Remaking the GOP

What’s the difference between a Conservative Republican and a Moderate Republican?  Via Central Standard Times - Remaking the GOP - here’s as good a definition as I have yet run across.

In recent years the difference between a moderate Republican and a conservative one was defined in Kansas by the social issues, with the former taking a far more permissive stand than the latter on abortion and the currently respectable vices, but this year the most important distinction is about economics. The moderates are fond of an economic development policy heavy on tax abatements, subsidies, public-private partnerships, and similar crony capitalist schemes, while the conservatives want to cut taxes for everybody, eliminate any regulation that isn’t absolutely necessary, slash the state budget down to the barest essentials, and let the marketplace rather than the regulatory agencies pick the winners and losers.

In the past, politicians running for office from city council to President have always promised to spend more money on schools, more money for roads, more money for this and more money for that.  Do you feel just a hint of a breeze that times may be changing, that there’s a shift of emphasis beginning to be felt because the “more money for everything” isn’t showing results after decades of being tried with nothing to show for it?    

The conservatives accuse their rivals of being little better than Democrats, a most damning slur ‘round here, while the moderates have sought to portray their opponents of wanting to do nothing at all, as if that were a bad thing.

We think the conservatives have the stronger argument, and should go a long way to reforming the state’s Republican party in their image. We attribute the moderates’ long domination of the state in large part to the fact that somebody who wants to do things with government is more likely to run for office than someone who wants to stop it from doing things, but this year the need for governmental restraint is so dire that the conservatives have been able to run a fairly strong if somewhat inexperienced and unpolished slate of candidates.

Romney will win the upcoming Presidential election not so much because of what he promises to do, but because of what he promises to undo.  While pundits say that the election is about the economy and jobs, that’s only tangentially correct.  Obama has been a miserable failure on both jobs and the economy, not because he did too little but because he did too much, virtually all of it counterproductive.   The “stimulus” that didn’t stimulate, the “shovel ready jobs” program that created no jobs, the ObamaCare Program that was supposed to be not just health insurance for everyone but the fix for the economy, remember?  The EPA programs that are destroying the nation’s electrical power system, the drilling ban that’s stymied off-shore oil exploration, blocking the Keystone pipeline, wasting billions on Green Crony Capitalism.  And let’s not forget Cash for Clunkers and Obama’s failed housing policies. 

Romney feels he has to tell us that he has a plan.  The truth is that Romney’s plan, if he has one, should be to dismantle the mess that Obama has made and let Americans free to rebuild the rubble that Obama left in his wake.  America’s strength has never been its government but its people, free to use their ingenuity to create and build the greatest nation the world has ever seen. 

I don’t know the shape of the future, but of this I’m certain: it is not and never will be the vision of a government bureaucrat imagining that she has the wisdom to guide the nation.  Those little would-be dictators need to be reminded that they work at our pleasure.  Decimation would be a good start.