Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it’s
slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We
saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot
box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right
around the necks of those same House members and senators who had
arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and
Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense
conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama
agenda.
Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with greater
confidence to the 2012 elections? Yes and no. Yes, objectively speaking
the next electoral cycle should be even more favorable than the one
that just ended. A large number of red-state Democratic senators will
have to defend their seats; and since Obama will be at the top of the
ballot that year, they won’t be able to hide from the fact that their
party leader is a detached liberal with a destructive tax-and-spend
agenda. Whether Republicans will do as well as they did in this cycle
depends on whether they learn the lessons from the 2010 election.
The first lesson is simple: Set the narrative. This
year it wasn’t too difficult to tell the story of the election: It was
about stopping an out-of-control Congress and an out-of-touch White
House. In races across the country, Republican candidates ran on the
message that the Left was bankrupting America with budget-busting
spending bills that mortgage our children’s future, burden the private
sector with uncertainty, and cripple our much-needed job growth.
The story of the next cycle, though, remains to be written. Its
content depends on what Republicans do next. Just as in the 1980s,
there are today millions of conservative-leaning Democrats and
independents who are ready to join our cause. They gave us their votes,
now we must earn their trust. And we do that by showing them that a
vote for us will not be a vote for the big-spending, over-regulating
status quo. The 2012 story should be about conservatives in Congress
cutting government down to size and rolling back the spending, and the
Left doing everything in its power to prevent these necessary reforms
from happening. In the next two years, if all we end up doing is
adopting some tax hikes here, some Obama-agenda compromises there, and a
thousand little measures that do nothing to get us out of the economic
mess we’re in, the same voters that put the GOP in office will vote
them out in the next election. If that happens, the story of 2012 may
well be that of the GOP going the way of the Whigs. No, the American
people are expecting us to be bold and big in our economic reform to
allow the private sector to create jobs and soar!
In the coming weeks, there will be those who lament that some of us
endorsed conservative Republicans over liberal ones in blue-state races.
It’s a good debate, and one I’m willing to have. First, we must keep
in mind that there is no guarantee that any Republican will win in a
deep-blue state (as evidenced by the exit polls in Delaware showing that
the liberal Republican would have lost too). But even more to the
point, we saw in the last decade what happens when conservatives hold
their noses and elect liberals who have an “R” after their names. Our
party’s message of freedom and fiscal responsibility became diluted. In
2008, it was difficult to claim on the one hand that we were the party
of fiscal responsibility and on the other hand that our fiscal policies
work. It was clear to the electorate that the GOP had not adhered to
fiscally conservative positions, and that the liberal positions they did adhere
to didn’t work. If we go on in that direction again, we won’t have a
base, let alone a majority. Certainly we can and should back sensible
center-right candidates in bluer states, but I see no point in backing
someone who supports cap-and-tax, Obamacare, bailouts, taxes, and more
useless stimulus packages. If you think such a candidate will be with us
when it comes time to vote down an Obama Supreme Court nominee, you’re
living on a unicorn ranch in fantasy land.
In the coming weeks there will also be a debate about the viability
of particular candidates. Anyone with the courage to throw his or her
hat in the ring and stand up and be counted always has my respect. Some
of them were stronger candidates than others, but they all had the
courage to be “in the arena.” The second lesson of this election is one
a number of the candidates had to learn to their cost: Fight back the lies immediately and consistently. Some
candidates assumed that, once they received their party’s nomination,
the conservative message would automatically carry the day.
Unfortunately, political contests aren’t always about truth and justice.
Powerful vested interests will combine to keep bad candidates in place
and good candidates out of office. Once they let themselves be defined
as “unfit” (decorated war hero Joe Miller) or “heartless” (pro-life,
international women’s rights champion Carly Fiorina), good candidates
often find it virtually impossible to get their message across. The
moral of their stories: You must be prepared to fight for your right to
be heard.
Another important lesson is that we will need the mother of all GOTV efforts
if we wish to win in 2012. Sending donations isn’t enough when push
comes to shove. Millions of boots on the ground are needed, and
voter-fraud prevention must be addressed before election eve.
The last, and possibly most important, lesson is that a winning conservative message must always be carefully crafted.
If candidates are going to talk boldly on the campaign trail about
entitlement reform and reducing the size of government, they must be
prepared to word it in such a way as to minimize the inevitable
fear-mongering accusations of “extremism.” We are quickly approaching a
fiscal turning point where these crucial reform discussions will be
mandatory. We need to speak about them in a way that the public will
embrace. During his first run for the presidency in 1976, Ronald Reagan
found out that election campaigns aren’t necessarily the best settings
for quasi-academic discussions about issues like Social Security
reform. So for his next campaign, he resolved to build his platform out
of tried and tested policies like tax cuts. Successful candidates in
the next election cycle will have to test and develop similar policy
platforms that address the crucial issues of entitlement reform and
shrinking government in a way that the voters will find pragmatic and
even attractive.
If we manage to do these things, there is no reason why we can’t look
forward with confidence to winning in 2012. I have said all along that
this election must be seen in conjunction with the next. Ultimately
2010 must be viewed as just the first battle in a much longer fight
that leads to November 6, 2012, and beyond. We cannot fully restore and
revive America until we replace Obama. The meaning of the 2010
election was rebuke, reject, and repeal. We rebuked Washington’s power
grab, rejected this unwanted “fundamental transformation of America,”
and began the process to repeal the dangerous policies inflicted on us.
But this theme will only complement the theme of 2012, which is renew,
revive, and restore. In 2012, we need to renew our optimistic,
pioneering spirit, revive our free-market system, and restore
constitutional limits and our standing in the world as the abiding
beacon of freedom.
Till then, I hope that commonsense patriots will join me in
applauding the real heroes of this election year: the Tea Party
Americans. In 2008, we were told that we had to “move beyond Reagan.”
Well, some of us refused to believe that America chose big-government
European-style socialism. American voters elected a politician who
cloaked his agenda in the language of moderation. Once the mask was
removed, Americans rejected his “fundamental transformation.” The Tea
Party reminded us that Reaganism is still our foundation. I think the
Gipper is smiling down on us today waving the Gadsden Flag.