RGA

Joshua Culling is the State Government Affairs Manager at the National Taxpayers Union.

With a large number of states considering tax hikes to balance their budgets, I looked at Georgia as a state with an opportunity to pass real pro-growth legislation. Rep. Tom Graves introduced the JOBS Act, which would have cut the capital gains tax in half and phased out the corporate income tax. After it passed the House and the Senate, it sat on Gov. Sonny Perdue's desk. We worked hard to convince him to sign it. Yesterday, he decided not to.

There has been a lot of talk about Republicans struggling to find their identity in the wake of devastating losses at the national level in 2006 and 2008. To be sure, the National Taxpayers Union (my employer) is a non-partisan organization, so we haven't been very involved in that discussion. But I think it's important to note that the decisions of some Republican Governors this legislative session flies in the face of the Republican principles of low taxes and small government.

Gov. Schwarzenegger (R-CA) urged California politicians to embrace tax hikes to pay for his rampant overspending. He has presided over a larger annual spending increase than his predecessor, Gray Davis (D), who was recalled from office due to his inability to manage the state's budget.

Gov. Linda Lingle (R-HI) just signed a cigarette tax increase into law. Haley Barbour (R-MS) looks poised to do the same. Charlie Crist (R-FL), now a Senate candidate, has waffled on the issue. Make no mistake about it: cigarette taxes are TAXES. They hit the poor especially hard, they hammer small businesses, and they drive economic activity over state lines. Nonetheless, lawmakers across the country have scrambled to hike tobacco taxes in the middle of a devastating recession.

And now Gov. Perdue, with an opportunity to do something very few Governors even considered, has politely declined to give a boost to investors and job-providers in Georgia. He's content with the status quo. Nevermind the evidence from capital gains tax cuts at the federal level that shows a net revenue INCREASE after their enactment. Forget the fact that Georgia sports an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent. In Gov. Perdue's office, it was time to play to the rent seekers that profit from government spending. It was time to play politics over principles.

And it's not as if we can look to the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary for the right answers. One of the three potential Republican candidates mentioned in this article has expressly advocated an override of the veto. The others basically refuse to give a straight answer.

I'm not naive. I understand the political realities that come with tax cuts for "revenue hungry" states. But one would hope that during these crippling economic times, when so many bad ideas are floated by Legislatures and embraced by Governors, one could look to the GOP for at least one good solution. I'm not even asking Gov. Perdue to come up with a good idea. Rep. Graves and the Legislature did that for him, and they passed it overwhelmingly. It was gift-wrapped for him to sign with all the political cover in the world.

He failed.

Defining the Republican/Conservative Party

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.

Doug Peterson

www.twitter.com/dpeterson329

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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.