It is a mistake to imitate Democrats
Attempts to rebrand the Republican party will fail to attract conservative voters. Democrats got back into power by allowing the conservatives back into the party that had run them off for 30 years. What Republicans need to do is make it clear that these conservative Democrats will have no say in stopping the evils of liberalism.Republicans are and should be panicked over the fact that conservative Democrat Travis Childers just defeated Republican Greg Davis by a margin of 54%-46% in the race for a vacant Mississippi congressional seat. That seat is in a conservative district that had given President Bush a 25-point margin of victory over John Kerry in 2004 - it never should have flipped Democrat. This is the third double-digit loss in a row for Republican candidates in conservative districts across the United States.
Childers' victory came one week after Rep. Don Cazayoux won a House seat in the Baton Rouge, La., area that had been in Republican hands for three decades. Over the winter, Rep. Bill Foster won an election in Illinois to succeed former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who had been in Congress more than 20 years.
What we're watching is the culmination of the decade-plus deterioration of the conservative Republican brand. Put simply, no one, including base conservatives, trusts the Republicans to govern effectively while following anything even faintly resembling a conservative platform.
That's unfortunate, since the only time that the Republicans really took the country by storm was in 1994, when they all ran on a set of firm, well established conservative values and issues. When the GOP strayed from that, falling back on the Democratic Party tradition of retaining power through excessive pork barrel spending and questionable ethical practices, they first lost seats - then lost their majorities. To regain what they have thrown away they must return to those conservative principles. If successful, they then must reject the compromising allure of power and promise to govern in the future as conservatives, not as the Democratic Party Lite.
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The aforementioned disparity between self-identified Democrats and Republicans doesn't fully explain the losses suffered by the GOP in 2006. The Dems had to run conservatives to win their majority that year. They had to run conservatives to win the three most recent House special elections. Isn't the natural home of many of those voters who elected conservative Democrats really the Republican Party, rather than the party of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama? The GOP's problems have gotten so bad that even a prominent national conservative, Sean Hannity, is now publicly speaking of his plan to leave the GOP and re-register in New York's Conservative Party.
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The other thing the liberals did was demonize unrelentingly President Bush and Republicans. It is time to get back to pointing out how bad Democrats are and will be for the future of this country. They are wrong on taxes, energy and national security. On all three of those issues the Republicans should be winning.
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