California Conservative

In Salena Zito’s latest column, an unnamed GOP operative working on a presidential campaign said something that should get every GOP activist up off their wallets. Here’s what this unnamed GOP operative said:

“You have to give Dean credit…his 50-state strategy has leveled the playing field with the Republicans in terms of party organization.”

That’s probably true but one thing Dean hasn’t done is level the playing field in terms of ideas. A week ago, I was working the Benton County Republican booth at the Benton County Fair. One of the things that we did to attract traffic to the booth was to have a drawing for a flag which would be given away at the end of the fair.

Saturday night, a young man approached the booth and filled out the entry form. To be eligible, would-be contestants had to answer a question on which party they most closely associated themselves with. This young man told me he mostly identified with independents. Not content to just leave it go, I asked him if he thought that tax increases were a good thing.

His immediate response was that he didn’t like the Minnesota legislature passing “$5.5 billion worth of tax increases.” Mind you, I hadn’t said anything about the size of the tax increases. I next asked where he lived. He said Willmar so I followed up by asking if Joe Gimse was his state senator. He is. I then asked who his state representative was. He said Al Juhnke. I told him I wasn’t that impressed with Mr. Juhnke because he voted for each of the tax increases.

By the time the conversation ended, he was asking how he could get in touch with the Willmar area GOP.

The point of that anecdote is to remind people that we’re still the party with a superior stand on the issues. We’re still the party with the appealing agenda. The reality that we as activists need to spread is that we’re confident in the power of our ideas.

When we stand on time-tested issues like national security, low taxes, sane judges and fiscal restraint, conservatism wins. Democrats’ only chance at victory is in hiding what they believe in until after the elections. This time, that will be impossible. This time, they’ll have records to defend.

Here in Minnesota, that means defending their votes for incomprehensible spending and tax increases. Nationally, that means Democrats defending their voting on few things that help working people in any appreciable way. From an issues standpoint, the Democrats’ biggest accomplishment is something that the Netroots are furious about: the FISA reforms that codifies into law President Bush’s NSA intel intercept program.

That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be working to re-establishing our GOTV operations. If we want to retake the US House and Senate, keep the White House in GOP control and retake the Minnesota House, we’ll need our year-round GOTV operation working at peak efficiency.

My point is that Democrats have a big weak spot, namely an unappealing agenda that won’t sell in America’s heartland or in the south. Here’s an intriguing paragraph:

Every nominee of recent years competed in only 18 to 20 states, writing off the rest of the country. If the next candidate approaches his or her campaign in the same, predictable way, then you will see all of Dean’s efforts go on a head-to-head collision course. But the Obama campaign’s Alaska-to-Alabama grassroots focus is one that does fit well with Dean’s view that you can’t write off any part of the country.

The reason that paragraph intrigues me is because Dean’s feud with the Clintons is well-documented. I don’t see this preventing Hillary from getting the nomination but I’ll be watching to see how hard Dean is willing to work for Hillary. I also remember all the effort they made to undermine his candidacy for the DNC chairmanship. I don’t think that this is an insignificant thing.

How well they work together might well determine the outcome of the elections.

Technorati Tags: Howard Dean, DNC, Hillary, GOTV, Taxes, Daily Kos, DLC, Election 2008

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 1:09 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Blogging, DNC, Election 2008, Hillary, Homeland Security, Intel, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.