On those rare occasions that political types ask my advice on how to blend party messaging with the internet and blogging, I recommend they spend time in the archives of Patrick Ruffini, eCampaign Director at the RNC and webmaster for the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign. (bio).
No kinsellan pretender, Ruffini's one of the rare birds who combines exceptional political instincts with an exceptional understanding of how the digital organism functions, and where to press one's ear.
From an exchange with Ross Douthat of The Atlantic and Reihan Salam, American Scene;
Douthat and Salam are believers in Big Government Conservatism, but argue that it’s been botched in its execution. Their vision of “Sam’s Club Republicanism” is that of a lower-middle class majority held in place by government largesse with a conservative face.I’m here to break the news to them that it won’t work. Republican voters are not motivated by a sense of entitlement. (That might be why they’re Republicans.) Whenever we’ve tried to give away the goodies (Medicare Part D, NCLB, etc.), we have not succeeded in creating loyal new Republican constituencies. The activist base that listens to Rush and dials Congress is up in arms about a bridge in Alaska and the 2% of the budget that is education spending. They won’t take kindly to a beefed-up version of Big Government Conservatism.
People vote their values (writ large) not a narrow Thomas Frankian sense of economic interest. And it cuts both ways. That’s why the church attendance gap does more to explain voting patterns than income. It’s why the toniest, most cosmopolitan parts of big cities vote 80% Democratic, while their French counterparts earlier this month voted 80% for Sarkozy. We aren’t Europe, where our politics revolves around class, and we shouldn’t try to be.
What the welfare state Republicanism that Douthat and Salam advocate (in the name of the “base” no less) most resembles are the economic policies of Richard Nixon and the One Nation Conservatism of Ted Heath in the U.K. Which is precisely what the New Right in America and Thatcherism in Britain rose in opposition to. The revolt against Country Club Republicanism and its accommodation with government is one of the few reasons why we can speak of a “movement” and a “base” today.
That’s why I write that when the movement is strong, the GOP becomes more conservative and government gets smaller. When we govern without reference to what our voters want, the brand is diluted, government gets bigger, and voters are confused about what we really stand for.
Emphasis mine.
Truly a message of relevance to Canada.
A big problem with the American conservative movement is that every conservative think tank or publication worth mentioning is infiltrated with horribly left wing progressives who think they are conservative because they get off on war. I know schoolchildren who are more conservative than the American Enterprise Institute, to name one egregious example. Solution: out the progressives.
Another problem is the "boiling frog" effect; Americans are unwilling/unable to acknowledge the dramatic extent to which America has drifted to the left in a relatively short period of time. Take Schwarzenegger for example; give him a microphone and he'll blab nonstop about global warming and stem cell research, to the exclusion of anything and everything conservative. This is a Republican governor?
I agree; I think it's clear that the electorate, even in Canada-The-Welfare-State, want less government, more power to working families and individuals, and a less centralized federation, ie, decentralization.
I think the recent Quebec election is the clearest indicator of that - because the socialist welfare ideology of Canada has effectively been that of Quebec. Quebec ideology has run Canada for the last 50 and more years. Now, even Quebec is rejecting welfare statism.
BUT - we are only taking the first steps on the road to freedom from the Nanny State. In Quebec, the Unions (aka PQ) are going to fight for their 'rights' to government largesse. And in the rest of Canada, the Liberals/NDP are doing the same. This first step is being met with great opposition by the Old Guard who benefited financially and in power, from the old centralist Socialist Engineering mode of gov't.
Right now, in our federal gov't, we have the Liberals controlling the Senate - and the Senate has moved out of its regular role as 'second thoughts' to an intrusive role as active decision-maker of new legislation. These unelected Senators, primarily patronage appointees of the Liberals, have moved themselves into a dominant governing role, - over and above the elected House. That's moving us out of a democracy.
And, we have the MSM, another Liberal stronghold, actively campaigning on behalf of the Liberals. We are bombarded with relentless vicious criticisms of Harper and the Conservatives. The CBC is a major voice - funded by the taxpayer - yet acting as a Liberal propaganda agency.
So, how does the will of the people, a will to move away from the socialist engineering of Big Government, away from the Welfare State - how is this will going to be transformed into reality - when you have the Senate moving into a legislative role, the MSM moving into a propaganda role - and the House of Commons being used to promote ridiculous Motions (eg, Kyoto)?
remember this when you are reading this tonight Stephen.
Take note PMSH. Since the embracement of Kyoto by the Tories, and their expansion in budget spending, I no longer look forward to voting the way that I did last time out.
The whole political spectrum seems to me as if it is shifting to the left. We live in dangerous times as we approach the point that more than 50% of voters will be drawing a check of some sort from the Treasury. The left has slowly dragged this toboggan up the hill and once the majority become net beneficiaries of the tax system, this puppy is going to be sliding downhill very quickly indeed.
Some statistics from the National Center for Policy Analysis in the US:
- The top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with adjusted gross incomes above $250,000, paid 33.2 of all federal income tax
-The top 5 percent, with incomes above $108,000, paid a majority of all income taxes: 51.9 percent.
-The top 10 percent of taxpayers, those with incomes above $79,000, paid 63 of income taxes; and the top 25 percent, with incomes above $48,000, paid 82 percent.
-The top 50 percent of taxpayers, having incomes above $24,000, paid 95.7 percent,
-The bottom 50 percent paid just 4.3 percent.
I don't have the figures, but I have to think it is even worse than that here in Canada.
GAG
I think less government spending and more libertarianism is something many Canadians believe in deep down inside. I think people in both Canada and the US are generous in nature so when silly polsters and media types ramble on about how we should make a difference and if only the government would people are apt to buy into it. For example with the last prebudget surplus the polsters were reporting that more than 70 percent of Canadians thought we should use the money for social programs. Harper must have been thinking carefully about that.
The ideas of people activly taking responsibility in making a difference in other people's lives instead of letting some government bureaucracy grow and pretend to make a difference has to be properly presented.
Too often conservatives come off sounding selfish when in actual fact they are both more likely to actively help people, and more likely to succeed in that effort.
Hubie Bauch:
"Even toughened pollsters are amazed by the sheer mass of Quebecers who don't want lower taxes.
It might lead some people to think Quebecers are crazy, said Christian Bourque of Leger Marketing, whose firm ran a post-budget poll that found 70 per cent of Quebecers are opposed to the $950 million in tax cuts announced in last week's provincial budget.
"One way to look at it is that we're the only people in North America not to want a tax cut," he said in a follow-up interview. But looked at another way, it's perfectly rational, he said: merely people acting in self-interest - the most normal of political responses."
www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=92a9316f-c96c-4059-9bb2-74b2bb69870c
This should be recommended reading for many in the CPC today. It seems that the lessons of the Mulroney PCs are beginning to fade and be forgotten.
The only surprise to me is that there are any small government, individual responsibility conservatives left. Libs control education from day care to university. They control all major media. They control the judiciary. They control the "arts community" - movies, music, literature. Even "science" is totally controlled by the left as we can see with the Y2Kyoto hoax.
The lib/left message is bombarded at the populace 24/7 365 days a year. Yet there still seems to be a core of about 30% small gov conservatives in both Canada and the US who seem impervious to this massive brainwashing. Anyone have any suggestions as to why?
ps. thank god for blogs because otherwise I would have gone insane by now.
andrew - before you accept a poll as a valid representation of a population, it's best to know exactly - very exactly - the question(s) asked in that poll.
Conservative appoints leftist/green judge.
Da judge is a "local actor". Green robes are fashionable in the Conservative Party. Blue is out.
Thanks to Red Tories: Brian Mulroney, Joe Who?, Hugh Segal, et al.
...-
From the Prime Minister's Web Site(http://www.pm.gc.ca/)
APPOINTMENT OF CHIEF JUSTICE OF ONTARIO ANNOUNCED
[...]
"founding chair of the environmental law section."
[...]
Chief Justice Winkler is a global thinker and local actor for environmental responsibility, chairing the Long Point Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Fund and acting as a member of the Board of Directors of Bird Studies Canada....-
"Douthat and Salam are believers in Big Government Conservatism, but argue that it’s been botched in its execution. Their vision of “Sam’s Club Republicanism” is that of a lower-middle class majority held in place by government largesse with a conservative face."
Sooo whay is it a choice between kleptocratic China friendly welfare state republicanism or martial law republical imperialism which enable the global village, illegal immigation and North American union?
Why is Republivcanism today a matter of a choice between 2 distinctly UNAMERICAN orthodoxies??
There is a 3rd was and this is a populist outreach to the voter who has demanded a return to constitutional republicanism for the past 25 years.
Ron Paul republicanism which puts the forces of statism back in the bottle and opens more government to public transparenciy and accountability.
Losing the "us and them" attitudes of social engineering and imperialist martialism may give the GOP a head start in the mew political wave which wants a return to constitutionally constrained/accountable government.
Maz2: Lots of the bird groups are good people like the Ducks Unlimited folk. You can be a conservationist without trying to extort money from others or stopping economic development. The worrisome part of the background is the "founding chair". That's BAD news.
People deep down want to be left alone, and can be motivated by that issue where they can't be by bribes. It takes good messaging to force the media around and to counteract the small groups that want to preserve huge rents that they're extracting - farm subsidies, auto subsidies, gov't workers...
The market reaction to chinese tainting issues is all the punishment needed, along with some totally crushing lawsuits and criminal prosecutions for fraud and deception. Even here we're seeing demands for more regulation and official inspections. We need to make sure that people can do their own private inspections and testing, but that we remove the power from the state here and in other countries to use "Japanese inspections" - inspect everything but ensure that the system is so delayed that imports are spoiled or can't compete with preferred suppliers.
Conservative governments get focused on this chequebook action by paternalism and the sheer difficulty of messaging. It's much easier to be deceived by polls to think that people will respond to be bought off. They won't. They will respond to results, especially if you don't take counsel of your fears or the leftist media.
Harris got scared halfway through his first term and did nothing else of value, and Ernie tried to make himself cuddly - they didn't make friends, they just failed. Let your enemies hate, as long as they fear, and drive to deliver for the citizens. That's the way to win, but it's brutally hard and almost impossible for politicians - you don't get many people at high levels who are fine with people hating them... they're attention whores, that's why they're in the business.
ET (and any other reality-rejecting clown who plays the Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt game when I take the time to research and post fact-based comments with links):
Post a link for once in your goddamned life or shut the f*ck up.
Don't argue with me and don't "think"; who told you to think? What record do you have of consistent rational thought? None.
Please leave the thinking to those of us WITH A DEMONSTRATED RECORD OF PROVIDING LOGICAL ANALYSIS BASED ON FACTUALLY ACCURATE DATA DUHDUHDUH!!!!! I DO THE THINKING AND YOU DO THE LISTENING ARE WE CLEAR???????
I thinky Wimpy got the point right from the start!
Whoa! Andrew I hope you’re being sarcastic; otherwise it’s over the top.
I thought only lefty utopians needed links and sources of authority to back them up. The rest of us rely on logic, reason and our personal experience to form opinions and then seek data to confirm them.
When you turn on the caps-lock, I tune out.
Andrew - I cautioned you about accepting conclusions based on uncertain data.
The 'uncertain data' are the questions asked in the survey. Do you know the exact questions asked? It's up to you to provide us with those questions if you want us to accept your opinion that the survey is valid. You haven't shown us that your data is 'factually accurate'.
Why on earth should I provide links? Links to what?
And what's the point of a link? Surely you aren't going to say that a link makes one's opinion valid!!!
Why shouldn't I argue with you? And why shouldn't I think? [ I presume you are being sarcastic - or, are you pretending to be An Evil Dictator?
Try again.
rebarbarian “turn on the caps-lock, tune out”
Who said that?
Timothy Leary or Al Gore?
Oh, and andrew, these polls, they NEVER asked me.
Governments never shrink on their own. It doesn't matter what their inclination is, liberal, socialist, conservative or otherwise. Now and then budget and tax cuts are always followed by extra spending later on. Governments will shrink only when they are forced to, such as serious populace uprisings, financial crises, depressions, revolutions, etc.
On their own though they NEVER shrink.
Someone at mises.org pointed out that while government expands under both left-wing and right-wing political parties, it can expand at a faster rate when right-wing parties are in charge. That's because left-wing parties really think that the sun shines out of the government's butt, so they take the welfare state seriously and they actually try to make it work. Not that they can or anything - welfare and big government (which are synonymous) kill societies by bankrupting them and leading them into wars of extermination. But until the inevitable crack-up, the leftists are at least conscientiously trying to teach those ghetto welfare queens how to breast feed, making sure that new welfare entitlements have at least some kind of half-baked fiscal plan, etc.
Right-wing parties claim to hate government, but they create big government institutions anyways, because this is the way of democracies: people vote themselves other people's property. But the right-wingers build welfare programs carelessly, they throw the money at people like they're tossing a bone to a dog. They might argue that communist medicare is bad, then vote for a huge, ill-advised, communistic expansion to medicare the next day. They'll tell you that they don't believe in the welfare state, then they'll spend billions or trillions of dollars on a war which in the end has no other purpose except to enrich their friends at the same time that they build new welfare states in foreign countries.
Left-wing parties are afraid to be accused of being spendthrifts so they watch their expenditures a little more closely. Right-wing parties are afraid of being called un-generous (with other people's money) so they feel they have to spend like drunken sailors.
I don't think that any of you conservative-leaning, independent-thinking, welfare-hating people are going to be able to vote your way out of this dilemma. The system is totally rigged to favor taxwasters over taxpayers, and probably even most of the people who are net taxpayers don't even realize that they are, or else they're so brainwashed that they're scared sh*tless at the thought of having to find a job or get their kids educated without help from Big Brother. I think the only reasonable approach is to hold the rigged, crooked, socialist political system in the contempt that it deserves, and don't miss any opportunity to tell other people why you do so, and why they should too.
Once you take off your partisan political coke-bottle glasses, you'll find that it's very easy to absorb and understand every new political development. Simply read the headline and the opening blurb and ask these questions: Is this going to expand government? Nearly every single item in your news, when you get to the heart of it, is a plea to expand government. Then ask, who's going to pay for this? The answer is always, the idiot taxpayers and voters who fell for the B.S. Finally, ask why did this problem happen in the first place? It's almost always either a non-existent problem, or a problem that was caused by government, usually the same government and the same gang of "experts" who are now begging you through their tools in the media to give them even more money and power than what they abused and wasted before.
Geothermal: 4:11
Pareto's Rule: 80/20
It approximates almost everything involving ratios.
Ahhhh. Whats the matter Andrew? ET prove you wrong? Or did you just have a slip and put the caps on by mistake? Poor baby. Go cry to Taliban Jack. He'll back you up that it's not your fault. It's the evil VRWC. And don't forget to give him and chow-chow your first born,as any good socialist would understand.I could go on,but why bother. Your type belong in the cesspool you have made.
Government? What is government? Who is confused? Politicians? Citizens?
...-
For crooks: guns aplenty. For you and me: paperwork
George Jonas, National Post
(jack's newswatch)
Captain’s Quarters | Palestinians Pine For Israeli Security
How bad has life in Gaza become? Palestinians have begun to recognize that they cannot govern themselves — and that life under Israeli authority was preferable. Not only are they saying this out loud, but as MEMRI reports, they’re writing it in their newspapers (via QandO)
(jack's newswatch)
Cabinet minister stoked criticism of jobs program
A Conservative cabinet minister sought out Liberal MPs to deliver a secret message: Keep criticizing our government over cuts and changes to the student summer jobs program. (national newswatch)
ugh - I think that you are the one wearing 'partisan political coke-bottle glasses'.
Your binary framework of How The Left Governs vs How the Right Governs and What Causes Problems is pure fiction.Just setting up a binary framework and slotting attributes into each side doesn't make that content valid. You haven't provided a shred of evidence - factual or logical.
Ugh:
Very clear take on the "excesses" of the mega state...as the state expands it consumes the freedom of the individual. Left wing statists push it at a faster pace than Right wing statists, but the bottom line is both brands of politics are in love with big government and the social engineered civilian control that goes with it.
We are our own worst enemies as we encourage these partisan statist grifters by thinking one brand is any less deadly than the other.
Statism sucks...it robs individual freedom and erects a strangling mega state at the expense of responsive democracy and cultiral liberty. ALL parties or politicos or philoshphies advocating for the mega state and its social engineered anthill society are enemies of the free individual.
Partisanism is a phoney left-right Hagelian diversion by the political class to fool you into thinking there is a defference between ruling/governing factions...there is not...both are statist and both demand your productivity and freedoms be rendered to the expanding state....they just differ in method and the percentage they take.
Lose your partisan blinders and you lose the control these fraudsters have over you...there is only one core democratic unit in free societies that should be empowered...that is the individual.
...statists ( left or right) despise the freedom of the individual and think him not worthy to direct his own destiny and that of his nation...so they disempower him and expand the state to take over duties that were once reponsibilities of the empowered individual...and this has been an ongoing process in the free world since the turn of the 20th century.
It has been the nnature and intent of the world's free democratic constitutional republics,commonwealths and parliaments to expand government power at the expense of the individual they derived the power to rule from in the first place. It is very telling the open contempt shown the individual by governments, media and the political class these days...their duplicitous treatment of the civilian population is on open display...the backlash is small as many have become anestethised to it because the collective memory has been shortened by a compliant media to not recal better days ( in the not to distant past) when we had more freedom and more respect from our elected representatives.
It is a trend in modern constitutional republics+commonwealth governments that must be reversed...it will not be reversed by changing a left wing statist government for a right wing statist government.
Statism is the antithesis of consentual democracy...statism knows no political label...think out of the box...lose your partisan shackles.
Carl Jung said that "mass man is man at his lowest common denominator."
I've observed that you can understand the dynamics of almost any mass movement by simply applying the principles that motivate people in high school.
We can't have perfect governments even if it were possible to dream up one, simply because human beings are flawed.
Whether one wishes to attribute this to the Christian "fall" or some other way, one simply can't expect big groups to get things right a great deal of the time.
In regard to the Republican Party (also a big group) Peggy Noonan just wrote that Bush 41 made the mistake of not realizing that he was elected to do Reagan's third term. He thought that because he was elected he had the support for his own initiatives.
This immigration thing is the equivalent for Bush 43 of his father's no-new-taxes pledge.
I find it helpful to keep in mind that the types who enjoyed social prominence in high school are the same people who think it's a good idea to be a politician. What was it that Oscar Wilde said? ...ambition is the drive of the talentless?
Manning's approach to the environment inspires coalition (CP via canoe news)
The sound of the cuckoo bird is heard in the land: cuckoo ... cuckooo ... cuckoooo .......