The following was e-mailed to Ludington Area Tea Party members on 21 Dec 2014: A Chance To Meet Voters Where They Are I am going to briefly outline a recent article I read in the National Review magazine by Kevin D. Williamson who has written how conservatives and the American people are not so far apart. At the end of the Reagan years, the Soviet Union was dead on its feet, the United States was a resurgent force in the world….and spending and deficits were both were up, thanks to the White House’s inability or unwillingness to put a leash on Tip O’Neill and the congressional Democrats. We did not undo the New Deal in the 1980’s. We are not going to undo the New Deal before 2017 either. But there is much that can be done, if the newly empowered Republicans have the will to do it. ”The fact is the American people are not as conservative as conservatives would like them to be, nor are they always conservative in the way conservatives would like them to be.” Why is this paradoxical shift occurring? The people intuitively sense that the Federal Government is overly large and intrusive, they resent slackers in our society who exploit the situation and worry that our finances and debt burden are over whelming. But, they do not wish to repeal the New Deal. Americans seem to be evenly divided on rectifying Social Security benefits in a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases. It seems likely that a great majority of self-described conservatives would support continuing current Social Security benefits indefinitely “if they believed it fiscally possible”. So the question is not a question of what we ought to do but what we can do. Conservatives in the new Republican congressional majorities have the opportunity to meet the public where it already is on a number of issues, beginning with immigration. “Voters are solidly on the conservative’s side on this issue, with 80-odd percent majorities supporting stronger border controls, the mandatory use of E-verify or similar systems, and like measures.” Voters also support a path to citizenship but not the free for all the White House is supporting. If a fight over executive amnesty is to be the first skirmish with the Obama administration then the conservatives command the high ground. (Let’s hope the newly elected Conservatives realize this as they will also have to take on Republican leadership as well). “As with Social Security, Americans are plagued by wishful thinking on the issue of health care. If we fail to address the twin problems of insecurity and unpredictability, we will fail to achieve meaningful reform, and the political pendulum will swing back towards centralized, statist approaches”. Americans will generally say that they support spending more on roads and education, but that support declines rapidly with the issue of raising taxes to pay for it. Here in Michigan we will see what happens to the ballot proposal to raise our sales tax to pay for our roads. In his conclusion Mr. Williamson writes “the American public is in many ways conservative, but in many ways it is not, and its conservatism is of somebody who fears the national debt and dreads bureaucracy but rather like his Social Security check”. I think it will be important to keep these elements in mind as the new Congress gets started in January and do our best to keep our legislatures both in Lansing and Washington on the correct path. When I read this article I felt it articulated what I have thought and I suspect many Tea Party Patriots are thinking and have observed in human nature. Let’s face it, we all would like to have it all. We must continue to educate our friends on what is really happening in Lansing and Washington so they can have the facts they need to make their decisions. I am thinking if we had rVotes right now what a great tool that would be to find out what our neighbors are thinking about the road fix from Lansing. This might be a great issue where we could find common ground. I will close for now but I did want to get this information out to all of you before Christmas celebrations have the priority in our lives. I wish you all a Blessed and Merry Christmas. Rosemarie DeLoof Tea Party Coordinator
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:32:47 +0000
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