Reagan 180: Spending And Bureaucracy

The entrenched DC Republican establishment is obsessed with “electability” – good and Constitutional governance be damned. They insist that the only road to electoral victory is through big government glad-handing.


Reagan 180: Spending And Bureacracy

It’s what I call “DC solutionism,” an irrational belief that all real answers and solutions naturally begin and usually also end in the cavernous halls of Washington bureaucracy and legalese. We used to call them liberals and, sometimes, less-specific identified as just Democrats. Now we call them simply “incumbents” without the silly archaic need for specific party reference. The centralized DC mentality has indeed infected the Republican club as well.

The Republican establishment [aka “The Club,” (TM)] is in fact more liberal than many of the milquetoast candidates they parade your way every four years. Their livelihoods are in elections, and they churn their own elections by pedaling “DC solutions.” (Read: Someone else’s money.) The longer they are in DC, the more unmoored they become from both localized economic reality and the ideas of Constitutional governance that they maybe, just maybe, might have arrived in DC with originally.

And this drift towards centralized government “solutions” and the necessary accompanying centralized government control has blurred the lines between once distinct political parties.

So when the RNC, its anointed and preferred candidates, their supporters and donor bandwagons cry out about “electability,” what they mean without saying forthrightly is that the key to winning an election is being likable and handing out stuff from the big DC trunk.

How’s that working for “The Club”? For you? For Constitutional governance? Well, let’s see… Aside from two nail-biter wins by George W. Bush, we will have had 16 years of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama in four asswhippings. “The Club” keeps giving us their old guard liberal Republican Senators in Bush 41, Bob Dole and John McCain. Breaking the mold, we end up with a non-Senatorial member of “The Club” in Governor Romney, the inventor of Obamacare. (Yeah, whatever. Save your breath, defenders. You people bore me with your distinctions that don’t resonate with anyone who isn’t a political junkie – the 97% of the country too busy working.)

The last time a Republican really won an election with a confident mandate was also the last time a true Conservative ran. And the blueprint is so simple it inspires disbelief. Yet there it is: Believe in (and understand) The Constitution and its limits on government overtly designed to preserve Liberty, believe in the American people and our uniquely American sense of individualism, and be able to speak in complete sentences.

In this second edition of Reagan 180, a three minute excerpt from Ronald Reagan’s 1979 announcement of his candidacy for president is a short sample of what proved to be the blueprint for two massive electoral landslides. He didn’t promise to give this program or that program. He promised to get Washington the hell out of the way. He wanted to go to Washington to affect it’s doing less, not more.

It seems counter-intuitive to today’s DC Republicans. No way anyone can campaign and win on doing and giving away less. But landslides don’t lie. They’re not close enough to be debatable.

How many are in DC today to reign it in and have it do less, returning many functions to the states to decide and carry out as constructed and instructed by the Constitution? How many “believe in (and understand) The Constitution and its limits on government overtly designed to preserve Liberty, believe in the American people and our uniquely American sense of individualism”? And how many of those left standing can communicate in complete sentences, all by themselves like big boys and girls? Talk about culling the herd.

Well, that’s all it takes to get the American public behind a candidate and his or her administration that moves inside the beltway from somewhere comfortably outside it before the election. The blueprint is right there. But if you don’t share the beliefs, you’ll resist and ridicule the example. And there you have it. In less than 3 minutes of audio.