“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Monday, March 02, 2009

Assigned Reading

Over at Pajamasmedia, John Hawkins, the producer of ConservativeGrapevine and RightWingNews, has his column about Rush's CPAC speech in which he draws a nice, concise contrast between liberals' solution to problems and those of conservatives. Go give it a read. Here's an exerpt...

The reality is that conservatives have better ideas than liberals in every area. We want clean air, water, and soil, but oppose budget-busting environmental extremism to achieve these goals. We want quality education, but support shifting the power and the money from the federal government and the teachers’ unions to the states and the parents. We want to cut the cost of health care via tax credits and giving consumers more choice in health care. We want achieve real energy independence not through investing billions in pie-in-the-sky solar and windmill technology, but by investing in shale oil drilling that could actually allow America to become the world’s biggest oil exporter in 15 years.
Conservatives have better solutions than either the left or the moderates in our own party can come up with — ready to go, ready to improve the lives of Americans — but very few people on the right are promoting those ideas.


One of the points I took away is that the republican party needs to field a candidate who makes these distinctions in clear, easy-to-understand terms like this, rather than in lofty, over-written, political oratory that puts everybody to sleep. Obama seduced everybody with tools other than pure socialism. His speeches for the most part, sounded like regular, every day conversataion, not grandiose, political pholosophy that people have to stop and think about. This paragraph by John sounds like to me what our candidates should sound like on the campaign trail. Of course Obama had the drooling, subservient media on his side. No matter how common-sense and regular-guy the republican candidate is, he'll get the tough grilling that Obama deserved, but was spared. That makes it easier said than done but, still.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ed,
You nailed it. The Right needs someone who can communicate with the American people. And, unfortunatley, none come to mind...yet. I feel confident there's got to be someone, some diamond in the rough waiting - likely unwittingly - to be unearthed and polished.

I think Jingel's (sp?) quasi coming-out after the not-a-state-of-the-union speach was a failure. He had his chance. He might be better as a behind-the-scenes man not unlike Newt because his Mr. Rogers persona is as distasteful and is about as likely to cause me to condider him as a leader as me considering Brangelina as non-emasculated.

Palin is a lightning rod for the left and while attractive, think MILF, she is not well-read and is more at home hunting - not that there's anyhting wrong with that - or shopping in the local supermarket. And on the latter, I do not want to elect my neighbor no matter how much I might like to see her svelt, bikini-clad likeness at the neighborhood pool, with or without her hunting knife.