a MCCL activist and Ron Paul supporter in a room?

Currently, not much; the pro-lifer calls the other two RINOs on social issues; the wonk calls his roommates RINOs on fiscal issues, and the Paulbot bags on the others’ commitment to small government and liberty.

And they’re all wrong.  And they’re all right.  And it’s no way to run a party, either way.

———-

In the past, I’ve used the metaphor of the “Tug of War” to describe my beliefs about partisan politics.  We live in a pluralistic society; nobody is ever going to convince everyone to believe as they do, to “pull the other side into the mud pit”, to complete the metaphor; the best they can hope for is to convince as many people as possible to join their team to “pull the rope” for their particular issue as far as possible in the direction they want.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean “compromise right out of the gate”; indeed, it means “pull like hell” – to a point.

As a Reagan Conservative – a center-right fiscal conservative and social libertarian – I’ve set my stake in the ground.  I wrote the “True North Manifesto” almost two years ago – and with its six key pillars (Liberty, Prosperity, Security, Limited Government, Culture, Family) it was a pretty decent summation of center-right conservatism as I’ve seen if I say so myself (and I say so myself).  Those are the six ropes I haul on, and try to convince others to join me in pulling for.

But when you run a genuine big tent party, there are many, many of these tugs of war – many of them within the party itself.  What does “limited government” mean to Arne Carlson?  What is “Security” to a Hispanic conservative, a 9/11 Democrat, or a Ron Paul supporter?

The problem is, to get anything of this implemented into policy, you have to win elections, no matter what bloc you belong to.  And with the Minnesota GOP this fragmented, that looks dicey.  But if the GOP isn’t in power, it’s for sure that the DFL is not going to stand for anything we believe in, whether fiscal sanity or law and order or the sanctity of human life.

What’s a party to do?

———-

My friend Andy Applikowki at the blog Residual Forces  – one of my colleagues on the ruling junta at True North – put it well at an editorial meeting a few months back.  Paraphrasing, he said we need, as a party, to put aside the things we disagree on to fight for the things we do agree on.

He’s right, of course.  If you oppose abortion, who is more likely to return your call when she’s in office – a Republican for whom it’s a non-issue, or a Democrat for whom it’s a social sacrament?

It’s a no-brainer; no GOP power, no progress on the things any of us, Paulbots and MCCLers and Jason Lewis fans and, by the way, me, believe in.

So what do all Republicans, from all corners of the party and every place in between, agree on, on a statewide level (meaning “things that state elected officials will ever have to deal with), that we can turn into a winning message?

Hint:  They all tie in with “Freedom” at the root of it all.  But “Freedom” is an ephemeral concept – a great, beautiful one that hundreds of thousands of our forefathers (and brothers and sisters, really) died to protect.  But one of the great political aphorisms is “it’s the economy, stupid”; people think in terms of tangible things that hit them where they live, day in, day out.

And for the Republican voter, and (more importantly) the non-affiliated voter who can be persuaded, there are three of these issues I’m going to suggest:

Prosperity.

Education.

Security.

We’ll address each of these – and why each gives the voter a reason to vote Republican, and why Republicans do have to agree on these – starting Monday.

I’ve been writing for years about the problems I see in the Minnesota Republican Party.  It’s taken years to even start figuring it all out.

How can an organization so chock full of talented, smart, motivated, passionate people find so many clever ways to shoot itself in the foot with flamethrowers?

I used to think it was just a problem with leadership.  And there are problems there; I can’t count the grassroots GOP activists who’ve railed against the feeling that all the real decisionmaking took place in a smoke-filled back room weeks before they showed up at the district or state convention; that debate was tolerated as a ticket-punching exercise rather than a key part of setting party policy.

And there are signs that leadership is a big issue; the state and district GOPs seem paralyzed at the thought of devolving any power outward; they seem to want control at the expense of results.  A great example – the party’s “Voter Vault” voter ID database, which is mandated from the national party, but is reportedly so rife with data integrity and usability issues as to be nearly useless for, y’know, identifying voters.  Having sat in boilerrooms and made countless calls to people who had no idea why they were getting calls from the GOP, I’ll testify.

And control is, I think, the MNGOP’s big issue – but parliamentary procedure and technology are only the barest surface layer of the problem.

Closer to the core of the issue?  The party has a notoriously standoffish attitude toward Minnesota’s big, passionate, thriving center-right blogging community. Oh, there are exceptions; Michael Brodkorb and MDE is a big and important one.

But it seems the party is so fanatical about “controlling its message” that it doesn’t want anyone else to have access to that message.

At lunch with another center-right activist last week, I mentioned this; she responded (just before I would have continued with the same line) “they don’t even know what their message is!”

And therein lies the rub; what is the MNGOP’s message?  What does it stand for?

And that, of course, is where it gets complicated.  The MNGOP is a big-tent party, in which social conservatives, Ron Paul Libertarians, “Moderates” (think Ron Erhard or Arne Carlson), Jason-Lewis’ hordes of tax-hawks, 9/11 Democrats, and inner-city political homesteaders try to duke it out for control in an exercise that, at the moment, looks like Italian parliamentary maneuvering.

How does a party fashion a cohesive message out of this Babel?

More tomorrow.

NOTE: While I welcome all comments, this thread (and the threads in this series) are going to be by, about, and for Minnesota Republicans.  I’ll be a lot less tolerant of tangents than normal.  I reserve the right to edit and excise without notice.  Thanks!

It comes down to three words.

More on Monday tomorrow.