It's the Money, the Media, the Groundswell/Grassroots Effort, and the Leadership
I have been listening and reading to a vast array of political experts/pundits and their ideas regarding what has gone wrong with the Republican Party. Many are spot on and a few are way off base in my opinion. I am of the opinion that things do need to change, but not our core conservative ideology.
As I have mentioned in replies to other bloggers on this site, this country is 232 years old. Over this span of time, just about every concept or political ideology has been tried. Some have been dismal failures and others have been resounding successes. At the end of the day, there are not many NEW ideas rather, there are new ways to package, present, and communicate these ideas to the American electorate. It also helps to have a leader that inspires the electorate and can communicate these ideas to the masses with charisma and vision.
I challenge anyone to educate me as to what Obama has campaigned or promised that is new. Tell me what new ideas that Obama has presented that hasn't already been tried from Clinton to Carter to FDR. Obama has simply sold a bag of goods that has already been done before or has tried to be done in one fashion or another (HilaryCare for example). At best, one could only cite tidbits of change or newness with respect to a broader idea.
First and foremost we need to acknowledge the failures of the RINO leadership we have had in Washington for the past 8 years and we need a comprehensive national strategy with a concerted focus on fund raising, the media, and a major grassroots effort unlike any ever accomplished in the Republican Party. Record fund raising is a must to counter the Obama Machine and to counter the liberal media establishment. The need for the grassroots effort should be obvious.
This will not be easy. There has been a lot of trust lost in the Republican Party and for good reason. I personally have friends and relatives who are ready to give money and help organize, but everyone is sitting back to see how the dust settles and who they feel they can trust with the future of the party. It also makes it difficult when we have created a system where nearly 50% of the electorate pay zero federal income taxes and have no stake in the federal system whatsoever. Further, with the Dems likely to push hard for amnesty for the illegals, we will likely lose the Hispanic vote for the foreseeable future. Where do you suppose these votes will go?? Consequently, we have to face the fact that we will constantly be working for the 5-7 percenters out there who always seem to be on the fence (at least for the short to mid term).
The Republican Party must rebuild the party with its core conservative values but with new methodologies for communicating our ideas and creating a groundswell of grass roots activity that we can all believe. We need to communicate our ideas and ideology to the American people and stop acting like Democrats (McCain, Powel, Bloomberg, and Schwarzenegger are prime examples). We need to defines ourselves and not allow the liberal establishment to define the Republican Party. We must have leaders with the charisma to communicate to the masses a singular voice of the party and a unique ability to raise much needed campaign funds. Over time, with success, we can regain the Reagan American Spirit we so fondly remember.
One of the biggest mistakes we as Conservatives and Republicans have made over the past four to six years is that we allowed the Democrat Party and the libs to define who we are and what we stand for.
George W. Bush and Karl Rove sat back the past six years and allowed the Democrat party and the liberal media to attack the party, the administration, the administrations policies, and the economic record these policies have produced. George W. consistently stated that he believed it was disrespectful to the "office of the President" to respond to the flurry of constant attacks.
As a result, the majority of the American people do not understand how the banking crisis has been culminating since the 1970's and how President Clinton helped to accelerate the problem. They are not aware that the Democrats holding power in committees consistently blocked efforts by Republicans (and President Bush) to reign in Freddie and Fannie through regulation. They are not aware that the CEO's of Freddie and Fannie were former hacks of the Democrat party and the congressional black caucus. They have not seen the mounds of video with the democrats in congress stating how there was nothing wrong with Freddie and Fannie.
Further, most Americans are not aware of the economic record of the Bush Administration. Most are not aware that no president has had more consecutive months of job growth than George W. Bush (including Reagan). The American people are not aware that the fastest growing segment of the American electorate are those making over $100,000. They are not aware that 40% of all voters voting in this years election make over $75,000 (the highest ever).
Furthermore, most American people do not know that the poorest segment of the electorate (those making under $15,000) has shrunk from 11 percent to 6 percent. And further, they still are not aware that the "working poor" (those making between $15,000 to $30,000 annually) have shrunk from 23 percent to 12 percent of the electorate. Most Americans are not aware of the significant growth of GDP this country has experienced through the majority of the Bush Presidency. And lastly (as I don't have time to list everything), most American's are not aware that if the black population were their own country, they would be the 16th richest nation in the world. How is that for improved racial equality.
No one from the Republican or Conservative groups have adequately communicated these facts to the American Electorate. If we do not find a way to successfully communicate our ideas, values, and successes, we will continue to fail. We must stop this vicious cycle of allowing the Democrat party and the liberal establishments to define who we are and what we stand for. We must define ourselves to the American people.
I just got back from the RGA conference in Miami. And though most of the learning and listening for me happened in sideline conversations, Tim Pawlenty put his finger on why the "traditionalists vs. modernizers" debate David Brooks is trying to foist on us is the wrong one. Pawlenty argues we need to return to our core principles and apply them to 21st century issues. This is essentially Newt's argument too. And 21st century issues doesn't just mean taxestaxestaxes. It means we need to be for broad, sweeping, dramatic free-market solutions to issues like health care and the environment that don't let us get painted as any less visionary or aggressive on those issues.
Let me lay down a few propositions here for discussion and debate.
For the foreseeable future, the GOP will continue to be the party of the Reaganite triumvirate of a strong national defense, free markets, and traditional values. Any effort to displace any part of the coalition will be met by fierce and automatic resistance. When Bush tried to transplant free markets with "buying good policy" on Medicare and education, the patient nearly died on the table from blood type mismatch. With the GOP in the minority, now is not a good time to be throwing parts of our coalition over the side -- but to keep everybody in the fold and add new people.
American elections are by and large not referendums on ideologies. They are contests of personality, optics, and performance in office. This goes the same for when they win or we win -- whether it's 1980, 1994, or 2006/2008. The Democrats did not have to change their ideology to win; they needed to change the charisma level of their standardbearer and needed an economic crisis and a prolonged unpopular war.
Because ideology doesn't matter in elections, and so much of politics depends on ephemeral characteristics like personality and who was in when the economy cycled south, the parties paradoxically have relatively wide latitude to govern ideologically without fear of public backlash once they get in. This is why cries of "socialism" were so ineffective during the campaign, and likewise why Bush got most of what he wanted in his early Presidency, even before 9/11. If Barack Obama is able to adopt far-left policies and make it look like he's making the trains run on time, the country will enter a new liberal era not by virtue of public opinion, but by acquiesence to what appears to be competent governance. In 1993-94, the Clintons tried to move the country to the left and looked incompetent in the process. It was the latter more than the former that opened a door for conservatives in 1994.
There is a relationship between ideology and competence in that ideological governance makes the other side fight harder, while middle of the road policies usually stymie effective opposition (but don't move the ball ideologically). This means that Mitch McConnell must obstruct to increase the likelihood of Obama being seen as ineffective or incompetent (independent of his ideology), but we have to lead with our positive alternatives to inoculate against the inevitable charge that the GOP is too negative.
What does this mean for the current party debate?
It means that the GOP will stick to its traditional principles, while distancing itself from examples of Bush's botched execution. It also means that modernization will happen in other, more useful contexts -- be it in the aggressiveness with which we apply conservatism to a nontraditional issues, revamping how we use technology and modernizing our grassroots efforts, and most crucially, by fielding younger, more inspiring candidates who can transcend petty battles between the "so-cons" and the "fis-cons" by providing a better hope of winning elections and restoring both factions to power.
This is not the United Kingdom, where there is a center-left majority in the population and the party as currently constituted could not possibly have won. In an ideologically flexible America, the political tenor of the times will be determined by the respective positions of the two major parties. If the GOP moves to the center and Democrats stay the left, America will be a center-left country. If the GOP represents the right and Democrats the left, America will be in the center. But if we can continue representing the right, and goad the Democrats into the center, as happened in the '90s, America will be a center-right nation again.
Bottom Line Up Front: The next leadership group of the GOP must rise above the different wings of the party. Political inclusiveness, public policy creativity, long term strategic thinking and risk-taking are the characteristics I'll be looking for in a chairman/minority leader.
I am now a proud coalition member of RebuildTheParty.com, and today's newspapers are highlighting stories and opinion pieces on the future of the GOP. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times writes an all-encompassing piece on the upcoming RGA meeting in Miami as well as leadership battles for the RNC chairmanship and Congressional minority leadership positions. Newt Gingrich points out that "the party would be wiser to offer a broad idea of what it stood for and how it would lead the country, and pick its battles carefully." Gingrich and former Maryland Lt. Governor and current GOPAC chairman are privately seeking the RNC chairmanship, according to Ralph Hallow of the Washington Times. One of the sticking points seems to focus on how to emulate Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy:
"Republicans, especially state party leaders, have become envious of the organization and money that Mr. Dean's operation deployed in two victorious election cycles in which Democrats regained and expanded control of Congress and captured the White House.
"Republicans agree that their national party is leaderless and in desperate need of someone who has the force of personality and history of accomplishments to command national attention to take on Mr. Obama. Someone is also needed to unite disparate factions that, even in the best of times, generate internal friction among themselves."
Save the GOP alerted this Kos nugget on Our Conservative Movement Leaders retreating to a country estate in Virginia to plan the future for us:
I attended one of these for our side in early 2005, and the experience was so miserable that it ended up being a major inspiration for Crashing the Gate. It was full of the same progressive "leaders" who had gotten us into our predicament, and their solutions were the same bullshit that had gotten us in the mess in the first place. So I left that retreat even more motivated to wage war against our party's political and issue-group establishment. Our victories in recent years have come, in large part, from our ability to bypass that crowd.
Those early tensions are mostly erased, as a new balance has been struck by issue groups more and more aware of the need to be part of a holistic progressive movement, rather than focus obsessively and divisively on their own single pet cause. It really is night and day. But that didn't come out of that conference. And it certainly wasn't billed as a way to generate a new grassroots movement. The notion of having a bunch of top-down movement leaders create a new "national grassroots" operation by fiat from up and above, by the same jokers who created the mess the GOP is currently in, is pretty laughable.
I believe we have fallen prey to the same problem that befell the left in its years in the wilderness. You had environmental groups, abortion rights groups, womens groups, unions, minority groups -- but no progressive movement.
Today on the right we have social conservative groups, economic groups -- subdivided into tax cutters and spending hawks, national security groups, gun groups, etc. but no truly mass-based conservative movement. Perhaps the best exponent of across-the-board conservatism is Rush, but he has no lists and no way to mobilize his audience directly to donate and volunteer.
When conservatism was a minority we may have needed single issue groups to pick off, say, pro-gun union members. But since Reagan, an entire generation has grown up thinking of themselves as nothing but conservatives. And they have no representation among the 1980s-era groups.
Whatever happened at that country estate will be irrelevant to the future of the movement. I'll bet not a single person under 40 was even at the table. The future will be shaped digitally, Here Comes Everybody-like, on blogs like this one, RedState, Save the GOP, the American Scene, and the dozens I have a feeling will be created in the wake of Tuesday's wake up call.
On November 5 John Kasich wrote: “We must figure out how to reorganize and restructure ourselves so that we can once again command the confidence and respect of not only the members of our own party, but voters of all stripes.”I certainly agree that conservatism must be redefined, and I will offer my suggestions in a moment.But I submit that none of us is ready for the task just yet.
In her 1969 groundbreaker On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., introduced a model known as the Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.While not every process entails all five stages, the good doctor stated categorically that everyone experiences at least two.But it appears that virtually every conservative commentator has tossed the model out and substituted his own single-phase paradigm: Submission.No sooner had Senator McCain delivered his concession speech than some of my favorite radio talk show hosts – who had been breathing fire just hours earlier – blandly appealed to my optimism as though the proponents of capitalism and self-determination had merely lost a preseason football game.Perhaps they don’t want to appear sore losers.Perhaps they want to come across as “high-roaders.”But in whose eyes?I guarantee you the liberals are so drunk with victory that they don’t care whether we lost sportingly or otherwise.Besides, it is a bit late for conservatives to worry about image.We have been drubbed.We have been bulldozed, hoodwinked, ground into the muck.We fought fair while they pulled every dirty trick in the playbook, and they clobbered us silly.
Where is the outrage, ladies and gentlemen?Do liberals hold a patent on passion?Did someone outlaw indignation while I wasn’t looking?The liberals seem to wield it freely enough.History instructs that we can not move forward until we fully appreciate where we are.Permit me to remind all of those blasé “we’ll-gettum-next-timers” a few facts I can recall off the top of my head about the man who just gave conservatism a bloody nose.Barack Hussein Obama: (1) exhibited blatant sexism during the primaries, then thumbed his nose at feminism by snubbing Senator Clinton in favor of “Conehead” Biden; (2) showed the “common man” his true elitist colors when he rejected public campaign financing and outspent Senator McCain by a factor of 7 to 1; (3) would turn our courts into tools for “redistributive justice”; (4) used government computers and databases to find dirt that would discredit Joe the Plumber; (5) has bragged about the fact that he wants to increase the tax burden on the producers of this country so that he can guarantee a better living for the 30-40% who are freeloaders; (6) was endorsed by both Hugo Chavez and Iran’s parliament; and (7) has little patience for the notion of individual rights.
And another thing. Let us not forget that, despite his silken demeanor, the man is an empty suit when it comes to concrete solutions.I know attorneys because I am one.The first lesson they teach in law school is how to use as many of the biggest words available to say as little as possible.Our new chief executive took that lesson to heart.People are weeping and screaming and dancing in the streets because “we” made history on November 4 by electing the first African American in U.S. history.Unfortunately, a majority of the voters got so caught up in making history that they forgot to ask what kind of person lay beneath the fashionable skin they were about to vote for.Let’s face it.Obama didn’t have to make sense.He needed no substance.And he didn’t need to curry favor with moderates.All he needed was to be a good looking, well-spoken black man who hung out with “cool” people like Madonna and Bruce Springsteen. And he knew it from day one.When I was a boy I was taught that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s would someday stamp out racism.I’m sorry to report that racism is still with us; it has merely switched sides.
This is the America our complacency has nurtured.So spare me the silver-lining pablum.I want to hear some emotionally healthy yelling and desk-pounding out there.I’m not talking about rioting or bullying.Those of you with an established forum in the media know exactly what to do.I only hope you’ll find the motivation to do it.As for the rest of you, try this as an example.When I moved to a college town some years back, I confess that I allowed my vitriolic liberal brother-in-law to temper my philosophies.Whenever he would rant about the evils he perceived Bush to have perpetrated, I was quick to remind him that the common enemy wasn’t Bush – it was career politicians and elitists in general.When he simmered down I patted myself on the back for "remaining above the fray."But one evening my 9-year-old nephew bragged to me that he had browbeaten a schoolmate of his into “voting” for a liberal in an important race.With the glassy-eyed exuberance of a Hitler youth, he recited the mantra he had heard night after night from his father. I decided I had placated the brother-in-law for the last time.Though I don’t hang out as much with my sister’s family as a result, I can rest assured that my nephew now knows his father’s way of thinking is not the only way.
So conservatism as we know it has been pulverized.It lies dead in the gutter.How do we resurrect it?The first thing we do is reintroduce ourselves to some fundamental principles many of us have forgotten: lower taxes; limited government intervention; disciplined government spending; individualism.All variations of the concepts of tradition and convention must be eliminated from our lexicon.Who do we attract?On the count of three, let’s all scratch our heads.One … two … three … and there is our answer: Real People.But just what is a real person?As a rule of thumb, real people don’t toe the party line or wear the homogenous blue blazer.Take me, for instance.I’m into The Who, Pearl Jam and the Black Keys, but I refuse to buy a suit that is anything but double-breasted.I have tattoos, but I believe shoelaces should be tied, belt loops should be belted and undershorts should be covered in public.I am licensed to carry a concealed weapon, and I will not hesitate to go for the kill shot if someone breaks into my home.On the other hand, I have never understood, and will never understand, the attraction of game hunting.I am an agnostic.I detest abortion, but I think an outright ban ignores reality.Though I am a heterosexual, I don’t understand how letting gays get married diminishes the institution for straights. By the same token, I don’t understand why gays feel the need to impose an archaic religious ritual on an otherwise fulfilling relationship.I don’t indulge in illegal recreational drugs; just the same, I don’t see the harm in legalizing marijuana or cocaine – people bent on destroying themselves will do it one way or another, so there’s no reason to spoil the party for responsible users.Blah, blah, enough about me.
The point is that today’s conservative is not as easy to peg as was the little twerp Michael J. Fox played on prime time television in the 1980s.That is why there were so many so-called Independents out there for Obama and his string-pullers to swoop up this time around.The key to redefining conservatism is to refrain from overdefining it.Agree on a very limited number of core principles, leave the rest of the slate clean and welcome the deluge of fresh new faces with bold ideas who will inevitably flock to your doorstep.
It happened in 2006, it is already starting this year, and there is no reason to think that we won’t be doing it in 2010: the ubiquitous argument that the Republican Party failed small-c conservatism.
“We didn’t govern as conservatives!” we hear reliably from National Review, The Weekly Standard and the old-line conservative blogs. “The problem isn’t with the ideology, it’s with the fact that Republicans sell out on major issues.” While that kind of talk is a great way for the authors to offload responsibility for failure on Election Day, it does nothing to advance either the conservative movement or the party.
The only viable political vehicle for conservatism in 2008 America is the GOP. If it fails, conservatism fails. Deal with it.
Keeping conservatism under glass and separate from the Republican Party insures that these thinkers and writers never ask themselves the hard questions. Questions like how the public wants its government to behave and how well conservative policies that have actually been implemented work in practice. As a result, we learn nothing when we lose elections.
Think about it: the “conservatism has never really been tried” argument sounds suspiciously like a campus communist after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soviet communism wasn’t a “real” implementation of Marx’s theories, he claims, to an increasingly small audience. In real life, Marxism turns into oppression, stagnation and war. In real life, conservatives (generally) run as Republicans and have to compromise on judges, immigration and everything else while still trying to win elections with a consistent message. This is the world we live in.
So what’s the takeaway message? Treat conservatism not as an orthodoxy based around the pronouncements of Hayek, Friedman and Limbaugh that punishes apostates and shirks responsibility for real-world results, but as a tool to best run America.
Winners govern. Inquisitors, bloviators and true believers who are unwilling to get their hands dirty lose.
Some folks would prefer to be part of an ideologically pure niche that will never be held responsible for anything. I’d like to win.
Keying off Jon Henke, John Hawkins has sparked an enormously provocative and healthy discussion about punditry vs. activism in the conservative blogosphere. Here he hits the nub of the problem:
Well, I've found that conservatives are willing to pony up the money, but it's extremely difficult to get people in the new media to ask their readers/listeners for money. Why that is, I don't know, but I find that as a general rule, if bloggers and talk radio hosts on the Right have a choice between seeing their favorite candidates lose and asking their readers to donate money, they'd rather see those candidates lose.
I'm unsure whether that's a cultural thing that will change over time or just some characteristic of conservatives, but it makes it extremely difficult to organize any sort of fundraising effort. As a general rule, it's like pulling teeth to get the bloggers who explicitly agree to help to actually ask their readers for money and most of the rest of them bend over backwards not to link a fundraising effort.
Put more succinctly, I've had people tell me conservative bloggers feel "dirty" asking for money. This sense of modesty and restraint is not felt by the likes of Daily Kos, MyDD, and Open Left. Note the huge blue fundraising graphics that are the first thing you see when you visit their sites. And I'm sure you're probably thinking: "Well, we don't want to be like Kos." Well, if not being like Kos means not winning, then I certainly can appreciate the intellectual rectitude at play here. But for those of you who want to move the Republican Party in a different direction, you might want to try something else.
Ace encapsulates the right's reluctance to engage electorally, and what I suspect is going to be the rude awakening that comes as a result of that approach:
I never was all that big into this idea. I think it's now necessary if we're ever going to start winning like we used to.
The GOP needs to do its part, too. It shouldn't be up to John Hawkins to compile a list of House GOP challengers. The GOP needs a permanent online liaison, not just charged with sending out press releases and that sort of thing, but with providing information about candidates -- who's vulnerable, who's a solid challenger, etc.
What will it take to turn this around? If you're a conservative blogger, the question you need to ask yourself is this. Is the main purpose of your blog to express your personal opinion? Or is its primary purpose to build political power for a cause? If you cannot answer yes to the latter, you're probably not going to be comfortable with making the changes necessary to make online conservatism a political force to be reckoned with.
This is not a criticism, but an observation. Most conservative blogs are still stuck in 2003 -- both in terms of the overwhelming focus on media criticism and punditry, and the tendency to outsource electoral politics to the Republican Party. This was in some ways legitimate response to what was happening in 2003-4, when media surrender-monkeys were undermining the War on Terror, Republicans had a kick-butt political operation, and Kos was going 0 for 16.
Ross has an excellent analysis of what the near future of the Republican Party looks like. A bloodbath between several different views of the party is coming. He characterizes Rush's:
For Rush, there are only two kinds of people in Republican Party: True conservatives like him, and "moderate Republicans." The latter is an ideologically-inclusive category: You can be pro-choice or pro-life, David Frum or Colin Powell, a Rockefeller Republican or a Sam's Club conservative; indeed, the only real requirement for moderate-Republican status is the belief that the Republican Party needs to reach out to voters who don't agree with, well, Rush Limbaugh on every jot and tittle of what conservatism is and ought to be.
Ross is right that "the whole argument collapses" while "it has a certain surface plausibility" to "many, many conservatives eager to be convinced that the '08 outcome had everything to do with John McCain's heresies and the treason of the Beltway elites, and nothing whatsoever to do with them". Earlier today, I noted a particularly bewildered form of this analysis out of John Ensign. Ross notes that "moderates", in this framework believe that "the Republican Party needs to reach out to voters who don't with with" ... us.
That's a very nice static analysis. But the good news about politics is that the goalposts always move. A Barack Obama presidency would undoubtedly overreach and create the conditions for the political unraveling of his experiments, probably long after leaving the White House. The tax rates would probably be too high. Healthcare reform would probably go too far. Too much regulation would probably stifle financial services. Obama would probably go too far in addressing (sometimes) legitimate grievances about crime, welfare, etc.
But the next powerful, dominating conservativism will likely be different. It will be responsive to those overreaches. Reagan responded to high-teens inflation, confiscatory taxation, a marginalization of faith in public life, an overreach of the sexual revolution, insufficient defense of western liberal (as in market, not sexual, liberalization) values, an insufficient defense of public safety, etc., which were either the product of policy or "progress." Reagan's critique was relevant, while Rush's (and, sometimes, McCain's (staff's)) is not.
A part of me thinks that we need to just let this play out. I cannot identify the leaders who will bring us back to a majority. They have to learn and prove themselves, through things like pension and tax fights. The two parts of the coalition Rush and Ross speak for will, inevitably, come back together in some form. In the meantime, they will fight over who is in control of the process first. (and sells more books, sells ads, books more consultanting contracts, places friends in jobs, etc.)
Our focus needs to become identifying talent, solving problems, and providing the intellectual and mechanical tools to help people when the time comes.
Less than a week ago Sarah Palin was introduced to America and many conservatives for the first time. In the intervening week, the GOP vice presidential nominee has endured a liberal smear campaign, ruthless media criticism and the biggest speech of her life. She emerged unscathed and more respected. In the process she united the right.
What now for Sarah Palin? As Jon Henke wrote yesterday, there is a fundamental misunderstanding by liberals and journalists why people on the right are excited about her. But what is it that gives conservatives so much hope?
From a purely partisan perspective, Henke argues she will reform the "directionless, corrupt and ineffectual" party and change the identity of the GOP in the process.
The question, then, is what Sarah Palin will do with the Republican Party if she has the opportunity to remake it. Change is necessary, but where does the Republican Party go next? That is a question that needs to be addressed.
Henke's point is a good one -- and very likely the reason many Republicans are motivated. But the reason *conservatives* are excited about Palin extends beyond the party (yes, there is a difference). Like Ronald Reagan before her, Palin has a special talent for talking to grassroots conservatives in a way they can relate. Her can-do attitude and optimistic outlook are truly inspirational. After eight years and many disappointments, it feels like morning again in America.
Sarah Palin is a blank slate. Aside from what we've learned in the past week, we know very little about the woman who could transform conservatism for the next generation. For that reason, we should be skeptical. Certainly not in a bad way, but with the recognition that she's on a ticket with maverick who has made a career of being unpredictable.
Will Palin follow in McCain's footsteps? Or will she charter her own course that remakes the right? She seems like a great leader. So where does she want to lead? Putting aside the talking points, what is her actual, governing philosophy? What are *her* priorities? Will she be a manager or transformative?
The next few weeks will be tremendously important for Palin. As we get to know her, she'll get to know us. What she says and what she does will be magnified because she is an unknown. The excitement she brings to the GOP ticket could be seen all week at the convention. No other Republican has been able to inspire that kind of enthusiasm in a long, long time. With so much at stake, she can't afford to let us down.
