The Next Right

Sarah Palin resigns

Jon Henke — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:53:36 +0000

What to make of the rapid-fire revelations that Sarah Palin is...

...not running for re-election
...resigning her office
...getting "out of politics for good"

There's no doubt that Gov. Palin and her family have been through a very difficult year, and I sympathize with a desire to get out of the public spotlight. I hope that is what's happening here, because it's just not plausible that quitting the only significant political accomplishment on her resume would help Sarah Palin in a Presidential run. It's awfully hard to go from "Alaska is better off if I am not Governor" to "Who wants to elect me President?"

On the other hand, Lefties can spare me their wailing and gnashing of teeth over just how irresponsible it is to quit in the middle of your first term. Take it up with the President first.

It's hard to know what more to make of this until we get a much better explanation, but the view from here is that you won't have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore. Her Presidential prospects are done, and it's hard to see how Republicans will still consider her a potential leader of the movement.

But perhaps that's best. Republicans need to stop looking for a Leader and start thinking about where they want to go.

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A Universal Health Care Economy

Jon Henke — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:23:28 +0000

Paul Krugman, 2005, saying universal health care would make us more like GM...

Why should we be a country in which hard working people aren't guaranteed health care if they need it? ... But the problem is that ... our economy is starting to look more like Wal-Mart and less like General Motors in the good days. The share of workers who get benefits at all is declining and the quality of the benefits.

Wal-Mart is very profitable. GM filed for bankruptcy.

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Rapid Right Innovation: Top 20

Max Borders — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:46:36 +0000

They’re getting comfortable. As Henke alludes to here, the self-satisfaction that comes with being in control was a primary factor in the waning of GOP power after 2002. The Dems know political power is nothing if not entropic. That’s exactly why the leadership is rushing like hell to do what they can to entrench their power and fundamentally alter the economy (i.e. before things start to burn and the people turn). Having mastered both the blame game and the art of sophistry, they think they’re better and smarter—despite all the linear thinking and pseudo-intellectual fervor. But victory has a half-life.

What is the Right to do? Let the Left languish in their smugness. Let's innovate:

Get better organized and unified. (Includes networking and collaboration.)
Convert talk radio listeners into givers and doers. (Need help from the jocks.)
Focus on popular messages of freedom, prosperity and suspicion of government.
Create new constituencies resistant to government takeovers of their sector.
Create media markets to further dilute the leftish MSM. Hasten the destruction of print.
Tap, activate and integrate existing grassroots networks while creating new ones.
Use mockery and satire to prick the Obama bubble. “What were we thinking?”
Redirect resources from policy wonks to message-makers, writers and activists.
Find and exploit joints and weak-points. (Attack from the side. A distracting swarm is better than a standing army.)
Develop an “operating system” for distributed activism. “Embrace and extend” the left’s successful methodologies.
Crowdsource investigation of key leaders. Dig Relentlessly.
Use technology as a means to 5 primary ends—registering voters, organizing activists, changing minds, increasing transparency and crowdsourcing ideas.
Make a continuous show out of dissatisfaction. Be creative. Create distractions.
Plan carefully, but execute rapidly. Make media. Explosive media campaigns should make people do a double-take.
Rebrand as a new breed with new ideas. (Use veterans/old guard sparingly.) Think: New Labour circa 1996.
Turn the Left’s apparent strengths (brand, power, media adoration, momentum) into weaknesses, a la Sun Tzu.
Create alternative funding channels, including micro-donations.
Invite in a million ideas and create a filtration mechanism for the best ones.
Take risks with policy messages and critiques. Simple and powerful.
More meme machine, less policy argument. (Emotion, images, stories & sticky sayings.)

When you’re clinging to power and pushing your agenda, it’s hard to keep tabs on the enemy. It’s hard to continue innovating now that your foot-shoulders spend most of their days doe-eyed before O-TV, or making snarky comments on rightwing blogs. In 2008, the Left took all the best aspects of the free market – distributed systems, decentralization, collaboration and voluntary association – and out-organized the Right. Disillusionment with the war and the Obama emotion-bubble helped too. But those will soon fade. It’s time to turn the tables.

To be sure, the Left’s leadership will be busy tearing down what is right and good about the U.S., building up what is wrong and adding to a network of special interests and dependents whom they honestly believe will keep them around forever. They’ll make a good go of it. But take heart: Ireland, New Zealand and Britain all rebounded from the depths of socialism and its crony-capitalist variants. Ireland is now economically freer than the U.S. So is New Zealand. Britain is currently moving right. So there is hope. Let’s start innovating.

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How Obama failed on cap-and-trade and consequences for health care

Soren Dayton — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:18:49 +0000

Early coverage of the Cap and Trade bill has focused on the successes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, although I noted that it was also a success for conservative movement groups.

However, focus is beginning to shift. Maybe they didn't get what they wanted? The New York Times' John Broder notes that various groups lobbied the hell out of it. He focuses on the utilities:

The biggest concessions went to utilities, which wanted assurances that they could continue to operate and build coal-burning power plants without shouldering new costs. The utilities received not only tens of billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, but also billions for work on technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from coal combustion to help meet future pollution targets.

By not auctioning these permits, Obama lost a huge amount of money for his earlier proposals. Donald Marron notes that this totals about $600b in revenue that this bill didn't create.

Now think about what Joe Lieberman said yesterday about the health care bill...

Lieberman cited the cost of a public plan as his primary beef with the plan.

"Part of my concern is that, and this goes to the…growing national debt, that inevitably if we create a public option, the public is going to end up pay for it and that's a cost we can't take on," he said.

If Obama had come out of this cap and trade debate with an extra $600b, the healthcare debate would look a lot -- A LOT -- different.

As the scope of the deficit becomes clearer and the political salience of it rises, the cap and trade bill may look like an increasingly poor deal for America, but also the rest of the Obama agenda.

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PDF 2009: Chasing the Internet Leader

Jon Henke — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:34:51 +0000

The annual Personal Democracy Forum was Monday and Tuesday in New York, and it was very good. As always. You can read more about it at TechPresident.

Naturally, there was a great deal of conversation about the imbalance between the Left and Right online. The general consensus is that Republicans are behind on the internet, though there is a great deal of debate over how and why. The least convincing answer was offered by a PDF audience member, and it basically boiled down to "Republicans suck. Democrats are cool. So we're better at the internet."

Yeah, well, those who forget history...

Democrats race to catch up to GOP online

The Democratic National Committee relaunched its Web site Friday and appointed its first technology adviser in an effort to match the Republican party's success in using the Internet to build its constituency. [...] "We realized that the Republicans were ironically peddling their Stone Age ideas with modern-day technology tools, and we were just not at their level in our dedication to technology," Buck said.Insiders say it's widely acknowledged that the Republican committee has done a better job than the Democrats' committee in creating an online strategy. The Republican committee "is far and away ahead in securing a large constituent of online activists and does a better job of using the medium to move their message," said Pam Fielding of E-advocates, an Internet advocacy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.

That was 2002.

What changed? Again, that's the subject of a great deal of debate, but I would argue that it was two things:

Republicans got comfortable.
Democrats got entrepreneurial.

In 2016, there's no doubt that the online landscape will be very different. The Right will be much more effective. The only question is how they will do it. The balance of power on the Right will depend, in large part, on who the new entrepreneurs are and how they build the infrastructure.

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The successes of the anti-cap-and-trade movement

Soren Dayton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:02:18 +0000

I was struck on Thursday and Friday of last week by the extent to which activists on the right were deeply engaged on the Cap and Trade bill that narrowly passed the house last Friday.

The thing is, the media has not played this issue up. The same week that the House voted on the bill, President Barack Obama held a prime-time townhall on healthcare. Even the conservative media was mostly engaged primarily with the healthcare debate. Obama and the Democrats played and won the media cycle war.

But the conservative groups, especially Americans for Prosperity, and conservative blogs like Redstate and others kicked in. From both Republicans and Democrats, we heard about enormous call volume coming into the House. This provided a robust whip-like mechanism.

Activists understood that they were the difference between this bill passing and not.

Now the fight moves to the Senate. Already, we see Obama caving on key provisions of the deal that kept protectionist Democrats together. It is hard to see how the Democrats find the votes, especially when they need full support from the Midwest to keep their caucus together.

And next time, it is hard to see how the issue is kept under the radar. The American people will be much, much more deeply engaged.

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What to do about the "Cap & Tr8-ors"?

Ironman — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:38:36 +0000

Yesterday was a slow day at the office, so I spent a lot of time on the I-phone seeing if we could actually give the lefties a shiner by defeating their "cap and trade" fiasco.

Then I got home, saw the result, and traded e-mails with various people in the "movement" The kindest response to the eight turncoats that enabled Waxman-Markey to pass was roughly along these lines

I don't think one can minimize why this was a truly hideous vote for those eight folks. Here we had a chance to derail the Obama socialism train and restore the Republican party to policy relevance, and these guys bailed out so they could get a nice mention in the NY Times tomorrow. Swell. Even the White House is giving up on the "global warming" issue and you guys sign up for the mission. Putzes,

The immediate response that I had was that the kindest thing to do to these "fredos" was to throw them out on an ice floe with the polar bears. And others were along those lines. Or at least, shut off their campaign money, demand retirements, or find primary challengers But that's my spleen talking. Today my brain took over.

No. it's time for a more "reasonable" approach.

See we now have an even more serious threat to the future of the Republic, and that would be a socialized health care system. I'll let John Hinderaker explain.

One of my law partners asked me yesterday which of the Democrats' current initiatives is worse, the tax on carbon or the health care "public option," otherwise known as socialized medicine. I replied unhesitatingly that socialized medicine is much worse. Carbon tax-and-trade can rather easily be repealed once people realize what a dumb idea it is. However, once our health care system has been destroyed and replaced with "single payer" socialized medicine, there is no going back

We need to explain to the Octofail Republicans that there is only one way out of the flaming pit they have dug for themselves. They need to become hard line zealots against the "public option" health care "reform".

And not milquetoast statements and a quiet vote "nay" on final passage. I mean going medieval on the whole concept 24/7/365. I mean like righteous 100 decible opposition. I mean like Rudy Giuliani vs. squeegee men or Michael Moore v. the Hometown Buffett bad.

Anything less, and we re-send the pink slips with no remorse and no reconsideration.

Now for our political geniuses. First off, let's dispense with the "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" canard here. This was a statist bill from the word go and there wasn't a libertarian idea within the same zip code. It was simply an energy tax. Ok if you want to keep the government out of my bedroom. How about letting people afford to heat their bedrooms?

Second, this bill is going to appeal to the vocal but few Saab Socialists who put the environment ahead of the economy. It is going to be painfully unpopular with blue collar America. Maybe Dave Reichert's uber green district will like it; but if Mark Kirk or Mike Castle think this isn't going to backfire on them big time in Rockford and New Castle they are going to find the Democrats whacking them with their own bill next November.

And please explain Mary Bono Mack. Both her and the lame hubby from SW FL are painful underachievers, proving surnames don't equal leadership. (Something we know well in CT!)

So that's the offer. Back before he went girlie man in Sacramento Arnold Scharzenegger told John Connor this

Come with me if you want to live

Well, "Cap and Tr8-ors".....either make sure Obama's health care reform fails...or

Hasta la vista, baby!

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In Defense of Social Conservatism

Mytheos_Holt — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:26:15 +0000

If you'd told my hardline libertarian, militantly atheistic Objectivist self of the past that I'd be ever write a defense of socially conservative political views, I'd probably have called you crazy in between fits of laughter and remarks about how that particular group of people was a roadblock to human evolution. Which goes to show that everyone must sometimes eat crow.

There's been a lot of talk about how Governor Sanford's recent scandal impugns the authority of social conservatives to discuss how terrible infidelity, abortion, homosexuality and post-1960's sexual morality are. The usual suspects have already got in their obligatory sneers, but what's more surprising is how quick various members of this website have jumped on the bandwagon. No accounting for taste, but they're wrong.

As I never tire of reminding people, most of the conflicts on the Right today have happened before. The desire to rid our side of social conservatives is no exception. Frank Meyer actually wrote an essay entitled "A Rebel in Search of Tradition" in which he savaged Russell Kirk for being culturally authoritarian and thus socialist by proxy. Friedrich Hayek leveled the accusation that "conservatism has compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder" at traditionalists. In the end, Meyer's fusionism resolved the dispute, but the tensions remained, to the point that Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk both tried to write each other out of the movment in the same issue of the same magazine. Kirk accused Rothbard's libertarians of being "chirping sectaries" who could never agree and were Satanic in their opposition to authority, whereas Rothbard wrote that fusionism was really a "libertarian manque" intended to keep those stupid traditionalists quiet. And even though any time social conservatism was dumped, it resulted in disastrous political alienation (see also the rise of the New Right in response to Gerald Ford), and anytime fiscal conservatism was dumped it resulted in political failure and division on the Right (George W. Bush), people still try and write both sides out.

But enough about history. Let's deal with the question at hand - why should the infidelity of Mark Sanford merit the expulsion of social conservatives? Perhaps I'm being willingly obtuse, but I can't remember a single time when any socially conservative Senator, Representative, Governor, President or dog-catcher has suggested that adultery be made illegal. I've also never heard a single Democratic Representative, Senator, Governor or President advocate adultery as a social good - in fact, unlike Sanford, some of them will even put themselves at the risk of impeachment to avoid admitting to it. Hypocrisy? You bet. But if we threw out every political idea that had a high profile hypocrite advocate it at some point, then we'd have nothing left to advocate at all.

The impulse to throw hypocrites out is a healthy one. The impules to throw out everyone but the hypocrites is not - it is a symptom of desperation. Suppose the Republican party followed the advice of all the people who said abandoning social conservatism because of the Mark Sanfords of the world was a good idea. Imagine the message that sends - "Alright, you've got us, husbands can't keep their pants up and we're not going to claim they should." Imagine the fun Robert Gibbs would have with that. Imagine how many voters, both socially conservative and otherwise, we'd never be able to get on our side again.

The mere fact that Sanford's so-called "hypocrisy" is getting so much airtime is the best argument for believing in a politics of morality one could ever want. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out yesterday, "Hypocrisy does two things, both at the same time: Hypocrisy shows -- and you're not going to want to hear this. You're not going to want to agree with me on this. I know you're not. But hypocrisy shows that there are moral values in a culture. Without moral values in a culture, it would not be possible for anybody to be a hypocrite. The fact that we are calling Sanford a hypocrite is the proof that there are still standards of dignity and morality that apply in our society." Or, to put it even more bluntly, hypocrisy is the one thing which liberals have not been able to turn into a lifestyle choice.

It's true that social conservatism puts us in a difficult position. You never hear about the pro-choice Democratic "hypocrites" who forbid their daughters from getting abortions. You never hear about the college professors who are rich and still say property is theft. Even when you do, it doesn't do anything. You don't see the Democrats arguing that they should drop opposition to corporate corruption because Chris Dodd got caught. When Bill Clinton cheated on Hillary or when Elliot Spitzer paid to become "Love Client Number Nine", you may notice there was just as much outrage, if not more, than what has accrued in response to Governor Sanford. Whatever we may do on blogs, putting partisan spin on a personal tragedy alienates average people because it looks cynical, heartless and petty. Making partisan spin on a personal tragedy the basis for a massive philosophical shift is politically and philosophically counterproductive because it makes your party look like a collection of gutless wimps who allow the worst members of their party to dictate moral standards.

In his article, Max Borders argues that while cheating on one's wife is a morally disastrous act, "there are egregious moral acts the discovery of which no politician should survive...legal bedroom behavior between consenting adults ain’t one of them." It is lucky, therefore, that nobody on the Right, Left or anywhere in between is suggesting government rationing or regulation of sex. They simply suggest that sexual habits and character may be linked. It may be true that, as Mr. Borders says, Jerry Falwell's form of public moralizing has caused the GOP more harm than good. This is not an argument for abandoning one's argument. It is an argument for changing the rhetoric and presentation of it, because we no longer live in the age of moral panic that characterized the 80's. Pro-choice advocates do not abandon their argument because Margaret Sanger once took their side on the grounds that blacks should be exterminated. One can be right for the wrong reasons, and there are plentiful examples of more "libertarian" Republicans who are anti-abortion or even anti-gay marriage who are not cheating scum.

In short, it is political suicide to abandon social conservatism at a time when our most zealous supporters are socially conservative, and when a good majority of even the fiscal conservatives hold socially conservative views. It is also logically fallacious to suggest that because one person violates a set of standards, the standards are therefore invalid. Finally, it is philosophically disastrous to conflate a refusal to regulate certain things because they are not capable of being regulated with abandonment of the moral arguments against them as reflections of an individual's character.

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Sanford, social conservatives and libertarians

Jon Henke — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:17:53 +0000

I tend to agree with Patrick Ruffini that Gov. Sanford should not be obligated to resign for having an affair (as distinct from his disapperance and deception of his staff). While I think that resignation is a perfectly legitimate, even appropriate, path to take after disgracing oneself, a personal disgrace should not necessarily require resignation from one's job, whether in politics or the private sector.

Indeed, as I pointed out in the comments there, I've been trying to think of a prominent politician who resigned from their elected political office because of an affair (note: McGreevey and Spitzer resigned because of the major ethics/legal violations involved, not the affair), and the only one I can come up with is Rep. Livingston, who resigned his Congressional seat in 1999 after admitting an affair. I'm sure there are others - probably more at the State/local level - but I can't think of them offhand.

On the other hand, I have to disagree with part of what Max Borders wrote here.

The Right is now reaping what it sowed. By making social conservatism central to its platform, it left no room in the GOP for sinners.

I don't think the backlash against Gov. Sanford has a lot to do with social conservatism. Social conservatives do not have a unique position on adultery. Pretty much everybody considers it immoral. And the social conservative position on gay marriage (which Sanford shared) is not predicated on heterosexual people being uniquely faithful, either. The appropriate criticism is not so much hypocrisy as it is failure.

Ultimately, there are no political or ideological lessons to be drawn from Mark Sanford's affair. There are only human lessons.

I also think Max is wrong on a practical and logical level to conclude from this story that "it is time to purge the Right’s politics of social conservatism". As a libertarian, I certainly favor the harm principle over the offense principle - that is, I think politics should focus on addressing force and fraud instead of things which are merely unpleasant.

I believe that libertarianism is a very internally consistent way of marrying the personal and political spheres, but I actually don't think it works. Or rather, it's wonderful in theory, but human nature has not adopted that theory for any large, sustained social group in history.

For my part, I've come to believe that libertarianism is a personal moral philosophy, not a political philosophy. It describes how we ought to behave individually, but it does not give us practical advice for how we can resolve social disputes in a political system.

The political system requires accomodation. Libertarians can either disengage or they can find a way to work within a coalition. Unprincipled? Maybe. But so is everybody. That's human nature.

But there is one final, very important point: Social conservatism is basically a personal moral philosophy (or tendency), as well. As Hayek said of conservatism, "It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments."

Social conservatives also need to accomodate libertarians. That does not mean they must minimize their objections to immorality, but it does mean they are going to have to accept fewer litmus tests and, if trends hold, a somewhat less decisive role within the Right's coalition.

Social conservatives and libertarians do have some common interests. The Right's coalition has worked best when they have focused on those common interests and left the rest to the social and personal spheres.

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Sanford and Social Conservatism

Will Haun — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:57:07 +0000

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's dereliction of duty, which occurred in the course of marital infidelity, is the latest in a disturbingly long line of conservatives who've been caught not practicing what they preach. Predictably, this has given the many journalists, Republicans, and others who are uncomfortable with conservatism's social side cause to state that conservatives should ditch their advocacy on those issues before more alleged hypocrites emerge. This argument is tenuous at best. In the spirit of simplicity, I'll go through the two primary reasons why one at a time before suggesting what I think is a proper response to the fall out:

1. There is a difference between hypocrisy and failing to live up to one's own standard:

Hypocrisy, properly understood, is when an individual has the "pretense of a virtuous character...moral beliefs of principles...that one does not really possess." That is distinguishable from being, well, a flawed human being who allows weakness to at times win the day. If the simple state of human nature made us all inherent hypocrites, none of us would be hypocrites -- there would be nothing to distinguish hypocritical actions from mistakes or the more severe screw up. We can say much about Mark Sanford's actions being a clear failing of judgment, and it certainly does not reflect well on his character. But are we really prepared to say that Mark Sanford does not actually possess a virtuous character, or moral beliefs or principles, in the aggregate of his actions or within himself? Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. But simply having a willing spirit but weak flesh does not make one a hypocrite, it makes one human. As is often said in Christianity, "God does not want you to believe in 'Christians', He wants you to believe in Christ." To paraphrase, do you get your beliefs from the actions of conservatives, or the principles of conservatism?

2. Failing to live up to a standard does not determine the standard's rightness.

Many who deride social conservatism want to use what happened to Sanford, to Senator Esign, to Senator Vitter, to Larry Craig, and to Mark Foley as reason to, as one of my friends said (a friend whose views I immensely respect) "ditch the 'moral agenda.'" We will get into the 'moral agenda' in a moment, but to me, this argument is so shoddy it represents nothing more than yet another attempt to try and expel social conservatism from conservatism - a longtime goal of many. But again, failing to live up to one's message does not mean there is something wrong with the message, it could mean something is wrong with the deliverer. In a similar vein, I've yet to hear any of the conservatives calling for consistency in politician's platitudes and actions argue their reasoning when it comes to fiscal responsibility. If one followed their argument to conclusion, conservatives should ditch the "fiscal agenda" too because the past decade has demonstrated that elected conservatives won't always live up to the principles they tout. I've yet to hear that argument, and I suspect its largely because this is less about "consistency" between the personal and the political lives of politicians, and more about finding another way to banish social conservatism from politics.**In the wake of these revelations, conservatives should consider not the fallacious arguments of those looking to score either cheap political points, or use a seeming opportune moment to settle their personal problems with social conservatism. Rather, conservatives would find it valuable to think about a few key points:

1. Social Conservatism, properly understood, is not code for sainthood

I disdain even the use of the term "social conservatism" because I utterly reject the premise that there is some separation between what conservatives are "conserving" on the economic or social sphere that merits distinguishing terms. There is a logical consistency between the two as they emanate from the same source - the American Founding, the experiences of the American people, and the "supreme law" of the U.S. Constitution. Becuase of this, social conservatism should be properly understood to be a desire to conserve the institutions that limit federal power in our social lives - the family, the local community, marital union, states, religious organizations, etc. Many of the rights our Founders saw as unalienable were cultivated virtuously by these institutions, and allowed man to pursue liberty in ways that could never be equally fulfilling if national authority stepped on his sovereignty in these areas. Of course, such a definition would likely preclude certain causes championed by social conservatives -- the legitimacy of a Federal Marriage Amendment that is not connected to federal benefits but establishes a federal definition requiring all states to conform would be one; the partial birth abortion ban that allows the federal government to criminalize a truly abhorrent, murderous practice on Constitutional grounds that was never intended to give such an authority (the commerce clause) could likely be another. But, this definition does not preclude the very institutions meant to limit federal power, states, or the family, etc, from stepping up to their own responsibility to cultivate virtues among the citizenry. Rather, this definition should give conservatives pause to question how we make our case for socially conservative positions. A Right to Life for example, is mentioned as the first inalienable right of the Declaration of Independence, a Right the Constitution prohibits the abridgment of without due process of law -- how can an abortion procedure be considered "due process of law"? The union of marriage between a man and a woman not only represents a commitment that is spiritual and socially valuable (according to both social science and social history), but there is no reason to believe there is a Constitutional "right" to it. No part of the Constitution was ever intended to include a right to marry, let alone for that right to apply to same sex couples when it never previously did for thousands of years before the Constitution. My suggestion is, in short, use the Constitution. Use logic, and reasoning rather than simply one's faith to justify the view of social conservatism. Make those arguments in the broader context of how they help preserve the intricate design of American society that limits federal intrusion in our lives, and be sure to respect that design when implementing public policy.

2. Politicians should not be seen as having our loyalty. Conservatism should have our loyalty

If 8 years of George W. Bush's failings, 6 years of congressional Republican failings, and recent scandals such as this prove anything, it is proof that Conservatives should want to place the defense of our ideas over our defense of those attempting to implement them. Psalm 146:3 alludes to this, but as a practical matter, it is the only way to keep those who claim the conservative mantle, those who have the highest responsibility to steward our principles, honest. That should be our goal, not to serve as their personal apologists.

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