Jay Reding.com

Marc Ambinder has a perceptive take on the election of Michael Steele, the first black Chairman of the Republican Party:

Did Republicans choose Steele as a token? Some RNC members will think so, as will many skeptical Democrats. But Steele won this thing by himself. The RNC is a fractious, uncooperative bunch. And Steele patiently politicked his way through six ballots. Just a few hours ago, my correspondent Will DiNovi saw Steele and Ohio’s Kenneth Blackwell face to face in the hall. “I know we’ve disagreed on a lot of things,” Steele was telling him. Blackwell waited a little — then he endorsed Steele.

Steele’s election won’t help the party attrack black voters immediately, but if Steele sets the right tone, he could help the party compete for them in the (way) future. As GOP strategists have always known, and noted, somewhat dyspeptically, it’s white suburban voters, particularly women, who are responsive to a diversity message. The RNC isn’t diverse yet; only five black delegates were chosen to attend the national convention. Steele was disgusted by that. It prompted him to run.

Steele’s election is a good thing for the GOP. What the party needs is a transfusion of new blood, and it needs it now. The GOP has painted itself into being a regional party of the West and the South. Granted, those are the parts of the country that are growing, but that’s not enough to win. Steele’s ambitious plan to make the Republican Party competitive in the Northeast is what’s needed. The GOP cannot cede any territory to the Democrats. Republicans should be making inroads with socially conservative black voters in the inner cities, but they have never really bothered to make that outreach. Steele seems likely to change that.

What the GOP should not do is abandon social conservatism. Yes, it should abandon the form of social conservatism that they have now, which is reactionary and offputting. Instead of preaching hellfire and damnation, the GOP needs to recast social issues as kitchen table cultural issues. The GOP approach has been to allow themselves to be painted as bigots—and sometimes with just reason—rather than cast social issues as issues that affect the average voter. People don’t care about the effect things have on some amorphous “society” they care about raising their kids. If the GOP wants to stay relevant, they can’t become a shadow of the Democrats and abandon their values, but they must make those values relevant to voters. Again, Steele is more likely to get this than most.

Perhaps Steele will fail. However, what is important is that the Republican Party not remain stagnant. That is a sure path to failure. The Republican “brand” is tarnished and is in bad need of reformation. The same people who got the party into this mess will not get us out. Thankfully, Steele is a reformer with a great deal of vision—and vision and reform are precisely what the GOP needs.

Tomorrow, George W. Bush rides off into history. The left is breathing a sigh of relief, their Emmanuel Goldstein is gone (although soon they will find another). Bush leaves an unpopular President—but so did Harry S. Truman. In many ways, Bush and Truman have had similar trajectories. Both began their terms in a time of war, and both made unpopular decisions. Like Truman, Bush will likely be vindicated by history. The narrow-mindedness and ravenous partisanship of Bush’s critics will become less and less relevant as time goes on, and a more fair-minded exploration of Bush’s legacy can begin.

George W. Bush has been systematically turned into a monster by the media. Bush the man has been obscured.

As a point of disclosure, I am only partially a fan of the President. His performance after September 11 was a masterstroke. The decision to invade Iraq was the correct one based on what was known at that point in history. At the same time, Bush’s second term was a disaster. When the President nominated the comically unsuitable Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, it was clear that Bush’s instincts for loyalty had become a flaw rather than a benefit. It was Gen. Petraeus and Sen. McCain that pushed for the surge against a recalcitrant Rumsfeld and Bush. The surge is what won the war in Iraq, and Bush only belatedly endorsed it. The Katrina disaster should not have been laid at Bush’s feet, but putting Michael Brown as the head of FEMA was unquestionably bad judgment. Bush’s tax cuts helped restore the U.S. economy and created millions of jobs. His wasteful spending and statist policies hurt the economy.

Where Bush has failed the most is where he abandoned conservative principles. The left wants to paint him as a radical conservative activist. The truth could not be more radically different. Bush dramatically expanded the size and scope of the federal government. He pushed for a massive increase in entitlement spending under Medicare Part D. He dramatically increased federal spending at nearly all levels. Hardly a fan of deregulation, it was under Bush’s watch that the ill-considered Sarbanes-Oxley bill was passed into law, a bill which dramatically increased the regulation of business. The picture of George W. Bush as laissez-faire radical could not be further from reality.

At the same time, Bush’s tax cuts helped keep the 2001-2003 recession from deepening. They helped America create millions of new jobs. Without them, it’s likely that Bush would never have been reelected. Those tax cuts put money back into the hands of working Americans. While Bush’s economic policies were flawed at best, it was not because of the tax cuts, but because of too much emphasis on state action.

The war in Iraq remains controversial, and will for some time. It seems quite possible that the Hussein regime systematically misled the entire world into believing that they had WMDS. It seems quite possible that the Hussein regime was lying to itself about what it really had. That is unsurprising for an dysfunctional autocracy like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. What did not happen is some sinister conspiracy to “lie” about WMDs to settle some personal score or gain access to oil. The Bush Administration weighed what evidence it had and made a decision based on that evidence. The evidence turned out to be deeply flawed. But the image of a Bush Administration hell-bent on war that was discarding mountains of contradictory evidence has no basis in reality. If Leon Panetta tells President Obama that a country has WMDs and terrorist ties and there is a “slam dunk” case for it, the same principle should apply. A President should never give the benefit of the doubt to this nation’s enemies. A President’s job, first and foremost, is to act on the evidence available and act decisively. President Bush did that, and President Obama should do the same.

This war against Islamist terror will continue. The supposed excesses of this war have led to an America that has not suffered another attack, no less a greater one than that visited upon us on September 11, 2001. We are not living in a fascist dictatorship, the Constitution has hardly been shredded, and our civil liberties remain. The hysteria and fear over this war came less from the President and more from his critics. Yet one unassailable fact remains: we have not been attacked since that fateful day. The plans of terrorists have been foiled, their leaders captured or killed, their hideouts destroyed, their money supply imperiled. Modern terrorism is sui generis, and the Bush Administration responded not be repeating the failed methods of the past, but by treating it as the serious threat it was. Did they always get it right? Of course not, but no Presidency could have been expected to. In facing an evolving and dangerous threat, this Presidency did what it could to keep this country safe. After the attacks, it seemed almost assured that we would be attacked again, and harder. Today, those attacks almost seem like a distant memory. We have the vigilance of the Bush Administration to thank for that. For all the flaws of their approach, it worked.

George W. Bush has been systematically turned into a monster by the media. Bush the man has been obscured. Yet George W. Bush is hardly an unfeeling monster. He is not the caricature that he has been made to be. That he has not defended himself is curious, but perhaps he does not think it his role to do so. Instead, the real George W. Bush is a complex character, motivated by an abiding sense of loyalty and faith, but also harmed by those same instincts. Hardly the unfeeling party-boy of the media’s funhouse-mirror image, the real President Bush is the man who would go to Walter Reed and comfort injured vets, rarely making a media event out of it. If we are to learn anything from the past eight years, we must first move beyond the crude image of President Bush painted by an ideologically homogenous media and see the real George W. Bush.

Sadly, it will likely be years before that happens. But history will judge the 43rd President of the United States with far less ideological rancor than there is now, and when his legacy is remembered it won’t be through the distorted lens of a partisan media, but with the hindsight of history. With that hindsight, the legacy of George W. Bush may be far different than what we would think. Like Truman, Bush may be remembered as a President who did what was right, but not what was popular.

John Fund takes a look at why the GOP lost Dennis Hastert’s former House seat. The Republican Party is going to face an uphill battle this fall to begin with—and the ham-handed way in which this election was handled does not bode well for the party as a whole. In order to win, the GOP is going to have to run smart, appeal to voters, and not pretend that a handful of negative ads will be enough to make a difference, even in Republican-leaning districts. So far, there’s not a lot of encouraging signs that the GOP is interested in running a winning campaign:

As for the $1 million the National Republican Congressional Committee poured into the district in a vain attempt to save it, the local reviews weren’t good. Even before Mr. Oberweis’ loss I heard comments such as “nasty,” “stupid,” “largely incomprehensible” and “factless” to describe the national ads that saturated the district. “The ads bore no relation to any issues competent polling would have surfaced; they were just schoolyard name calling,” was the opinion of a conservative media specialist in the district.

By way of contrast, Democrats made a heavy buy for an ad featuring local Senator Barack Obama touting Mr. Foster’s credentials as a scientist and problem solver. “He represents the change we need,” the Obama ad concluded. Obamamania may not be as strong among the general electorate as it is among Democratic partisans, but in Saturday’s special election it certainly helped the Democratic candidate score a victory. Mr. Foster’s win is a wake-up call to Republicans that this year they will have to step up their game, big time.

The GOP had a chance to take the lead on earmarks. A few courageous Representatives stood up, but the party remains behind. The GOP has a chance to take the lead on corruption, but Speaker Hastert defended corrupt politicos like William Jefferson. In such a tight election season, the GOP has to take the lead. Playing defense on the issues does not work. Attacking the other candidate does not work.

The only way that the Republicans can win is by standing on their principles, and consistent and clearly applying those principles to our nation’s problems. If the Republican Party wants to win, it has to win on the issues, and to do that the GOP has to start talking about real solutions for real world problems.

I know that Republicans by and large don’t believe the spin on global warming, and for good reason. If the GOP runs on the platform that there is no global warming, and we don’t need to take action then the GOP will lose on that issue. That’s politics. Instead, we should be advancing a 21st Century energy agenda that includes a crash program to create safe pebble bed nuclear reactors, embracing Bob Zubrin’s flex-fuel energy independence plan, and generally reduce our dependence on foreign oil while reducing CO2 emissions—without sacrificing our economy and our way of life. Think that’s hard. It is a difficult task to get these policies enacted, but to borrow a phrase from a candidate who knows the value of political rhetoric “yes we can.”

The middle class is feeling the squeeze. The GOP should have a very simple message: you have to tighten your belt during hard times. Government should do the same as well. The GOP should follow the example of brave legislators like Rep. John Kline and Sen. Tom Coburn. No earmarks. If the GOP doesn’t stand strongly against government waste, then the GOP will lose. That includes waste from military contractors. It’s a national security issue. The military procurement system is broken. The GOP needs to fix it. If we don’t lead, we lose.

That’s just two issues. I could go on forever about health care, education and other issues. The basic point stands for all of them: this is not a time for complacency. Republicans need to run like we’re 20 points down, because in some cases we are. Sen. McCain is the right man to lead on some key issues, but he has to have a forward-looking (and dare I say it, truly progressive) agenda to bring to the American people. If Obama gets the nomination, we won’t be able to win on style. Every Republican should be thinking about advancing our agenda, even if all we can do is start moving the ball in the right direction.

A party that stands for nothing but power will lose, sooner or later. The GOP needs to stand for a real agenda and make that agenda the center of every campaign, or the loss of Hastert’s old seat will be but a prologue to yet another annus horibilis for the GOP.

Erick Erikson gives us a look into his thought process in endorsing Fred Thompson. I’ve been wary of making it official who I’m supporting here, but rather than pretend to be neutral I’d rather come out in favor of full disclosure.

I’m officially supporting Fred Thompson in the Republican primary. There are two basic reasons for this endorsement: the first is that Sen. Thompson is a consistent conservative. The second is that he has a record of fighting governmental corruption and he is someone who has spent time in the Beltway but is not a creature of the Beltway. There are two issues I care about personally: winning the war and reducing the size of government. Sen. Thompson is strong on both.

The Importance of Judges

There’s a reason why Sen. Thompson has such strong support from the legal community. When President Bush needed someone to guide Chief Justice Roberts through his Senate hearings, he turned to Fred Thompson. In the next few years there is likely to be at least one Supreme Court vacancy, and this country needs a Supreme Court that recognizes the limited role of the judiciary and respects the Constitution as a document that expressly limits the power of the federal government. Stare decisis is undoubtedly important, but it doesn’t mean letting one bad case pile on top of another. Roe v. Wade, as a matter of law, was wrongly decided. The Supreme Court’s decision in Casey was one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of the Court not only in terms of its effect, but in terms of its poor reasoning and bad jurisprudence. As a law student and future member of the bar, it is crucially important to me to know that this nation has qualified judges who respect the rule of law and the constitutional order. I know that Fred Thompson will appoint such judges. I can’t say that with certainty with any of the other candidates.

Economic Policy

I’ve already given praise to Sen. Thompson’s plans for Social Security reform, and for good reason. Entitlement reform is absolutely critical to the future of this country. We cannot sit idly by while entitlement spending threatens to consume more and more of the national fisc. We need to reform entitlement spending now before it matures into a full-fledged crisis. Sen. Thompson has a plan on the table to do that, and the other candidates are behind the curve.

On taxes, Sen. Thompson also has a realistic pro-growth tax plan. We need to keep the Bush tax cuts in place, or risk destabilizing an already shaky economy. While I’m for a flat tax in theory, the question is how it would be implemented. The genius of Sen. Thompson’s plan is that the flat tax would be voluntary. It’s difficult to push through major tax reforms like doing away with the IRS—there’s too much bureaucratic inertia in effect. However, creating a secondary system is easier than full-scale reform, and provides a reasonable stepping-stone towards switching over to a flatter, fairer tax system. Sen. Thompson’s tax plans aren’t based upon pie-in-the-sky promises, but actually stand a chance of being enacted. It’s that kind of incremental approach that helps shift policy in the right direction rather than making promises that are virtually impossible to keep.

Sen. Thompson has also been strong on earmarks and limiting the rapacious growth of government. His commitment to reducing government waste and increasing transparency is absolutely crucial towards the end of reforming the culture of corruption in Washington. His record on these issues makes it clear that his talk of reform is sincere and that as President he would enforce a policy of fiscal discipline that has been lacking in recent years.

National Defense

Sen. Thompson has called for a much larger military, and that’s the right call. We cut back as part of the post-Cold War “peace dividend” and now that events have shown that we live in a much less stable world than we thought, it’s time to rethink that policy. The situation in Iraq has demonstrated that we still have a 20th Century military. We need to continue the process of changing our military for one geared towards fighting Soviet tanks rolling down the Fulda Gap to fighting a modern counterinsurgency. That means changing strategic doctrines, training more soldiers, and learning the lessons of Iraq. Sen. Thompson’s plan for a million-man Armed Forces is the right plan to ensure that we can fight the conflicts of tomorrow.

These are just a few of the issues that justify this endorsement. On the issues that matter—substantive issues of policy—Sen. Thompson has the right positions. While Thompson’s poll numbers have declines, my support is not about hitching my wagon to whatever horse happens to be in the lead, but on which candidate has the strongest policy and the right temperament to lead. Sen. Thompson is that candidate, and while there are many strong Republican candidates in this race, in the end Sen. Thompson has demonstrated that he has the strongest mastery of the issues.

Sen. Trent Lott is stepping down at the end of the year.

This is probably good news for the GOP at large. What the Republican Party so desperately needs is a break from the status quo. Sen. Lott, for all his service, represented the kind of Beltway politics that are causing the GOP to lose both its principles and its electoral prospects. His vigorous defense of Strom Thurmond caused him to lose credibility, but his vigorous defense of pork-barrel spending and earmarks were nearly as bad.

The Republican Party must be a party of governmental reform. It’s much harder to do that when someone like Trent Lott is part of the GOP leadership. Sen. Lott deserves credit for his years of service, but it’s time for a new face in that position.

The latest Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll has some good news for Sen. John McCain, as it places him second in the GOP field, albeit far behind Rudy Giuliani. McCain also appears to be the Republican most likely to defeat Hillary Clinton in that poll.

Throughout this race, people have been looking for a candidate who could be a credible “dark horse” to challenge Rudy in the key primary states. First it was Fred Thompson, then Mike Huckabee, and now it’s McCain. What this tells us about the race is that it’s still wide open. While Romney seems to be winning in many of the key states and Rudy has the national advantage, anything could change between now and then. If McCain performs well in Iowa and New Hampshire (which is possible), it could give him enough momentum to knock out some of the challengers like Huckabee and get him from the second tier up to truly competitive status.

McCain’s advantages are clear: he’s a straight-talked who has appeal with independents. He’s the “maverick” who nevertheless has been one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq—based not on political expediency, but principle. At the same time, he can claim that he was against the way the war was being run, and it was only when the Administration started listening to him that things changed for the better.

His disadvantages: McCain-Feingold is (rightly, in my mind) reviled by conservatives, and he’s a squish on immigration. The campaign finance issue might be a minor roadblock, but immigration is what’s killing Sen. McCain in this race. Immigration will be a key issue, at least with GOP voters, and an advocate of the President’s non-amnesty amnesty plan is not going to be popular. The fact that McCain is willing to take an enforcement-first approach helps him, but it will take him time to persuade voters that he’s not lax on border security.

Right now, the GOP race is so fluid it’s impossible to say what would happen. There’s action on the top tier of Romney and Giuliani, and the next tier is crowded with Thompson, McCain, and Huckabee. The only thing that is for certain is that Tom Tancredo won’t be getting the nomination any time soon. It’s a free-for-all, and it may be a while before we have a firm grasp on who has the inside track for the nomination. Or, the situation may radically change and one candidate will step so far ahead that the rest cannot keep up. It’s all in the air right now, which makes any one poll only a data point and not necessarily a trend.

Power Line notes that Fred Thompson is losing ground in polling in key primary states:

I think there are several reasons why Thompson’s campaign has not, so far, taken off as some expected. Thompson is a perfectly good conservative, but he lacks any particular stature as a one-and-a-half term Senator with no outstanding legislative accomplishments or policy innovations to his name. Given that he is also a quiet (some say lackluster) campaigner, it shouldn’t be surprising that so far, he hasn’t emerged as a powerhouse.

Also, Thompson’s appeal is based largely on the “none of the above” factor. He set out to appeal to the considerable segment of the Republican electorate that expressed dissatisfaction with the existing field. That was a good and potentially fertile niche, but it means that in a sense Thompson has been running against the field. To the extent that Romney, Giuliani and Huckabee have won over some previously skeptical voters, the need for a “none of the above” candidate may have diminished. And John McCain’s resurgence must have taken support away from Thompson, the candidate whose policy profile most nearly resembles McCain’s.

The appeal of Thompson’s campaign is that he’s a consistent conservative who is actually coming out with some strong policy prescriptions—especially in terms of Social Security reform. Granted, it may be a politically unwise endeavor to lead your campaign off with something so esoteric, but in a political climate devoted more to style than substance, there’s something refreshing about Thompson.

The fact that Thompson has been formally endorsed by the National Right to Life Foundation certainly helps. The fact that Mitt Romney had been lobbying for that endorsement also says something about the state of the race. Thompson is finding his niche as a consistent conservative in a race in which candidates either have great appeal to social conservatives and little to fiscal conservatives (Huckabee) or great appeal to fiscal conservatives and less to social conservatives (Giuliani) or candidates who have been accused of shifting their positions to match the prevailing political winds (Romney).

Thompson is not out—polling in these key states can be volatile, and many (including myself) figured John Kerry was dead in the water at this time four years ago. Still, Thompson is losing ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, and while he’s doing very well in South Carolina, it remains to be seen whether the winds won’t shift between the earlier states and that race.

What Thompson needs to do is start creating a grass-roots effort—and that means more time on the campaign trail. He’s got a firm grasp on the issues, in terms of fiscal issues, social issues, and national defense he’s the most consistent conservative in the race. The problem is that people don’t yet see him being able to win. To counter that perception, Thompson is going to have to get his boots on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire and start making a stronger impression with the electorate.

This race is totally up in the air. Romney and Giuliani have the inside track, but Thompson could pull ahead, especially with this key endorsement. McCain is doing better than one would expect (though not enough to win). Huckabee has been doing an excellent job of what Thompson should be doing—winning over social conservatives alienated by the top tier. There is no clear winner, and anything could change.