I was a baseball fanatic starting from my first and only year in Little League. I had the most improbable start as a Minnesota Twins fan, never setting foot in Minnesota until attending an academic conference as an MIS professor from Milwaukee years later. I was a player on the 1-19 Little League Twins, while my middle brother played on the league-leading Yankees. (I really should tease him about it because our family has its roots in the Franco-American communities of southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and he was born at Otis AFB, hence a Red Sox fan by birth.) One day this 8-year-old twerp on the bench got on my case, telling everyone I had a girlfriend, which was untrue (and was the ultimate insult, as any guy before puberty kicks in will tell you). I mockingly grabbed him by the collar, telling him he better cut it out. In turn, I found myself yanked out of the dugout by the collar by an unamused coach, whom ordered me to go home. Where the story takes a turn is the fact that we were playing the Yankees, and I decided to stay and went into the stands (still in uniform) cheering on my brother. This was too much for my coach, whom responded by kicking me off the team for disloyalty. The worst part was the fact he also blocked me (despite my parents' best attempts to mollify the coach) from attending the season-ending fried-chicken banquet dinner featuring Sumter, SC's own Bobby Richardson, recently retired second baseman of the New York Yankees and 1960 World Series Most Valuable Player. For some inexplicable reason, I transfered my loyalty to the Minnesota Twins and was a huge fan of Hall of Fame slugger Harmon Killebrew, lobbying my dad and middle brother to cast their own ballots for him (and he rewarded my trust by hitting a homer in the 1971 all-star game).
One of the things I learned during my years of following major league baseball was how pitchers would reinvent themselves to extend their careers by adding new pitches (e.g., a knuckeball, a screwball, or a sinker) to complement a fading fastball (e.g., Greg Maddux and Warren Spahn) or using better tactics (e.g., Glavine) by targeting different parts of the strike zone and becoming less predictable in terms of the mix of pitches or varying the speeds of pitches, keeping the batter guessing.
We can easily take the baseball analogy to the current state of the GOP. For the past 30 years, we have seen an alliance of business and social conservatives, focusing on individual rights and responsibilities, low tax burdens and limited government footprint, size and spending, a strong national defense, and traditional values.
I think that there were a number of issues that undermined the credibility of the Bush/Republican Congress agenda. First, I think Bush's decision to liberate Iraq was ill-considered, and there is no question that the first MBA President mismanaged post-liberation Iraq. This is not to say that the world is not a better place without war criminal Saddam Hussein. But I don't think that Iraq constituted a legitimate, viable military threat. Certainly it was a surprising change of principle and perspective from Bush, whom had criticized the Clinton administration for nationbuilding in eastern Europe. I am empathetic to the concept of overthrowing war criminals, certainly an objective that Clinton spelled out in 1998.
But it's not enough to simply point out that Hussein was a war criminal. There have been other horrendous crimes against humanity within our lifetimes, e.g., Rwanda, Cambodia, and Darfur. The question is, the United States can or should intercede, without an international mandate, given our limited financial resources and the dear lives of American sons and daughters. But the crucial first step in reconnecting with the American people is to admit that we made a mistake, and we need in the future to do a better job in picking our battles and risking our nation's blood and treasure.
This does not mean abandoning our leadership in the free world or refusing to support democratic resistance to autocratic rule.
Second, the Terri Schiavo case to a certain extent was a watershed moment in American politics, one that opened a philosophic debate among conservatives themselves. As a pro-life American, I am appalled that the legal system would allow Terri's husband to veto her parents' pleas to assume custody and to mandate effectively a death by malnourishment, which to me constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. As I recall, Terri Schiavo hadn't even been recently examined by a medical doctor, but judges were making decisions regarding her life. Medical technology has seemingly outpaced our laws to keep up with it.
But the problem here is that one case, among many of a like kind, brought Washington to a stop, and even then the legislative and executive branches had to distance themselves from unduly influencing a judicial outcome. (The judicial outcome upheld the status quo, thus bringing into question the wisdom of the intervention from the get-go.)
Many conservatives think the concept of the intervention itself violated the concept of limited government. There is also a legitimate issue regarding the materiality of a particular issue. In my "American Conservatism" post back in October, I discuss John Adams' focus on supremacy of law (i.e., no man is above the law, including politicians and rulers.) There is a closely related concept of generality of law: we shouldn't create a Byzantine system of convoluted laws, some of which may reflect idiosyncratic purposes (e.g., a tax law benefiting one company).
There are lessons to be learned from the Schiavo experience: we need updated laws to ensure where there is no commonly accepted evidence, e.g., in the form of a properly notarized living will, which was lacking in the Schiavo case, that the presumption of the law is in favor of life, and death by malnourishment is by principle unacceptable. Second, we need legislative and tax reforms which simplify the status quo. To a certain extent, Obama's obsession with lobbyist reform reflects a similar concern. Steve Forbes and Mike Huckabee have made tax simplification a key political position. I believe that the Republicans need to make this a defining issue in the upcoming elections, as Obama has increased the percentage of American workers without a vested interest in the efficient spending by the United States government.
Third, the Republicans lost their way in terms of spending. This goes beyond being responsible over an accumulated $2T-plus national debt, without even a materially insignificant Obamaian gimmick program to "reduce" federal spending by fractions of a percent (if there's one thing Obama understands, it's symbolism). Not only that, but Bush heavily pushed for the largest expansion of entitlement spending, the Medicare drug benefit. There were scandals (Abramoff and Cunningham) and earmark excesses (e.g., Ted Stevens and the Bridge to Nowhere). Bush also made only a half-hearted attempt to address chronic Medicare and social security reserve funding issues.
The worst part of this is that Democrats are able to argue that the Republicans have no credibility on balanced budgets (even though the Obama explosion of the national debt is orders of magnitude higher). My personal opinion is that Republicans should seize on the fact that the public doesn't really believe Obama's smoke-and-mirrors budget numbers add up, that only a modest rate increase to the upper tax brackets will be enough to pay off his tax credits and new spending priorities. As talk show psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw might say, "it's time to get real." I feel that the voters will be so fed up with Obamaian double talk, that politicians should be able to gain credibility by pointing out the country has to live within its budget and can't afford new programs like Obama's health insurance proposal during a recession.
Fouirth, the Republicans need to champion capitalism versus Obama's meddling in banks, auto companies, and health care (among other things). Politically motivated influence (e.g., in favor of unions, which we have seen in terms of restructuring proposals in the auto industry and the firing of GM's CEO) is not in the best interest of global growth and competitiveness of American companies. I do not excuse the issues that many banks brought on themselves with inadequate risk management and loan qualifications, not to mention the fact that in the midst of an American housing bubble, neither the government nor industry seemed to have proactively anticipated or learned lessons from Japan's real estate market correction almost 20 years ago onwards.
Fifth, the Republicans need to focus on competent, disciplined government management. Bush's inexcusably botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina (and I recognize the failure of Louisiana's local and state governments to execute an evacuation plan), not to mention the mismanaged aftermath of the liberation of Iraq, has significantly undermined GOP credibility on the issue. We need to bring the same expertise and tools to government as we see in the private sector--e.g., WalMart's world-class inventory management, near real-time account balances/portfolio net worth from the financial sector, etc.
Sixth, the Republicans need to be pragmatic, not dogmatic. For example, in dealing with entitlement reform, taxes have to be on the table. However, we must insist on principles of shared sacrifice, look at how increases are computed, and provide diversification of the reserves. "Pay as you go" is no longer acceptable; our reserves should not be vested in operational deficit spending. We cannot continue to kick the can down the road and leave the thorny problems for future generations to resolve under a far more competitive global market.
Seventh, the Republicans need to meaningfully engage in a broader agenda and explicitly recognize real issues. For example, we have a deteriorating health care financial environment where uninsured or unpaid patient costs and certain Medicare costs are passed along to the private health insurance industry and where the private sector often filters out high risk patients. Many urban centers have hollowed out tax bases and unsatisfactory public schools (e.g., high dropout/low graduation rates). I think the GOP needs to do more about inner cities than simply push for school voucher programs. In particular, we cannot let Obama's massive public spending, inefficient government intervention programs win by default.
In conclusion, the Republicans need to go beyond their dependable fastball (low taxes/low government spending). In the pursuit of lower taxes, Republicans have ironically gone along with increasing the percentage of working Americans without a short-term interest in efficient government spending, because these Americans don't share the cost burden. They need to do a better job pointing out Obama's sham attempts to co-opt the traditional Republican message by exposing the 95% tax cut claim as welfare version 2.0, to sell a so-called stimulus bill on the basis of job-creating infrastructure which, in fact, compromised only a small portion of allocated funds and his signing an omnibus budget bill with thousands of earmarks, breaking a campaign promise, and a bogus deficit reduction program that amounts to less than a 1% of Obama's unprecedented spending and deficits. Republicans also need to ensure without compromising national security, low government spending implies a smarter, more targeted approach to national defense that does not overstretch our deployed manpower, does not compromise our military hardware and supplies and readiness to meet alternative challenges, and minimizes our foreign entanglements. The Republicans need more than token program alternatives to inner city issues, underfunded entitlements, runaway health care costs, and environmental issues. Finally, the Republicans need to do a better job of cultivating smart, personable, articulate, inspirational leaders and candidates in the mold of Reagan and Kemp whom can match up to the Democratic demagogues in Congress and the Oval Office.
