The late Lee Atwater used to say that “issues win campaigns”, and he was exactly right. While on their face those may not seem like the most brilliant words of political wisdom ever uttered, they are simple, profound and accurate. And much of the Republican leadership seems to have either forgotten them, or just refuse to pay heed.

From Senate races all around the country comes word of Republican incumbents in tight races, with several of them in danger of losing their seats this fall. And nationally, the President has been doing good to bump up against a 40% job approval rating, depending on the poll in question.

So how do we win in this political environment? You do it by changing the environment. While we can and should do all the get-out-the-vote hocus pocus we can, in the end it takes issues.

And just what are the central GOP issues this year? Those of us who are familiar with the inside baseball of politics can pretty much quote the laundry list we would (and should) hear in response to that question. National security, Iraq, “values” issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, and judges. But what is the general public actually seeing and associating with the Republican Party?

Sure, we have had a few votes on bills dealing with important social issues, but almost all of them go down to defeat. All we get are token votes that can be highlighted in the fall, but nothing that has truly excited the party base, much less the general public.

In fact, the issue that’s drawn the most attention in Congress and the highest public profile, immigration, has been one where the GOP isn’t unified and where the base is adamantly opposed to half of what is being proposed.

The problem is that we haven’t had a galvanizing and unifying fight lately, and on most issues the Democrats have wisely avoided such public political brawls. They are all too happy to let things coast as they are now on through November.

For our part, we can’t simply sit back and try to run out the clock. For that to work, you’ve got to be ahead in the game. And we can’t win by playing defense either. You don’t score points that way. We have to go on offense and take the initiative away from the other side.

Simply put, we cannot afford the status quo. We need a fight. And if the Democrats don’t want to give us one, we have to go and pick one with them on an issue they can’t afford to ignore. And we have to pick an issue that presents us with favorable terms of debate and that fires up our troops.

That issue is judges. Specifically, Senate confirmation of conservative judges. It is an issue that has united Republicans all across the country and helped produce victory in three succeeding elections.

Most recently, before the 2004 election, the GOP Senate leadership kept it on the front burner by forcing the issue of up or down votes on President Bush’s judicial nominations. It was something near and dear to the party base, but it was also easily understood as an issue of fairness by many in the general public.

The issue worked and we still have a Republican President and a Republican Congress – not to mention two new conservative justices on the Supreme Court. It’s hard to argue with results.

I sincerely hope we don’t look back on the results of the 2006 elections in ten years time and realize that this is what kept us from being able to solidify a truly conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in generations.

We’ve lost such opportunities before. As a result of losing the Senate majority in 1986, President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court was defeated at the hands of the Democrats. After the smoke cleared, we ended up with Justice Kennedy, hardly a conservative stalwart.

Close your eyes and imagine a Justice Bork sitting along side Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. The mere thought makes conservatives giddy. It’s what could have been, if we had a Republican majority at the time.

There’s a scene in the movie Braveheart where William Wallace is about to ride out and meet the British general for a parlay, and he is asked by his friend where he was going. “To pick a fight”, he replied. To which his friend said, “Well, we didn’t get dressed up for nothing”. Exactly. They needed a fight because the status quo was unacceptable and the only way to change it was by fighting.

Unless something changes, and the leadership gives the party base something to fight for, come November we may have gotten dressed up for nothing.

 

The state of Arizona is making a play for the distinction of implementing one of the absolute worst ideas ever to promote good citizenship.

With the ostensible goal of increasing interest in voting and thereby voter turnout, Arizonans will be faced this November with what is known as the Voter Reward Act. It is a referendum that would create a million dollar lottery awarded to a randomly chosen voter who cast a ballot in any given election. In other words, bribery.

The only real wonder is that it has taken so long to come to this.

Over a decade ago, in response to the manufactured crisis of low-voter registration rates, the federal government mandated that states begin registering people to vote when they received driver’s licenses and at agencies providing welfare related assistance. It also mandated that states allow mail-in voter registration.

Aside from the obvious problem of federalism (does anyone even worry about such niceties any more?), it also created several other problems. It made the job of committing voter fraud much easier, (“mail-in” registration!), and it made it more difficult for states to purge their rolls of inactive voters, (names which are more likely to be used in cases of fraud.)

The law did actually do one thing its supporters suggested, it increased the raw number of Americans registered to vote. What it didn’t do was make these newly minted voters any more interested in participating in the civic process than they were to begin with. As a result, the overall percentage of registered voter turnout dropped, which in turn gave the politicians a new dragon to slay – low voter turnout.

In response, many states have suffered under an array of new “solutions”, such as absentee balloting for no reason whatsoever, which then evolved into “early voting” in some states starting the balloting process as much as thirty days before Election Day (an increasingly meaningless term).

Oregon took it a step further and moved to an entirely mail-in balloting system, while others have moved to Election Day voter registration which allows you to both register and vote at the same time.

Those are just the bad ideas that have actually been tried. Some progressive agitators are even calling for doing away with registration entirely, while others have proposed that the federal government force states to drop prohibitions against felons voting once they’re out of prison. Worse yet, some (such as Jesse Jackson) advocate letting criminals vote from the comfort of their jail cells. No increase in the chance of fraud there.

Simultaneously, these intrepid progressives have opposed measures that would actually reduce the opportunities to commit voter fraud. Most notably, laws that require the production of a photo ID when you show up at the polls, in order to prove that you are indeed who you say you are. Shouldn’t we demand at least as much security in our election process as we do over cashing a check at the bank?

Now comes Arizona with the latest scheme, bribing people to vote. State sponsored lotteries are bad enough but “election” lotteries? And what kind of signal does this send to those who are already inclined to vote more than once? It’s an invitation to fraud, plain and simple.

What’s next, scratch-and-win ballots? How about making everyone who votes in two or three consecutive elections eligible for a “Powerball” style election lottery? I should probably stop giving them ideas.

Any scheme that opens the door to more fraud is always portrayed as absolutely necessary, while anything that seeks to make the process more honest and secure is portrayed as a violation of someone’s civil rights. And it’s all a load of bunk unless you’re worried about the voting rights of illegal aliens, criminals, or dead people.

What this is really about, ultimately, is naked political gamesmanship. Liberals want a more open process that would create more opportunities for fraud because they know by experience that it works – for them. It has been a regular part of their get-out-the-vote strategy for decades.

This doesn’t even begin to address the issue of how “interested” we truly want those who cast ballots to be. Do we really want the participation of those that don’t care enough to register to vote? Or people who just don’t want to wait in line at the polls on Election Day?

And do we really want people to vote who otherwise wouldn’t do so unless they were bribed with a shot a million dollar payday?

Citizenship isn’t just about rights and benefits. It’s also about responsibility. Our problem is that we have too many politicians who want to coddle people into forgetting that fact.

Drew McKissick is a Columbia, SC based political consultant.  He regular blog is maintained at Conservative Outpost.

Hooray for the Supreme Court. Yes, believe it or not, they actually do deserve some praise. Specifically the members of the majority who recently held that Vermont’s restrictive campaign finance laws violated the First Amendment’s free speech provisions.

This development comes at an opportune time in our political history. Currently, our free speech rights are besieged by politicians using the boogeyman of political corruption to build support for laws which themselves corrupt our political system by limiting our ability to participate in it.

The most egregious national example is the 2001 Bi-partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, (AKA McCain-Feingold), which placed severe limits on the ability of Americans, acting as individuals or as groups, to participate in our nation’s political discourse within arbitrary time periods prior to elections. This bill was upheld by a five-to-four majority of the Supreme Court in 2003.

The difference between then and now? Samuel Alito. Sandra Day O’Connor, whom Alito replaced, was the deciding vote in upholding McCain-Feingold, while a few weeks ago Alito was part of the majority that threw out the Vermont statute, (as was newly appointed Chief Justice Roberts).

In other words, thanks to Bush’s Supreme Court appointments, we’re getting a Court that is becoming more interested in protecting freedom of political speech and less interested in allowing government to police how people participate in our political system.

In fact, three of the current justices are on record as wanting to go as far as overturning the Court’s 1976 precedent, Buckley vs. Valeo, which allowed the government to set campaign contribution limits. This means that we now have three justices who think the government has no business regulating political spending or contributions, and two others that thought Vermont’s campaign spending restrictions violated free speech. Good news for those who believe in the First Amendment.

In the meantime the free speech reformers are at it again, this time in court, with two of the original proponents of McCain-Feingold suing the Federal Election Commission for not being restrictive enough of political speech in how it applied the law. Based on the results in the Vermont case, it looks like they may be doing those who care about free speech a favor, perhaps putting us within a year of the Supreme Court revisiting McCain-Feingold and throwing it out altogether.

Thanks to the ongoing crusade for campaign finance “reform”, political speech is one of the least protected forms of speech in America. Everything from flag burning to the distribution of virtual child pornography is protected, but not a group of citizens that wish to convince public officials to support their cause by airing TV ads within sixty days of an election. Does that sound like what the Founding Fathers had in mind with the First Amendment?

This is critical, as the Founders recognized political free speech as the key ingredient to maintaining a free society. If there is no freedom of political speech, then other rights secured by the political process are endangered.

While I’m not in the habit of quoting Justice Kennedy, an excerpt from his concurring opinion in the Vermont case is instructive in the current debate over “reform”. He states that:

“The First Amendment guarantees our citizens the right to judge for themselves the most effective means for the expression of political views and to decide for themselves which entities to trust as reliable speakers… These new laws force speakers to abandon their own preference for speaking through parties and organizations. And they provide safe harbor to the mainstream press, suggesting that the corporate media alone suffice to alleviate the burdens (placed) on the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”

He went on to state that such “reform” is an “effort by Congress to ensure that civic discourse takes place only through the modes of its choosing”. Ditto.

Notice that the proponents of such reform tend to be either members of the press or incumbent politicians that want to avoid having their records highlighted before the voting public.

Who do you trust to provide you with the information you need to cast an informed ballot when you step into the voting booth? Citizen driven organizations, or politicians and the media? Even if the answer is none of the above, shouldn’t citizens at least be on an equal footing?

We are currently suffering from a pestilence of “reformist” politicians. They eagerly work to manufacture a political issue which will, serendipitously, provide job security by giving them the ability to restrict the effectiveness of political opponents in the future.

It’s good to see the high court on our side for a change.

This just in. It has recently been discovered that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have access to a technologically sophisticated, multi-million dollar intelligence gathering operation. It has agents on all continents, and sources within every agency of the US government. Even worse, this organization is actively being shielded from disruption by the American court system. It goes by the nickname “The Gray Lady”, but is officially known as The New York Times.

No information is too secret, no secret too important to national security not to be revealed in its pages, all in the name of the “public interest”.

Last week, the Times took it upon itself to reveal the US government’s top secret program to track the international financial transactions of terrorists. This is the same New York Times that six months ago revealed to terrorists that the US was secretly listening to their phone calls. This is also the same New York Times that in December of 2001, tipped off a terrorist front organization in New York, known as the Global Relief Foundation, that it was about to be raided by the FBI.

All of which begs the question, “what do you have to do to get locked up for treason in this country?”

If a news organization had pulled this type of stunt during WWII, revealing our intelligence gathering practices against the Germans or Japanese, someone would have gone to jail.

It would be nice to think that these people truly comprehend that we are in a war. That they appreciate that there are people in this world who want to kill Americans, who would love to acquire weapons that would do far more damage than what we experienced on September 11^th. People that wouldn’t hesitate to incinerate New York City or Washington, DC if they could.

In truth, the fact that they can’t is all that’s stopping them. But give them enough time and money and they will be successful, which is why our government is trying to find and kill them before they have a chance. Letting them know how we are trying to prevent them from being successful gives them aid and comfort, the Constitutional definition of treason.

So what should be done? At a minimum, Attorney General Gonzales should have the Justice Department start an investigation into the source of the leak, and lock up any New York Times personnel that refuse to reveal it. Congress should immediately begin to hold hearings on the Times’ publication of this information, and examine the practices of the media in such circumstances.

Haul the editors and publishers in front of the TV cameras and make THEM the news. Hopefully, this will give some pause to the next joker that insists on disclosing national security secrets in the name of the public’s “right to know”.

Beyond our “right to know”, (or the media’s “right to tell”), we have a much more important constitutionally guaranteed right; the right to life. Specifically, the right to expect our government to do everything it can do to prevent all enemies, foreign or domestic, from killing us. The New York Times endangered that right, and thereby endangered us all.

In offering the Times’ excuse for exposing the classified program, Editor Bill Keller stated, ““We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.” Yeah? It’s also a matter of “terrorist’s interest”.

It’s in the public interest that the government be successful in protecting them from terrorists. It’s in the public interest that the government find and prosecute those who leaked this information to the New York Times. And it’s in the public interest that the Times be held accountable.

For several years, I’ve had a bumper sticker on my car asking, “Who would Osama vote for?”. Maybe it’s time to switch it for something like, “The NYT: All the news a terrorist can use”.