The Republican Party - Moving Forward
I don't believe that the Republican Party needs to be rebuilt. Instead it needs to be refocused. There are a lot of bloggers with a lot of good ideas, but I think that if we just listen to some of the brightest people in the Republican Party, we will see the way forward pretty clearly. I believe that Republican principles remain the same. We have lost people who were never really with us - independents and Reagan Democrats, for example, Hispanics and blacks, libertarians and evangelicals. Independents generally vote based on the pocketbook issues. They will come back to the Republican Party in droves when President Obama pushes through all of his social welfare programs, and taxes go up to pay for some of them. The deficit will increase, or we will all pay more. Inflation will follow, as it almost always does during a Democratic administration.
Reagan Democrats will return to the Republican Party when a President Obama supports social programs that they disagree with such as gun control, abortion rights, gay marriage and embryonic stem cell research. Hispanics may be lost to the Republican Party for years to come, because a President Obama will push for full amnesty for illegal immigrants and the Republican Party has made it clear that its grassroots workers will never support amnesty. Libertarians will eventually realize that when their choice is between an Obama administration and the Republican Party, they really have no choice - they will come back to the Republican Party.
The most difficult group to analyze is the Evangelicals. They are also the most rigid of all the groups. If a candidate disagrees with them on one issue, Evangelicals will not vote for that candidate. In fact, they will not vote at all. I'm just not sure that as a Republican, pure and simple, I think that is a battle we should even fight. We just can't afford a rigid idealogy. We need the support of every diverse group. We can't be an exclusionary party any longer.
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