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Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.
The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn't going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don't like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they're stealing from the young. They've spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.
The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren't sitting around worried to death about big government—they're worried about jobs and what they have in savings.
Watching the incredible RICO crime spree being committed on the American nation by Obama's cohorts of unions and lawyers and other parasitic growths on the body politic puts me personally in the mood to blow a fuse. But Rabinowitz believes that anger can motivate only a small number of morally committed and historically aware Americans. Most Americans nowadays just don't give a hoot. Except for their pocketbook and personal situation. Like making their mortgage payments.
The Republican candidate would have to make clear just how far removed from reality, how alien to the consciousness of most Americans, is this reflexive view of the nation as morally suspect, ever obliged to prove its respectability to a watching world. The attorney general still refuses to drop charges against two CIA employees accused of using enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists—notwithstanding the recommendations of investigators looking into the case that the charges merited no prosecution.
The candidate will have to speak clearly on foreign policy—and begin, above all, by showing he actually has one. The near silence on the subject among Republicans consumed by domestic policy battles has been notable. Not till President Obama delivered his speech relegating Israel to pre-1967 borders did outraged Republicans come to roaring life—as Democrats, too, largely did—about a foreign policy issue.
The Republican candidate might bear in mind, for use on the campaign trail, the grand irony in the spectacle of candidate Obama holding forth on the stump about our friends and allies whom the United States had so alienated under George W. Bush—allies who would have to be won back. Fast forward to September 2009, when the Obama administration virtually overnight cancelled the planned missile defense system that was to be established in Poland and the Czech Republic—a shock to both allies but a gift to the Russians. The Kremlin was indeed grateful.
In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let it be known that the United States no longer supported the British in the matter of the Falkland Islands, which have been British territory since 1833, and that "negotiations" with Argentina were in order. P.J. Crowley, then the State Department's spokesman, expressed the new neutral stance of the U.S. by referring to the Falklands and then adding, with his usual ostentation, "or the Malvinas"—the Argentinian name—"depending on how you look at it."
This view of the nation as a cynosure of moral iniquity seems to be growing old, very old.
The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must g
o. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.
At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring "USA! USA!" at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.
After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.
Harvard brings back ROTC, LSU threatens to lynch a flag-burner. Each in good time at its own pace. Unless Obama can pull some sort of rabbit out of his hat on the economy [the Labor Dept unemployment stats are coming out in about five hours from now], he's going to be rowing upstream.
Remember Clinton in '92 when the Cuomos and other moguls of the DNC deferred to GHWB's overwhelming popularity after the First Gulf War? I'm hoping a Paul Ryan can be fetched out of his happy hollow in Congress to give the nation a new sense of its essential rectitude---the Great Awakening of spiritual greatness that might pull us out of this Slough of Despond and send blood back into our heart and limbs with enthusiasm and hopefulness.
Not Hope and Change, which has the electorate hoping to find some change in the furniture to meet their mounting bills. Real return to greatness---such as the Terrible Vengeance of Seal Team Six achieved to get some payback against our REAL enemies.
UPDATE Paul Ryan actually moved a smidgeon from his adamant refusal to consider running---the dropping out by Mitch Daniels and the failure of his Republican colleagues to craft a sales pitch equal to his excellent health plan ideas.
Ryan might also see a policy incentive -- not just a political one -- to contemplating a run. His plan to cut federal spending by trillions of dollars and overhaul Medicare has taken a beating from Democrats in recent weeks, and Republicans have failed to mount an effective counter response.
Recent polling on public attitudes about the plan has been dismal -- though conservatives have said polling questions have been slanted -- and a Democratic candidate is credited with winning a special congressional election in New York last week in part because of her Republican opponent's support for the Ryan plan.
Ryan said in the Fox interview that "within a handful of months" he believes the country will rally to his side. But he may need a louder megaphone.
There have been other indications that Ryan’s resistance to a presidential run -- which is based in large part on his reluctance to be away from his wife and three young children -- is softening.
Sources close to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus –- who is also from Wisconsin and is encouraging Ryan to run -– say that it is not just unilateral pressure from Priebus that is sparking rumors. They say Ryan is himself considering making a move.
Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol has been pushing a Ryan presidential campaign for many months, and wrote last week that an appearance on Fox by the congressman showed that he was opening the door.
Ryan said at the time that he was being encouraged to run "quite a bit," but said that "right now where I am at this moment, I need to focus on this budget fight we're in."
Kristol wrote that "it would be a great and fitting irony if the victory of Democratic scare tactics in [congressional district] NY-26 spooks other Republicans into backing off from bold deficit reform and reduction plans, which in turn forces Ryan into the presidential race -- ultimately the Democrats' worst nightmare."
Leave it to the libtard Demonrats to overdo it so obnoxiously that they force the only viable anti-Obama candidate into the race.
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