The most successful Republican presidential candidate of the
past half century — Ronald Reagan, who was elected and reelected
with landslide victories — bore little resemblance to the moderate
candidates that Republican conventional wisdom depicts as the key
to victory, even though most of these moderate candidates have in
fact gone down to defeat.
One of the biggest differences between Reagan and these
latter-day losers was that Reagan paid great attention to
explaining his policies and values. He was called “the great
communicator,” but much more than a gift for words was involved.
The issues that defined Reagan’s vision were things he had thought
about, written about and debated for years before he reached the
White House.
Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line
of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed
against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is
not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for
the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things
long before the game began, and now just need to execute.
Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any
sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for
example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he
indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum wage rate,
so that it would rise automatically with inflation.
That sounds fine. But the cold fact is that minimum wage laws
create massive unemployment among black teenagers. Conversely, one
of the lowest rates of unemployment among black teenagers occurred
in the 1940s, when inflation virtually repealed the minimum wage
law passed in 1938, since even unskilled labor was paid more in
inflated dollars than the minimum wage law required.
Even during the recession year of 1949, black teenage
unemployment was a fraction of what it would be in the most
prosperous later years, after the minimum wage rate was raised
repeatedly to keep pace with inflation. One of the few benefits of
inflation is that it can in effect repeal minimum wage laws, which
politicians can do directly only by risking their reelection.
Conservative opposition to minimum wage laws is just one of the
ways that conservative principles often work out to benefit those
with lower incomes, more so than liberal principles that sound so
much better as political rhetoric.
It seems unlikely that Governor Romney had time to learn about
such things during this year’s busy election campaign. He was like
a rookie quarterback with just a few seconds to try to figure out
the opposing team’s complex formations before the ball is
snapped.
One of the secrets of Barack Obama’s success is his ability to
say things that will sound both plausible and inspiring to
uninformed people, even when they sound ridiculous to people who
know the facts. Apparently he believes the former outnumber the
latter, and the election results suggest that he may be right.
Since most of the media will never expose Obama’s fallacies and
falsehoods, it is all the more important for Republicans to do so
themselves. Nor is it necessary for every Republican candidate for
every office to become an expert on every controversial issue.
Just as particular issues are farmed out to different committees
in Congress, so Republicans can set up committees of outside
experts to inform them on particular issues.
For example, a committee on income and poverty could be headed
by an expert like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This is
a subject on which demonstrable falsehoods have become the norm,
and one on which devastating refutations in plain English are
readily available from a number of sources.
A committee on the counterproductive effects of liberal policies
such as minimum wage laws on minorities could be headed by someone
like economist Walter Williams. Here too, there are many writings
in plain English that could expose the huge harm done to minorities
by liberal policies that claim to be helping them.
It is not necessary to explode every single lie put out by
liberal Democrats. All that is necessary is to thoroughly discredit
a few of their key claims, exposing them as liars.
What is even more necessary is for Republicans themselves to
understand the urgent need to do so, for their own sake and — more
important — for the country’s sake.
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