Lately, it's become fashionable in Republican circles to argue that the party must move beyond Ronald Reagan if it wants to rebound in the mid-term elections and recapture its congressional majority next year. Reagan represents the past, the argument goes. The GOP needs to stand for the future. I made this same argument myself in the January 2008 edition of The Ripon Forum.
"As much as Republicans may hope, and as much as their candidates for President may try, Ronald Reagan cannot be replaced," I wrote at the time. "He was the right man at the right time. But he is gone, and this is a different time." Then, comparing Reagan to a draughtsman who designed the modern GOP, I concluded: "Republicans need to be looking for a new architect, a leader who will help them meet the challenges our nation faces ahead, not the road we have left behind."
Over the past few months, though, I have come to a different conclusion: I was wrong. This period has seen a Republican resurgence of a sort in the polls. In April, Republicans trailed Democrats by 9 points in the generic ballot for Congress. By late September, the GOP had cut that margin to 3 percent. While any Republican has to be pleased so see that margin narrowed, I suspect that some in the party also have concerns about how that gain was achieved.
This summer will be remembered as a season of discontent among the American people. It was the season Senators and Congressman returned to their states and their districts and were met with anger and protests in return. Anger at the possibility our nation's health care system might be taken over by the federal government. And protests about the rapidly growing deficit and the amount of new spending being proposed. As this anger grew, and as the shouts of protest grew louder, Democrats grew weaker in the polls, while Republicans grew stronger.
The result is that what seemed far-fetched less than six months ago is now something that is seriously being discussed -- the GOP stands a chance of reclaiming control of Congress next year. This discontent has already paid dividends for the party in terms of more dollars; both the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee out-raised their Democratic counterparts in August.
The question facing the party is whether this anger will be the foundation of a new GOP, or simply the spark that helps fuel its drive toward a new majority.
Which brings me back to Reagan.
In 1978, a revolt took place in the California over the rapid rise of property taxes in that state. Known as Proposition 13, the revolt was led by a man named Howard Jarvis, who was famously featured on the cover of Time magazine shaking his fist in the air. Jarvis was the Glenn Beck of his day, riding a wave of discontent that was propelled by voter fear and populist anger. The revolt he led resulted in property taxes being slashed 57 percent in the Golden State. It also led to a nationwide anti-tax movement that culminated in Reagan's election in 1980. Somewhere over the course of that two year period, the fear and anger that fueled Jarvis's revolt was transformed into a different kind of emotion - a sense of optimism. That transformation didn't just happen on its own. It was led by Ronald Reagan.
According to his biographer, the legendary political reporter Lou Cannon, the former California Governor not only tapped into the emotion that took root in his home state, but also turned it into a positive source of support. "Reagan mined these seams of fear beyond doubt," Cannon recalled, when asked recently about Proposition 13 and the 1980 campaign.
[He] didn't seem angry, however. He campaigned as a 'happy warrior,' ala FDR, his first political hero. You can't do this unless you truly are optimistic, and Reagan's optimism -- his steadfast belief that America's best days were ahead -- was, again like FDR, ingrained and natural, not posed.
And therein lies the challenge for today's GOP.
For all the talk about moving beyond Reagan and becoming a party of the future instead of the past, the fact is that the GOP would benefit greatly from a dose of Reagan-style optimism at this time. To their credit, Republican leaders like John Boehner and Eric Canton appear to recognize this and have taken steps to move the party away from some of the anger seen this year. Boehner, for instance, bent over backwards a few weeks ago trying to get Joe Wilson to apologize for his joint session outburst toward President Obama. And Cantor recently held a joint town hall with a Democrat in which he stressed the importance of bipartisanship and the need to cool the heated rhetoric down.
These steps are welcome if the GOP is going to move away from being seen as the party of "no." But to become the party of "yes," Republicans are going to need more than just rhetoric. They are going to need solutions. And here, too, they should look to Reagan. Indeed, it wasn't just Reagan's optimism that helped transform the tax debate in 1980. It was that he had a plan on the table as well -- the Kemp-Roth tax cut package. Reagan's support of this plan not only put him on record as supporting legislation that slashed taxes for the American people, but it also embodied what the tax revolt led by Howard Jarvis was all about.
Today, Republicans have no plan that embodies the anger and fear felt by millions of Americans over what is happening in Washington. Health care is a good example. Polls reveal that a majority of people are angry and clearly oppose a public option. But these same polls also reveal that a majority are fearful of rising health costs and support some kind of reform. Although various Republicans have proposed a number of different reforms, the perception of the party as a whole is that it stands for doing nothing. This might be good enough in the autumn before the mid-term elections. But when people step into the voting booth next year, they are going to want more. They are going to want to know what Republicans will do if they win back the majority. And for this, Republicans need to get behind a plan.
In his speech to Congress on September 9, President Obama provided the GOP with an opening to do just that. The President stated that Republicans and Democrats agree on "about 80 percent of what needs to be done" to reform the nation's health care system. If this is true, and if consensus between the parties does in fact exist, Republicans should turn this consensus into a bill and introduce the measure as the "80 Percent Plan." And what would be included in such a bill? Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal outlined several possible areas of agreement in an interview last week with Politico.
These areas include making sure a person could take their coverage from job to job, making sure no one is denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, and reforming the nation's malpractice laws to cut costs and reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits doctors are forced to deal with each year. What wouldn't be included in such a bill? A public option, which people do not want, and raising taxes on middle income Americans, which Republicans would never support and the President pledged he would not do.
Ronald Reagan once wrote that, "If you got 75 or 80 percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later. ..." By putting forward a plan geared around the consensus that already exists, the GOP would not only be following his advice, they would be defining the terms of the debate.
In the process, they would also be defining the Republican Party as it was under his leadership -- a party known not for its angry opposition, but for its optimistic solutions to the challenges we face.
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Maybe what we really need is a strong third party that represents the Moderate voters in this country.
Jim Clary
http://www
It was a power and money grab by the politician
Home buying continued, skewed toward those with the resources to pay property tax bills in the thousands of dollars yearly while their neighbor in the same tract home paid just hundreds, while the older owner enjoyed the same local services as the younger and usually had the means to pay the higher taxes.
Howard Jarvis was not a populist crusader, but a deluded pawn held up by a jaded wealthy few. If the Republican