Nov. 2 is 10 months away, and if the Republican Party stays focused on three big issues, voters may reward it with a chance to check the huge lurch to the Left that President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid engineered in 2009.
First, the government takeover of private life is deeply alarming. The massive thrusts of Washington, D.C. into the control of health care, the car business, the banks generally and the home loan industry specifically — all these are obvious and disquietingly huge intrusions of the federal government’s presence into private life.
Americans hate to be pushed around, especially by the federal government. The president’s plans for even more power grabs via the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior using “global warming” as an excuse haven’t yet touched most Americans, but they are out in the open and coming. Only a rebalancing of power in D.C. will forestall further metastasis of government.
A second reason to rebalance the House and Senate by voting for the GOP is the simple fact that must be repeated again and again: Lower taxes equal job growth. Whatever minor improvement in the unemployment numbers that emerges in 2010 — if any — will be threatened by the looming lapse of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 unless Congress obliges the president to abandon his “spread the wealth” gospel that views every tax increase as a form of economic justice, regardless of the cost in real jobs.
Finally, the GOP needs a majority in the House and significant gains in the Senate in order to force accountability on the president’s foreign policy and national security fecklessness. The withering of our defenses was on display on Christmas Day, and Obama’s months of dithering on Afghanistan following months of apologies and bows abroad telegraph the need for a robust congressional check on the president’s deeply ingrained instinct for appeasement.
“Balance” is an appealing concept to voters in the middle of the political spectrum, especially as they, like conservatives, are troubled by the refusal of the president and his congressional team to engage in any of the promised bipartisanship.
The endless blaming of George W. Bush has also become an obvious dodge of responsibility, a childish complaint that satisfies only the hard Left. The president has played that card so often and in so many circumstances that the mention of Obama’s predecessor by any senior administration official has become a laugh line or a cue in a drinking game.
The president’s near-constant shots at W contrast with Bush’s refusal to blast Clinton after 9/11, and serve to build the latter’s reputation, even as they diminish the former’s credibility. The obvious reliance by the Obama White House on the wearying tactics of Alinksy and Chicago-style bullying have even diminished the president’s personal appeal.
The GOP must boldly proclaim the Obama administration’s incompetence as a function of its deep-seated ideology and its Chicago roots in cronyism. And it must campaign on the simple pledge to “Repeal the Deal” on health care and on General Motors.
Every voter should know that as of the first of the year the Death Tax is dead but that the Democrats want to resurrect and raise it. Every voter should know that the stimulus didn’t and that the EPA’s plan is to take control of and tax tens of thousands of businesses, further crushing our previously unstoppable jobs machine.
And Americans have to be reminded that national security is a fabric of threads that cannot be pulled upon haphazardly without terrible consequences. The Department of Justice cannot set the hounds on the CIA, while importing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for a trial in New York and al Qaeda for long-term storage in Illinois without consequences.
If the Obama administration emboldens terrorists by weakness and signals Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Chavez and every al Qaeda franchisee that the American government believes American power is the greatest problem on the globe, the international gangsters will probe and push for the spots in which that power is being withdrawn.
The GOP’s message for 2010: Year one of our experiment with Alinskyism is over. Year two will bring a chance to curb the president’s ideological enthusiasms and their vast damage.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com
