Granted, most of what has been written about the Tea Party movement since Election Day has been from a mainstream media that wants nothing more than for the movement to collapse.
But stories are circulating about what “tea party” organizations are pushing as legislative priorities. And it ain’t pretty.
Locally, the Virginian-Pilot highlights some of these priorities:
State Veto of Federal Laws
Fighting Cap and Trade Laws
Eminent Domain Reform
Protection from Interstate Commerce Regulations
Illegal Immigration Reform
Fine. All good proposals, I guess. But it’s not why people gave the House to Republicans and threw out Democrats, at least not directly.
Democrats have developed a talking point that we’ll be hearing for the next year. It goes like this:
“Instead of creating jobs and getting our economy moving, Republicans are bogged down in issues few people care about to cater to their extreme anti-Obama base.”
Democrats should know. They spent the past two years ignoring job creation and getting our economy moving while focusing on their extreme agenda of taking over health care, cap and trade, stimulus bailouts and payoffs and expanding government.
Democrats paid a price, and Obama will if he continues spending massive time and capital on things that don’t create jobs.
Democrats misread their mandate. Obama swept into office a lot of Democrats in districts that are not Democrat strongholds. People in 2008, in the midst of what looked like economic collapse, had to change to something. They did.
After seeing what Democrats’ priorities were, and how they didn’t address people’s economic concerns, voters showed them the door, too.
Voters will show Republicans the door as well if they pursue agendas that Americans value less than fixing our economy.
Republicans didn’t win states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on the Fair Tax and making the Senate appointed instead of elected.
Here’s the key! Republicans need to make the case that their agenda is key to ending the sluggish economy and putting us on the track of good ol’ powerful, free-market powered economic growth.
Study the master. Read or listen to this speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1977 at Hillsdale College.
Reagan goes through an agenda of federal reforms and makes the case of how these reforms will result in an economic rebirth and frames it in human terms.
“A study of 700 of the largest corporations has found that if we could eliminate unnecessary regulation of business and industry, we would instantly reduce the inflation rate by half. Other economists have found that over-regulation of business and industry amounts to a hidden five-cent sales tax for every consumer. The misdirection of capital investment costs us a quarter of a million jobs. That’s half as many as the President wants to create by spending 32 billion dollars over the next two years. And with all of this comes the burden of government-required paperwork.” Ronald Reagan
That’s how you communicate an agenda in economic terms.
If we don’t commit to a single-minded focus on legislating and communicating in economic terms for every change we advocate, and communicate relentlessly no matter what the press wants to write, we risk voters throwing us out as quickly as they threw out the Democrats.
It’s still the economy, stupid.
