We are watching the wheels come off the most radical and dangerously incompetent administration in history. “I am not on the ballot this fall,” President Obama proclaims, “but make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.”
This statement should be the final nail in the coffin for the Democrats. The GOP should be poised to win a landslide of historic proportions.
So why is there so much debate over whether they’ll win -- at all?
The answer is crystal clear. The Republican Party needed only to choose any one of a number of national issues and campaign on them, offering the voters a clear conservative alternative. But the tepid GOP leadership has not chosen not to do so, fearing any debate over their party’s own policies. The result? The moderates responsible for this political cowardice -- and that is what it is -- are now in preemptive damage control mode, trying to blame conservatives.
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If Republicans are not victorious next month, it will not be the fault of the conservative base. The moderates and their consultants will own this disaster.
The fumbled opportunities are mind-boggling.
In one poll after another, a vast majority of Americans want real border security and oppose blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.
Still, Obama has all but pledged that after the elections he’ll issue amnesty through executive order, defying the Constitution and popular opinion. It should be manna from heaven for Republicans who need only to pledge, with one voice, to stop this. And yet the GOP leadership, led by John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy continues to give oxygen to the amnesty debate. So too did Eric Cantor – the now former Majority Leader.
The Republicans could deliver a landslide victory simply by pledging to honor the rule of law.
From the moment it was enacted, Republicans have pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But leadership hasn’t even tried. When conservative Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee tried to defund ObamaCare last year, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell kneecapped that effort, with a healthy assist from John Boehner and the “professional” GOP consultant class.
All Republicans needed to do was offer a concrete plan to defund and ultimately repeal this wretched law.
A landslide political victory in November would’ve been guaranteed.
This administration has allowed the emergence of the biggest terrorist threat in history -- ISIS. Its foreign “policy,” if it can be called that, is simply incoherent.
Obama won’t even call it terrorism.
Americans trust Republicans more on national security than they do Democrats, 55 to 32 percent. Some Republicans are stepping forward forcefully to offer a foreign policy alternative.
But where is the GOP leadership? AWOL.
This administration has given us an unfathomable debt that will cripple our grandchildren. The monumentally expensive stimulus failed. Sky-high taxation failed. Oppressive regulation failed. The economy isn’t “struggling;” it is a mess and the American people are clearly worried.
The Wall Street Journal reported in August that, “despite the steady pace of hiring in recent months, 76% of adults lack confidence that their children's generation will have a better life than they do—an all-time high.” The WSJ added, “Some 71% of adults think the country is on the wrong track…”
“It’s the economy, stupid,” Democrats told Republicans in 1992. Republicans should be making that charge today.
Republicans need only to put forward the very policies championed by Ronald Reagan, and which led to the greatest peacetime expansion of the economy and a 49-state electoral victory.
Why couldn’t history repeat itself?
Time is almost up, but there is an opportunity for one more presentation to the American people. Republicans have three options:
1. They can go all Romney, convince themselves victory is inevitable, follow the professional consultants’ “prevent defense” political strategy, and then watch in disbelief on Election Night as they suffer a crushing election defeat as unacceptable as it was predictable.
2. They can go all Bush, with continued meaningless rhetoric masking a Democrat-lite agenda, squeaking through on Election Day with no mandate to do anything thereafter.
3. Or they can go all Reagan, immediately, with a bold and unequivocal legislative agenda akin to the Contract with America, and then watch the tsunami unfold on Election Day.
It’s so easy.
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