The Republican Party stands on the brink of an epic comeback.\u00a0 Dropping to near-third-party status in 2006 and 2008 in Washington and in state houses around the country, things looked very, very bleak for the GOP.<\/p>\n
But the Obama administration’s overreach, and the Democrat-dominated Congress’ ham-fisted pettifoggery in enabling the overreach, and the spontaneous uprising of millions of people, including many “swing” independents with a bad case of political “coyote uglies” for the Democrats, are what’s causing the Dems’ problem.\u00a0 The National GOP is not.<\/p>\n
Now, a lot of people – including, until the last year or so, me – misunderstand what the national Party is supposed to be for.\u00a0 It is <\/em>in charge of fund-raising, logistics, and support for national GOP candideates.\u00a0 It is not <\/em>the ideological clearinghouse for the GOP as a whole; that’s the candidates’ job.\u00a0<\/p>\n So as messed-up as the National GOP seems to be, what with staffers going to lesbian strip joints and Michael Steele showing his malaprop collection (granted, with the connivance of a media that likes its’ black people to be quiet and stay on Democratic political plantation), that’s not the problem.\u00a0 Or at least not much of it.<\/p>\n The Democrats are bleeding right now because the American people want something other than an eternity of debt and a future of servitude to the government.<\/p>\n And except for some uppity conservatives – Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn and a small legion of others – the party’s response seems to be “we’ll get to fixing things when we get around to it”.\u00a0<\/p>\n Look, I get it; politics is about compromise, and right now the GOP, being a superminority party in Congress, is having to fight like hell to even get bad compromises.\u00a0 That’s life, when you lose elections.<\/p>\n But when it comes to life after January, 2011?\u00a0 Now is not the time to compromise.\u00a0 Now is the time for a bold, strong, clear vision that shows all those disaffected, disgusted people who are dumping the Administration and rejecting Pelosi and Reid that there is <\/em>an alternative, not just ofay, incrementalist reaction.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n More importantly, the party needs to not merely atone for its role in getting us here – the corruption and democrat-style spending from 2000-2008 that helped put the Dems in office in the first place; it needs to reverse that course in a way that nobody can mistake.<\/p>\n The National GOP and all of its candidates need a message that says “we are for stoppping the growth, rolling back the regulation, reinstating economic liberty, cutting taxes, re-limiting government, and undoing the damage of the past ten years”.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’m getting that from Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Paul Ryan.\u00a0 We get it from Chris Christie.\u00a0 When we need it, Tim Pawlenty shows it.\u00a0<\/p>\n We need a party of Chris Cristies, Paul Ryans and Sarah Palins; we need to show the American people that we are on a mission.<\/p>\n And for the most part, we are not.<\/p>\n There are millions of voters waiting to be convinced.\u00a0 I ran into hundreds of them at the Tea Party last week; they want <\/em>to be convinced.<\/p>\n So convince them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Republican Party stands on the brink of an epic comeback.\u00a0 Dropping to near-third-party status in 2006 and 2008 in Washington and in state houses around the country, things looked very, very bleak for the GOP. But the Obama administration’s overreach, and the Democrat-dominated Congress’ ham-fisted pettifoggery in enabling the overreach, and the spontaneous uprising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,13,101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-republicans","category-what-the-hell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10236"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10241,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10236\/revisions\/10241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}