America continues to be a 50-50 country with the political left and right locked in an antiquated communications trench warfare because Republican leadership in the states and in Washington, D.C. has failed on the critical information front. We will only get beyond this stalemate when our candidates and elected officials decide to change their ways.
We’ve written at length on this website about what specifically needs to change. The summation is that the job of elected officials and the Republican Party apparatus must be modernized so impacting public opinion is the number one goal.
The message that’s supposed to be advanced has a social, economic, and foreign policy component. Just taking the first two – the social and economic issues – the message would win if only it would be aggressively and effectively articulated.
If a candidate does his homework he can easily make the following arguments: 1) traditional values have stood the test of time and thus aren’t in need of adjustment by the radical political left-wing, and 2) government can be limited because people have the ability to take responsibility for most aspects of their lives.
These two issue areas – about the culture and about the size and scope of government – have been with us since the founding. John Adams gave us the definitive quote on the cultural and social issues:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The debate over whether we needed a king – or whether to merely replace the monarch with a king-sized government – was answered by the U.S. Constitution. The fact that we’ve drifted on both the social and spending fronts puts at risk the preservation of this republic.
The authentic Republican Party message honestly addresses pressing problems with realistic solutions:
- We can’t continue Social Security in its present form, but we can transition out of it without harming the neediest retirees. Republicans believe that most people can manage their own retirement accounts.
- We can’t afford to continue to separate the cost of health care from health care consumers. Republicans believe that like the welfare system, we have to end health insurance as we know it – people have to start being responsible for their own health care.
- Most people can take responsibility over their own and their children’s education. We can’t continue to allow our taxpayer funded educational systems to be controlled by union members that are insulated from what brings excellence: competition.
- And we can’t continue to be competitive in a world burdened with our current tax and regulatory systems, let alone having government (that is taxpayers) bailing out what should be private enterprises which are subject to market discipline.
Last September, Greg Scandlen, who is now with the Heartland Institute, wrote an excellent piece on the health care debate. The following is an excerpt:
“On one hand the politicians – both Republican and Democrat – are scurrying around to come up with Grand Designs to ‘fix’ the health care system.
They want to tell you what to do – what kind of insurance to buy, which providers you should choose, how much those providers should be paid, what services they should be allowed to deliver. They want to control things from the top through the use of committees, bureaucracies, agencies, rules and regulations.
On the other hand, there is a growing grassroots movement of consumers who say, NO! The bureaucrats, the agencies, the commissioners are what has created the mess health care is in. They are the cause of the high costs, poor quality, inefficiency, and inconvenience of the current system. They do not deserve more power to create more messes.
Give Us the Money and we will make our own decisions. After all, it is all our money to begin with. Every penny spent on health care comes from US! We will spend it as we see fit – on the services and providers who provide the best value – as we do in every other area of our lives.
In just a few years, this consumer movement has grown dramatically. With the help of Health Savings Accounts and other forms of consumer empowerment, we are taking more control over the money. Now we are demanding reliable information and transparency. Once we have money in one hand and information in the other, we will radically change health care so it is more efficient, more convenient, of better quality, and far lower costs.”
Sounds like great stump speech material for Republican candidates.
