Monday, November 23, 2009

Opinion

Michael Barone

Republican Party Should Go Upscale

February 02, 2009 03:17 PM ET | Michael Barone | Permanent Link | Print

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

That's my advice to Republicans in my most recent Creators Syndicate column.

Tags: politics | Republicans

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Just Don't Get It...Or, Don't Want To.

Michael,

As long as the Republican Party keeps their head up their....whatever, they will continue to lose members. The Republican party is seen as uncaring, arrogant, unethical, greedy and a part of the culture of the Wall Street Robber Barons. They don't care who they screw as long as they make money, they don't care who loses as long as they don't. Many times the local Republican Committeeman has tried to lure me away but since Bush took office I don't him, "as long as Republcians continue to act with such indifference and arrogance I don't think I would ever vote Republican. I am an Independent who will not vote for party but for a man of conscience and decency. It has been a long time since I have seen one of those in the Republican Party since all the RNC thinks about is MONEY--that is your mantra, the all-consuming thought of the RNC. Proof of that is how the RNC allowed Bush to run this country into the ground. The RNC just stood there and never said a word or attempted to stop what Bush was doing. We all believe in party loyalty but not at the expense of the nation. I think the RNC has to grow some real balls, conscience, compassion, and learn some decency and loyalty to the nation and not only to the party. I would dump any party before I betrayed the nation.

Here We Go Again

Michael: The voters whom the Republicans lost in the suburbs are not coming back, and the Republicans should not want them. They only believe in the public school system because they live in jurisdictions where the NEA's monopoly on education is tempered by the local district's enjoyment of the special funds contributed by the parents. Those parents will never support freedom of choice in education, whether it is by charter school, vocational education, home schooling, vouchers or the abolition of compulsory education itself. They favor restrictive environmental regulation because they are its primary beneficiaries; they make their livings in "clean" jobs in offices, not "dirty" ones in restaurants, garages, farms, factories and construction sites. The Republican Party has to decide whether it wants to represent waitresses or unionized school teachers, truck drivers or DMV employees. The Democrats already have the loyalty of the groups in our country who are insistent on being paid higher than market wages, never being laid off, and never, ever being fired for being bad at their jobs. There is no way that the Republicans can ever compete successfully for the votes of the people who confuse diplomas with wisdom and talk with work. When the Republicans as a party finally have the courage to embrace their origins as the party of hard money, limited taxes, and reduced government, they will recover the majority they enjoyed when genuinely humble men like Grant, Coolidge and Reagan were their leaders.

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Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.

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