Painting the Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority

INTRODUCTION

SIXTY SEATS TO WIN THE WAR

The Strategy for 2006

If you are a conservative Republican, as I am, you have a right to be worried. An overconfident and complacent Republican Party could be facing electoral disaster. Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and a host of others could be looming in our future and undoing all the good we’ve tried to do.

It is break the glass and pull the alarm time for the Republican Party. The elections looming in November 2006 are shaping up to be as disastrous for the GOP as the elections of 1994 were for the Democrats. Most GOP insiders seem unaware of the party’s political peril. Some are resigned to a major defeat as the price we have to pay for a decade of consistent gains, which, they think, couldn’t have gone on forever.

I have spent the last decade as an optimist about the GOP’s prospects, certain that the country’s brush with Hillarycare had left a generation-lasting remembrance of what Democrats want to do when they hold all the power. And after 9/11, that belief was joined by a deeply rooted conviction that the Democrats could not be trusted to run the Global War on Terror.

I am still certain that a majority of Americans agree with us—but simply having majority agreement on crucial policy positions doesn’t translate into winning elections. Agreement on policy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for winning at the ballot box.

Millions of Americans voted for John Kerry, and they haven’t been persuaded by anything that has happened since November 2004 that their choice was wrong. As Mark Steyn put it in a round-table interview I conducted with him, Fred Barnes, and Michael Barone last year, the president has become for the GOP a problematic figure, largely because the electorate’s opinion on him is settled.

As Steyn put it, People have their view of George W. Bush. Nobody after six years is going to say hey, you know, I listened to a Bush speech last night, and I’ve got to say, I haven’t liked him for six years, but he’s persuaded me this time. I think he clearly is, essentially, a 50/50 president, that people who haven’t warmed to him aren’t going to warm to him now.

Barnes, Barone, and Steyn are, in my judgment, the three ablest analysts of politics on the center-right side of the opinion spectrum. Barone is a prodigious consumer of political data, Barnes is as wired-in as anyone not on the payroll of the White House or the Republican National Committee, and Steyn is the country’s finest polemicist.

I began my conversation with them confident that at least one and possibly all three would see opportunities for the GOP in 2006. But in fact, all of them agreed that the Republicans would suffer setbacks, particularly in the Senate. While loss of the House was a remote possibility, they sounded the first clear warning that Republicans could end up shocked and shattered. When that happened to the Democrats on that landslide November night in 1994, I proclaimed, If it was a fight, they’d stop it. This time we might suffer the beating.

Then congressman Chris Cox, now the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was one of my guests that night a dozen years ago. He candidly asserted that anyone who tells you they saw this coming is lying. Democrats had underestimated their weakness, the Republicans their strength. The result was a political earthquake that no one had forecast.

In 2006, it could happen to the Republicans. In fact, that earthquake looks increasingly probable to me. A scandal-plagued 2006 could result in Jack Abramoff–tinged Republicans following the rightly disgraced Congressman Duke Cunningham out of the House and into jail. Conservative Republicans, like you and me, are already disgusted at the inertia of our Senate majority. I fear that disgust, combined with liberal opposition, could help tip the balance for a huge political shift against the GOP. We are losing a once-in-a-lifetime moment.

I don’t see a majority of voters changing their minds about the big issues, especially the war. But I do see them changing their minds about the effectiveness of the Republican Party in achieving the majority’s goals on key issues.

Voters on the right could sit on their hands by the millions, fed up with the GOP’s refusal to govern like a majority, its indulgence of Democratic obstructionism in the Senate, and its general unwillingness to push for urgently needed policies—such as security fencing along the southern border, long-term tax relief, genuine spending control, and the approval of specific judicial nominees. The grandstanding of John McCain and his colleagues in the Gang of 14, the camera addiction of Chuck Hagel, who is always eager to declare the war a disaster, and the antics of loony Lincoln Chafee and other moderate senators and congressmen have produced a steady drain on party enthusiasm. Chafee, especially, has stifled the party’s hopes to gain seats in the Senate. Donors who gladly poured bucks into the campaigns of John Thune (twice), Norm Coleman, Saxby Chambliss, John Cornyn, Jim DeMint, Johnny Isakson, Mel Martinez, David Vitter, and Richard Burr are passing on the appeals from the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s direct mail team, aware that the money is going to the efforts to re-elect Chafee and fellow New Englander and party irritant Olympia Snowe.

And again, the mainstream media will work with the Democratic National Committee to achieve an electoral Waterloo against the GOP.

The mainstream media is going to be keeping up an assault on Bush, nonstop, as they’ve been doing for five years, Barone said. That’s their mission in life, to try to destroy his presidency.

Key question here, Hugh, Barone added, both for the Catholics, Evangelical Christians, strong religious belief people: who’s going to turn out?

Behind that question is another question: why bother to turn out?

Fred Barnes looked into his crystal ball and concluded, While Democrats pick up a few House seats, they will not get control of the House, thus no impeachment effort on President Bush. And while they may pick up a Senate seat or two, they will not control the Senate. And while they may pick up a governorship or two, they will not have any sizable lead among governorships. So: small gain that means very little.

I think Fred is underestimating the dangers by a significant margin. There’s disarray in the Senate. There are scandals in the House. There are Democrats boiling with anger and frustration at having been beaten like a drum in three straight elections.

The Soros money machine, on the left, is still out there, pouring massive amounts of money into every race that’s even close. And the mainstream media, which couldn’t nail Bush with fake but accurate documents or gotcha last-minute campaign stories about missing ammunition stockpiles, can be much more lethal on a selective, state-by-state basis. An enduring conservative majority could be built within the GOP, in the House, and in the Senate. But it is being frittered away by self-serving opportunists in the Senate and attention-loving back-benchers in the House.

There is still time, though—not just to avoid devastating losses, but to make gains. All it takes is for us to get involved. We need to demand that the party show discipline and leadership. We, you and me, concerned citizens, have to teach the GOP to fight as hard for our goals as the Democrats do for political advantage. The Republican Party needs to listen to us, to get us, the base, back into the game, and to nationalize the election to achieve another conservative revolution as Newt Gingrich did and as Ronald Reagan did before him.

How can this be done? The answer is: with this book, where I intend to outline the goals, strategy, tactics, message, and leadership we need to win. You cannot win elections with only one, two, three, or even four of these big five. You need all five. And we need to demand all five from the GOP.

Step one is articulating the goal. The goal has to be tangible. It has to make sense to activists. It has to be understood as a solution for all that ails them.

The goal has to be sixty votes in the United States Senate committed to ending Democratic obstruction that threatens defeat in war, economic contraction, and a return to an activist liberal judiciary.

The goal has to rally the base and persuade the middle. And there is an obvious strategy to achieve that.

Mark Steyn laid out the winning strategy in typically knock-down straight-ahead style at the conclusion of our round-table:

HH: Mark Steyn, what message would you hit early and often, if you wanted to turn what is at best a 50/50 year for the Republicans around, early in 2006?

MS: Well, I think that their trump card is that these are serious times, and you need a serious party. And whatever you feel about the Republican Party, and there’s a lot of disillusionment at the grass roots with the performance of the Republican Congress. Whatever you feel about them, they’re still serious on the serious issues, in a way that the Democrats are not. The Democrats have had four years to get serious about the new age in which we live. And they’ve persistently failed to do so. In fact, they’ve become more frivolous . . . since the election. I thought a lot of that rubbish in 2004 would be over once the election was over. But they’ve gotten worse since then. And as long as that persists, they will be un-electable for a certain critical sliver of the American people.

Steyn’s grasp of the crucial aspect of the political battlefield in 2006 was followed by Fred Barnes’s agreement and his shift to the tactics this strategic difference entails:

FB: I would follow on what has been said so far, and that is: for Republicans, go negative. They have to go negative. They have to scare people about what Democrats would bring. You know, Democrats would run up the white flag in Iraq. Democrats don’t want to fight the War on Terror. Democrats want to raise your taxes. That’s what you have to do. You have to argue . . . times are pretty good. It turns out we’re winning in Iraq, the War on Terror. We haven’t been hit again. We’re aggressive in waging that war. The Democrats would take all that away. I mean, you really have to go heavily negative.

This is the hard part for Republicans, who are afraid of full-throated, hard-nosed political arguments on national security. They are afraid of complaints that they’re questioning the patriotism of the Democrats. But a liberal party that preaches retreat and defeat deserves political reproach, not we’re all friends here in Congress politeness.

When Howard Dean declares, as he did in late December 2005, that the war in Iraq can’t be won, Republicans need to hang the Democrats with Dean’s words. When Dean declares that he hates Republicans, and says that the GOP is a white Christian party, Republicans have to call him out as the nutter he’s become. When Democratic congressman Jack Murtha called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the Republicans in the House did exactly the right thing. They forced a vote on Murtha’s proposal and shamed the Democrats into voting against it. The Republicans need to do that again and again. On drilling for oil in Alaska (the great ANWR debate), the GOP needs to talk not just about gas prices but about national security. On issues across the board, the demands of national security should be the trump card to prove that the GOP is the party of seriousness and the Democrats the party of grandstanding and irresponsibility.

A great part of this book deals with the five messages that every Republican candidate needs to internalize and repeat, every conservative talk-show host needs to know and to preach, and every conservative opinion purveyor needs to genuinely embrace without all the asides and reservations about why they are disappointed with this or let down by that. But it’s also about what each one of us can do.

All of us have a right to demand effective leadership from our party. For starters, Majority Leader Bill Frist should demand a public pledge from every Republican senator not to side with any Democrat-led filibusters in 2007 and 2008. Any senator refusing to take the pledge should be stripped of his seniority. The same demand should be made of all GOP candidates—and we, the voters, are the ones to hold them to it. It is fine, for example, for Congressman Mark Kennedy, who is running for an open seat in Minnesota, and Senator Mike DeWine, who is running for re-election in Ohio, to vote against ANWR exploration, but not against the up-or-down vote on that issue that the American people want to see. If Republican politicians won’t support the policies for which we elect them, then we shouldn’t elect them—and we should find candidates who will.

Majority Leader Frist and the president need to make this a national campaign to build a sixty-seat Republican majority in the Senate—a majority committed to action to win the war against terror, defend our free economy, and restore judicial respect for the Constitution. If we do this, we can send the Democrats into political oblivion for a generation or more.

If we achieve a sixty-seat majority, it means we can demand—and expect—that our government will do what needs to be done in the war on terror; that the Senate will approve President Bush’s third Supreme Court appointment (if he has that opportunity); that we can pass a constitutional marriage amendment; that we can achieve securer borders, permanent tax relief, and spending restraint. The Democrats’ weapon of choice, the filibuster, is an albatross around their necks, and a successful campaign can be waged on ending their abuse of it in time of war.

If John McCain, Chuck Hagel, or any other Republican senator with a glimmer of presidential ambition refuses to take the pledge to end Democratic filibusters, his ambition will be dead. If self-styled civil libertarians like John Sununu of New Hampshire or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska refuse the pledge, they will have endangered their careers (though Sununu’s day of reckoning will be much sooner than the just-elected Murkowski’s). If Olympia Snowe refuses, she will still win in independent and cranky Maine, but she should lose her position on the Finance Committee. If Arlen Specter refuses, he should forfeit the Judiciary chairmanship he not only loves but in which he has generally been effective.

With a national campaign built on a showdown over national security and ending the Democrats’ obstructionism, the Republicans can:

020 Save the Senate seats of Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum, Ohio’s Mike DeWine, and Montana’s Conrad Burns (if Burns chooses to run)

020 Defend the open seat in Tennessee that Senator Frist is vacating (and in Montana, if Burns retires)

020 Pick up the open seat in Minnesota being sought by Congressman Mark Kennedy

020 Take Democratic seats in New Jersey, West Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Washington

This paint the map red strategy—to nationalize the campaign, as the 1994 campaign was—will work, but only if we demand it of the GOP. The Republican Party needs this bold gambit if it is going to win. Those of us who support the GOP deserve to see it happen. And Majority Leader Frist needs it himself, if he hopes to relaunch his moribund presidential campaign. If Frist does not act, then we should push him out. We cannot afford the Senate to fall into the hands of Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin, and Harry Reid.

If, instead of a national campaign, we are reduced to state-by-state slugfests, a dispirited GOP base will ask itself (with good reason) why bother trying again, why give again, why walk a precinct again, why blog again—when they know it will only be more of the same. There are still reasons to do so, of course, but if the GOP deserves our votes it is only because Republican candidates pledge to deliver on their promises on the most important national issues facing this country.

If the GOP fights to end the Democrats’ filibusters and to bring action on the pressing military, economic, social, and judicial issues facing our country, we will have taken the first crucial step toward painting the map red, achieving the permanent majority our party needs to prosecute the war, and keeping the nation’s defenses in competent hands in 2008 and beyond. In the chapters that follow, I’ll show you how we can make that happen.

CHAPTER ONE

THE VALUES WE VALUE

I mean, a part of presidential campaigns, and really part of the large part of [all] campaigns becomes ultimately about values, and not necessarily moral values, although that’s important, but what people care about in their life, and whether or not they think a candidate understands them, whether they think somebody’s strong or weak, honest or dishonest. It’s those types of values. . . . I think Republican candidates that walk in and want to make this a strictly partisan race do so at their peril. I think you’ve got to make it a values race. And once you make it a values race, then we have a better shot at it . . . Instead of saying we’re going to debate some specific issue, or say this is the Republican plan on this particular issue, I think you have to talk to people at their gut level, where it says