NEOAVATARA

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/13/rollins.republicans/index.html

The Republicans continue to flail around, like a chicken without a head.  This irritates  most conservatives, especially people like me.  You see it in polls, where less and less people identify themselves as Republican.  Heck, if a pollster called me I am not sure I would identify myself as a Republican either…

Yet, there is a dichotomy here, that the media as usual is missing.  The public isn’t sold on the Democrats either.  They are dissatisfied, after 8 years of George W. Bush, and are looking for alternatives.  The Obama lovefest continues for now, but what happens a year from now when unemployment is still over 9%, as predicted?  And the Generic Congressional poll shows Republicans and Democrats at a virtual dead heat; no exactly a glowing endorsement of liberal leadership, especially when the Republicans are in such disarray.

Yet, the Republicans are still a mess.  But they have several examples to show them the way out of the darkness.  I have already, in previous posts, described both the Reagan Revolution and the Gingrich-led Republican Revolution.  But we have a new example:  the Conservative Party in Britain, the Tories.

The Tories have been in the wilderness for a decade and a half.  Then popular Prime Minister Tony Blair crushed the Tories, and left them as a withering, almost dead right wing party.  However, things change.  A few lessons can be learned:

• Focus on what matters.  I am sorry to all the social conservatives out there, but virtually nobody cares about or votes because of gay marriage and abortion.  It just doesn’t matter politically.  I know, there are entrenched forces on both sides that want to make an issue of it, but you look at polling and neither of these issues are even in the top 10 most important thing on voters minds.
• The Tories have pushed a more broad based social conservatism in recent years.  How?  Here is how the Washington Post describes it:

They’ve done it through three key moves: enthusiastically signing on to Britain’s liberal settlement on homosexuality, recasting pro-family policies as part of an anti-poverty crusade and tying support for the family into a broader recognition that people aren’t motivated by profit alone.

• Keep focused on what people are worried about:  the economy.  While liberals led by Gordon Brown have made a mess of the fiscal landscape in England, David Cameron and the Conservatives are providing broad based conservative alternatives that more and more are appealing to the public, ala Newt Gingrich in 1994.
• Make sure to show the differences between us and liberals; especially when the public sides with us.  This has been true with many of the British conservative policies, such as less government spending and less taxes.  The same can be said here in the States.  The public is vehemently against many of the big spending programs that Democrats are talking about, especially those that are not even beneficial to Americans per se.  Make it clear there is a real difference in policy beliefs.
• Keep hope alive.  Look, things are bad now…but politics, like much in life, is about cycles.  We must hold to our principles in the tough times, so we can be prepared to lead when our time comes.  The lesson we must learn from the last 8 years is that talking about leadership is something completely different than actually leading and governing.  The Democrats and Barack Obama are finding that out first hand right now.

The GOP is in desperate straights right now…no leader, no mission, no focus.  But that doesn’t mean anything.  We are now in the firs 120 days of the Republican wilderness campaign.  Our goal should not be infighting or bickering.  It should be about building the foundations of the next conservative revolutions…and remember, history tells us it is only a matter of time.