Freedom Dogs

Pat Shortridge, President of New Majority Project,has the let's roll up our sleeves and seriously evaluate our strengths and weaknesses approach in this piece published at National Review Online today. Starting with the "Yes We Can" title you might think this will be a rah rah aricle. Not so. He has some good solutions and thankfully they are not the same as I am hearing from Frum, Gingrich, and the we gotta change our ways crowd:

Right now, most people couldn’t tell you what it means to be a Republican, or what John McCain stands for other than continuing the war in Iraq. That’s not to say that there aren’t good ideas floating around (amongst the many bad ones), but they haven’t been presented in any sort of consistent, coherent way.

One of the fundamental Republican mistakes, led also by House Republicans, was in adopting the Tip O’Neill mantra of “all politics is local” following the 1998 election losses and Clinton impeachment. Rather than pushing big ideas, they began focusing on “accomplishments” — that’s earmarks to you and me — and gave up on seriously pursuing the Big Four limited government reforms that everyone knows are necessary and politically potent (tax reform, Social Security reform, health care reform, and education reform).

Conservatives who are genuinely interested in creating a 21st-century, limited-government conservative movement must pursue these big issues even though they are hard. Defeating Communism and reforming welfare were hard, but conservatives vigorously pursued them over a period of decades, not just an election cycle or two. They were the right policies and they paid political dividends, because in the process, we defined ourselves and the liberals.

Read the rest at NRO