Posted by
Ronald Lanham Jr. on Wednesday, November 05, 2008 11:19:00 AM
Dear Republicans,
Well here we are at the beginning of
our long exile from power. We have two groups to blame for our
ouster: the leadership in the Republican party and the selfish
American people (see my previous post). Because I have already
addressed the issue of the selfishness of the American people, and I
have already given fair warning to the Democrats about the next two
to four years, it's your turn my brothers and sisters.
I originally was going to do a bullet
list of the problems facing the Republicans at this time. However, I
felt that maybe it would be better to go in depth with the problems
and some possible solutions. I mean we have to be optimistic and have
a “Yes we can” attitude.
First of all the leaders of the party
must be held accountable for their lackluster performance. We have
already shed some like Denny Hastert, but it will take a
scorched-earth policy to cleanse us of the scourge of
neo-conservatism. We should be die-hard conservatives, pure and
simple.
The next thing we must rid ourselves of
is the label “compassionate conservative”. The very term should
make us cringe. It's as if we're admitting the old liberal chestnut
that conservatives are crotchety old Scrooges that want to take the
home away from the old widow lady. If we truly believe in the merits
of our conservative principles, then it is not necessary for us to
say that we are “compassionate” conservatives.
We must not put all of our eggs in one
basket. While most of the members of our party are God-fearing people
who believe in social conservatism, we can't rely on that one side of
our nature to win over the moderates and independents. Abortion is
murder, pure and simple, but we have no hope of eliminating that
horror if we are still in exile or we don't have a super-majority in
the Congress. Gay marriage is slowly being decided on a
state-by-state basis, and remember we believe in states' rights,
right?
Keeping with the topic of
diversification we must also not rely too heavily on security and
defense as a crutch. We know we are strong on defense and the
American people know we are strong on defense. We don't need to keep
reminding people, especially in the current economic climate.
Obviously the American people are more concerned at this point with
getting something-for-nothing, and robbing those that earned it to
give to those that didn't to be concerned at this time with little
things like national defense (even though we are still fighting a war
of terror).
Next we as a party must become a part
of the information age. We cannot sit idly by while people like
Moveon.org and Daily Kos corner the market on the high tech sector of
campaigning. There are some good sites out there, like RedState.com
and PajamasMedia.org, but we have to do more. We have to hit iPods,
iPhones, YouTube, Blackberries and new emerging venues. We need to
add tools to our arsenal, like Flash animation and Conservative web
programming. Again we have a start with sites like Stop-him-now.com
(which has apparently ceased to exist) which used Flash animation to
poke jabs at Obama and the Dems as a whole. But it never achieved the
regularity of liberal forums like MarkFiore.com, only producing
sporadic animation. In fact, the site started as Stop-her-now.com,
and was directed at Hillary Clinton during the primaries. So it never
achieved the coherency of purpose that it needed.
Which brings me to our next point. We
cannot continue to target Billary—or now Obama—solely. We must
take a broad approach to the entire Democrat party. We can target
those that lean too far to the Left, but we also have to target the
Dems that are considered moderate of conservative. If we are to gain
the necessary seats in the Senate we have to go after all comers.
We must be judicious in our use of the
filibuster. We don't want to give the Democrats a reason to use the
so-called “nuclear” option. We also can use that refusal to use
the filibuster as a way to not go on the record without voting the
dreaded “present”. This way it will be easier to put the complete
responsibility of Democrat failures solely on their own heads. They
won't be able to claim that the reason that things are bad is because
of Republican obstructionism.
Finally, any Republican candidate that
promises to take only public funding should be immediately
disqualified for mental incompetence. We need to target smaller
donors, like Obama did in this election. It is the only way we can
compete.
We have a long road to hoe brothers and
sisters and the days will be long and the winds cold but we can
reclaim the Congress and the White House if we are persistent and if
we stick to our principles.
Love,
The America Report