An Open Letter To Obama

[Warph]

Dear Senator Obama....
A Republican reformer has advice for the new guy promising to clean up Washington: get specific.
By Newt Gingrich

Your campaign has been brilliant. It has given you more support and more momentum than most analysts expected a year ago. Keeping things simple and vague has worked so far, and it might work all the way to the White House. "Change you can believe in" is a great all-purpose slogan. It allows every person to fill in his or her own interpretation of what it means. In some ways, it's reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's 1976 promise to run "a government as good as the American people."

The challenge you will face in the next few months is stark. Do you want to remain vague? You might win—but you might find that, in winning, you have a "victory of personality" with no real policy consequences. Or do you want to provide specifics? If so, your victory could be a clarion call from the American people to Congress to join you in achieving your goals.

I participated in two successful "change" campaigns: the Reagan revolution of 1980 and the "Contract With America" in 1994. Both were built around a limited number of powerful, specific proposals. As a freshman congressman in 1980, working in coordination with the Reagan presidential campaign, we selected five popular themes we knew would help our candidates get elected and create momentum for President Reagan's bold agenda. The clarity of these five positions (the two most important were a three-year, 30 percent tax cut and strengthening the military) helped our candidates in the closing weeks of the campaign. We won the presidency, six seats in the Senate, 33 in the House—and joined with a minority of Democrats to pass the key measures into law.

In 1994, House Republicans had been in the minority for 40 years. We needed to do something dramatic. So instead of a traditional platform of vague commitments ("We believe in ..."), we offered a clear program of specifics ("In the first 100 days, we will ..."). We also enjoyed the advantage of positive historical trends. Already, there was an emerging consensus in favor of welfare reform, tax cuts, a stronger military and a balanced federal budget. Every item in the "Contract With America" had support from the vast majority of Americans.

Can you find five big changes that are substantive, popular—and can rally Democrats from the House and Senate to join you on the Capitol steps in September or October? If you cannot, you should question if you'll be able to deliver on your "change" slogan. Your campaign advisers may not care about that. Their instinct will be to win the election and leave the difficulties of governing up to you. But if you want to be a genuine historic agent of change "we can believe in," then you have to look beyond Election Day.
President Carter never understood this. When his vague campaign of "trust me" and "a government as good as the American people" came to Washington, it ran into a Democratic Congress that didn't trust him and that wanted a government that was good for the Congress. Carter, like many outsiders who become president (including the current White House resident), greatly underestimated the institutional strengths of the Congress. Many state legislatures meet very rarely. Georgia was like that when Carter was governor, and the Texas legislature only meets every other year. This gave Governor Bush a considerable misunderstanding of the depth of institutional trouble he would face in Washington.

By contrast, Congress is a permanent institution with a 225-year history of challenging the president. Carter learned even before his Inauguration that Speaker Tip O'Neill was happy to stand up to a newly elected president. President George H. W. Bush painfully learned that his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge was a target for the Democrats rather than a problem for them. Hillary Clinton learned as First Lady that she could cut a healthcare deal with Republicans Bob Dole and John Chaffee, but she could not get several key Democrats to go along. Her plans foundered on the unwillingness of House Democrats to give up their core values for a presidential "win."

One final caveat: after four years as Speaker, the one lesson I learned is that the problem with being specific and real is that you become specific and real. Your opposition has new ammo—or, if you pick good enough changes, the Republicans might even decide to deliver on them in September, and the president might be willing to sign them. Then you will have delivered change, but probably not in the manner you had intended.

Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House, is the author of "Days of Infamy"

[Teresa]

EXCELLANT!

I Have always said I would love to see Newt Gingrich run for president.

Here is something too that is a good read. It is from Will Manley's Blog.
Hays Daily News Editorial

For those of you who don't know where this newspaper is written.
It is in the center of Kansas.

A town founded by hard working and hard thinking Americans.
You gotta love those small town people.

Hays Daily News Editorial
Hays, Kansas




Dear Barack Obama
Monday, April 14th, 2008 @ 4:02 am

BY WILL MANLY

Dear Barack Obama:

I grew to like you over the last year.

I've always thought of you as dangerously naive at best. Eloquent, gifted, genuine, yes. But dangerously naive at best.

I couldn't vote for you — but not because of your funny name or your lunatic pastor. I couldn't vote for you because you say we should raise taxes (even on the rich, who I'm convinced already pay too much), and because you say we should abandon Iraq (which I'm convinced would be surrendering a war we must win), and because you don't respect the Second Amendment (which I'm convinced should disqualify any politician from any office).

Still, I've liked your message of unity and your ability to inspire. And, since your rise I've hunted, quite frantically, for young conservative leaders with your talent. (To my relief, I found Bobby Jindal.)

And I've long said if you beat Hillary Clinton, you will have done your country a tremendous service. But anymore I'm having a harder and harder time rooting for you.

First came your wife's comment about being proud of America for the first time — conveniently, right after you started winning primaries. Then came your own words about your grandmother, who is just a "typical white person" — a racist, or at least someone with racist tendencies. (I'm a "typical white person," I suppose, and I'm no racist. In fact, little makes me angrier than when it's insinuated I am.)

Sometimes people say things they don't really mean. But this is a pattern.

Last week we heard your comments about small-town America. Someone at a San Francisco fundraiser asked you why it's so hard for Democrats to win in rural areas. You said:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them ... So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them ... "

Is that a minority? HEY CLETUS, GET THE GUN! (If only we had a job to go to, some time in the last 25 years ... )

Here's a thought: Maybe gun rights voters know gun control laws kill people and steal freedom.

Here's a thought: Maybe some of us have moral objections to an immigration system that forces rule-followers to wait decades for legal status, and rewards border-violators with amnesty.

Here's a thought: Maybe some Americans cling to their church because their pastor is a nice person, because they find love there, because there they have something they can believe in.

Here's a thought: Maybe, just maybe, us simpletons in small towns find it harder to be bigoted than all o' y'all cityfolk. Maybe, in small towns, where everybody knows your name — and how hard you work, if you pay your taxes, how well you treat your neighbors, how often you volunteer in the community, and whether or not you're a good parent — people see the content of your character, so they don't give a hoot about the color of your skin. (But I grew up in a small town where about a third of the population is of a different race than me. What do I know?)

And here's my favorite thought of all: Maybe small-town folks are — really — capable of thinking. All on our own.

You're wrong about why small-town Americans don't vote for Democrats.

We don't vote for Democrats because we're self-reliant so we don't like the government trying to "solve" everything for us. And because you tell your rich friends in San Francisco that we're dumb. And because, each election, whichever one of you is running for president traipses all over the country telling us you have all the answers, that you're the one on our side, that you respect our way of life. But each time, a little bit here and there slips out — and by the end of the campaign, we can tell what you think about us. And we manage to learn who you really are.

And we see you're just a horse's ass.