Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Hmmmm....

With the exception of the concern over health care, National Review could be talking about me in their cover story about the conservative base being the problem because we're out of step with the American people.

I've long said "look at the statistics!" with respect to economic circumstances and tend to think of global warming as the biggest hoax since The War of the Worlds. (I just wanted to use that analogy - I actually think it's likely true. But climate, like the weather, changes and even if it is caused by man there's no way we'll reduce emissions let alone China! You talk about your pipe dreams, that's the pipe-iest!)

But NR says that conservative base needs a wake-up call:

The deepest cause of the party’s malaise is not the inadequacies of the presidential field. It is that the party’s base is out of step with the public. On issue after issue, polls find independents lining up with Democrats.

Take the economy. Republicans are much happier with their economic circumstances than Democrats: 81 percent of the former, and only 54 percent of the latter, express satisfaction. Independents are exactly where the Democrats are. At their recent economic debate, however, most of the Republican candidates essentially advised dissatisfied Americans to look up some economic statistics to see how well things are going. The ones who acknowledged public gloom proffered protectionism as a remedy.

Or take global warming. The public thinks it is real and worrisome, but is not ready to embrace liberal policies that would drastically reduce economic growth. Republicans would have an opening here, if so many of them had not persuaded themselves that global warming is a hoax.

If the public debate is confined to a choice between people who brush off public concerns and those who offer bad solutions, the latter group will win. Conservatives, right now, are not offering better solutions. And because the Republican base is not demanding those solutions, the competitive dynamic of the primary is not producing them. For most of the year, the Republican presidential debates have featured barely a word about health care, the public’s most pressing domestic concern. The leading GOP candidates have belatedly put out plans (except for Thompson, who still hasn’t) — to the seeming indifference of rank-and-file conservative voters.

Instead, the competition is taking Republicans farther and farther away from a connection with the public. Giuliani has broken with the base of the party, but only in ways that will not help with the larger electorate...Romney and Thompson, meanwhile, are fighting over who is the most conventional, paint-by-numbers conservative circa 1987. Creative domestic policy is off the table.
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We don’t have to support “universal coverage” on health care. But we ought to talk more about health care than about the budget; and when we talk about health care, we should explain how Republican policies will help people keep and control their own health care. We don’t have to abandon attempts to reform the tax code and to drop the top tax rate. But we should put much more effort into providing tax relief for middle-class parents. We don’t have to open the borders. But we should make it clear that our immigration policy isn’t based on anger. We don’t have to give up on the idea that sometimes the U.S. must fight wars, even going it alone; but we need to persuade people that we see unilateral military action as a last resort — that we’re not spoiling for a fight.

One unintended consequence of the Iraq War was that it took all the oxygen off the table (there's my Yogi Berra-ism for the week) for other projects. With the war (rightfully) dominating everything, there was no way Bush could seriously address the one thing that is the problem of exploding health care costs, which negatively impact every sector of the economy since employers help pay for them. It not only slows economic growth but increases the already soaring-cost of education since teachers need health care plans too. And I haven't mentioned soon-to-be-bankrupt Medicare. It's almost a sin that Bush effectively ignored this issue for eight years.

We have to use market strategies to lower the cost of health care, which would surely involve (in part) people paying for routine doctors visits that they currently get "free" or at a small cost. Because if anything is supplied for free demand increases infinitely.