The Conservative Revolution

Author Amity Shlaes has a great piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about how president-elect Obama’s FDR style plan for “economic recovery” will only make things worse. She debunks Paul Krugman’s arguments about the great depression and his ideas about what the U.S. should do in response to the current financial problems.

What kept the picture so dark so long? Deflation for one, but also the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector. New Dealers raised taxes again and again to fund spending. The New Dealers also insisted on higher wages when businesses could ill afford them. Roosevelt, for example, signed into law first his National Recovery Administration, whose codes forced businesses to pay an above-market minimum wage, and then the Wagner Act, which gave union workers more power.

Let’s hope that we don’t have to undergo the same government-created problems in the future.

As The Politico reports, there is growing evidence that the earth has been cooling, not warming, since 1998. As liberals in Congress begin to push for “cap and trade” to deal with the ostensible “global warming” phenomenon, their case for doing something is falling apart. As one scientist told Politico,

“We’re worried that people are too focused on carbon dioxide as the culprit,” D’Aleo said. “Recent warming has stopped since 1998, and we want to stop draconian measures that will hurt already spiraling downward economics. We’re environmentalists and conversationalist at heart, but we don’t think that carbon is responsible for hurricanes.”

FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe has an outstanding piece up on USNews.com about the automakers bailout being discussed by Congress. He makes the point that labor union shakedowns and a bad business model are to blame for the Detroit 3’s troubles.

Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for these companies. Let them compete on a level playing field with the rest of the auto industry. They should file chapter 11 bankruptcy if they need to restructure. Here is a great quote from the piece:

High labor costs and inflexible work rules, staggering legacy costs, an unwieldy dealer network, and a failure to overcome negative consumer sentiments have combined to bring Detroit’s automakers to their knees. To put it bluntly, the Big Three remain weighed down by unmanageable legacy costs resulting from unrealistic union contracts made decades ago, leaving the car manufacturers no flexibility to respond to market changes.

Read the rest of the article here.

I’ve been in Atlanta this weekend organizing volunteers for a massive Get Out the Vote operation for the Georgia Senate race between Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democrat challenger Jim Martin. Although I’m not a big fan of Chambliss (he voted for the Wall St. Bailout) I fear what the liberals will do if they have a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate.

I’ve been going door to door and placing flyers in parking lots in Atlanta, Buckhead and Roswell. FreedomWorks also has a bunch of volunteers deployed all over the Atlanta area, including Duluth, Sandy Springs, Kennesaw, Stone Mountain, Decatur, Lawrenceville and Lilburn. Our goal is to put out 85,000 pieces of campaign literature leading up to election day. We are on pace to do just that.

I’m confident that the Democrats won’t win this race, but even if Chambliss wins, conservatives have a lot of work to do. As I told my Atlanta FreedomWorks chapter, we need to rebuild the grassroots conservative movement and immediately begin to hold Chambliss and the other politicians in Washington accountable. FreedomWorks plans to do just that, by stealing a page out of the Obama playbook. We are enacting a two-year plan of a major community organizing effort in key battleground states, from New Hampshire, to Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia and Virginia.

Conservatives must not wait until the next election to get involved. We must begin to take ownership of our our precincts, counties and congressional districts and we must organize monthly meetings to get ready to take on the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda next year. If you would like to join this national effort to rebuild along the principles of lower taxes, less government and more freedom, please let me know. Sign up at FreedomWorks.org and let us know that you want to start a conservative club in your own community. Town by town, city by city and county by county we can take our country back.

Conservative leader Rep. Jeff Flake has decided to run for a seat on the House Appropriations Committee. Readers of this blog will recall FreedomWorks’ campaign to support his previous run with our petition site Make It Flake. Unfortunately the House Republicans denied Flake the seat.

Flake is a tireless defender of liberty and small government. If the House Republicans are serious about reforming the party, they will quickly move to give Flake a seat on the committee. If House Republicans don’t do this, they will be telling us that they still have not learned their lesson.

Let’s hope that they make the right decision and support Jeff Flake for a seat on the House Appropriations Committee.

So far the Republican Party is trying to figure out how to reform itself and begin to rebuild for the future. Most of what I’ve heard from rising stars like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona is good. They are on message when it comes to how the party should behave, and how it should communicate its message. Both of these leaders are pocketbook conservatives, and recognize the need for the party to clean house, behave as conservatives and offer a reform message for the economic issues that voters care about. Jindal in particular has been saying great things about the future of the GOP.

As for the conservative activists out there, they need to understand one thing in particular: we have got to organize better than we have in the past. We have to learn from Barack Obama’s community organizing, not jeer at it. One blog in particular that is focused on teaching activists and bloggers some useful tips about how we go about that is The Next Right. While they are focused more on grassroots fundraising and blogging, The Next Right bloggers also understand the importance of grassroots building and campaigning. Soren Dayton writes,

In the end, the Obama campaign’s various technologies for fundraising, GOTV, and communications were side shows. They all derived from a much more fundamental innovation. Rolling Stone described the most important insight of the Obama campaign from one of their trainers: “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers. We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.”…

You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.

Exactly. This one reason that I have been introducing my interns and field organizers to the ideas and tactics of radical organizer Saul Alinsky. His ideas were very influential in the organizing skills learned and employed by Barack Obama as a community organizer in Chicago, as well as a candidate for president. Now, Obama has institutionalized his revolution with the introduction of something we’ve never seen before: a committed grassroots force of 10 million Americans who he can count on to support his agenda with lobbying, fundraising and campaigning.

Until the right begins to think like revolutionaries, as the left does, we will be stuck in the wildnerness. But combine the support of our future leaders like Jindal and Flake with the community organizing that needs to happen, and we will be able to lead our own revolution in the future after 8 years of Obama/Reid/Pelosi socialism.

This weekend I fly to Atlanta to organize a cadre of FreedomWorks volunteers to do some GOTV for the Senate runoff election on Dec. 2nd. Although Sen. Chambliss is not a conservative stalwart, I fear the worst if the Democrats get 60 votes in the Senate. This would mean that no one could stop their onslaught of bad policy, from union giveaways like “card check” to socialized medicine and “cap and trade.”

I’ll be working with our field team to organize a dozen meetings around Georgia, from Columbus in the west, to Atlanta, to Savannah in the east of the state. We will be going door to door with information about the two candidates in the race, and hope to move 100,000 pieces of voter education materials in the next couple of weeks.

All conservatives around the country should do what they can to make an impact on this race. Call the state GOP in Georgia and volunteer a few hours to make sure that liberals don’t get a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate.

The San Francisco State University College Republicans posted this crazy video of left-wing activists trying to shut down an interview of a pro-traditional marriage activist in Palm Springs. Watch the end of the clip as the left-wing activists knock down a Christian cross and begin stomping on it.

The true nature of the far left is captured on video once again. Jonah Goldberg was on to something when he wrote his best-selling book Liberal Fascism. This is the same kind of thing I experienced as a student at UT when the leftist activists would attack us by taking our signs and ripping them apart or yelling loud enough to effectively silence our speakers.

Get ready for the coming liberal thugocracy. Next up, union bullying and the end to secret ballots for union organizing. After that, look for the “fairness doctrine” to be imposed to silence folks like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

This piece in the Wall Street Journal outlines how Barack Obama’s grassroots donors and activists will be mobilized to support his ideas as president. Quite frankly, this is a brilliant strategy and I wish the right could figure out how to organize this well. Certainly the timing and the historic nature of Obama’s rise is important in all of this, but his organizational skills are superb.

“What the Obama candidacy has shown is that he understood the importance and usefulness of new technology,” said Harold Ickes, a Democratic strategist who organized voter data for the Obama campaign. “It seems to me that the grass-roots data he used to run his campaign can be transferred into a tool to support legislation and other initiatives.”

This online and offline army of volunteers will be flooding Congress with phone calls, faxes and emails, and getting involved in the elections of those that don’t support President Obama’s policies. This means that Barack Obama has just institutionalized his revolution, which will continue to rely upon his volunteers to “be the change we’ve been waiting for.”

Obama is so far ahead of organizers on the right, and we all should quickly learn from his campaign and gear up the conservative movement to take on his worst ideas as president. We should also build a similar movement on the right that is ready to get behind our rising stars like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana or Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

Whoever our future leaders in the conservative movement are, we need to invest in the infrastructure now to be ready for 2012 and 2016.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) is calling for the Senate to expel convicted felon Senator Ted Stevens. As Politico reports, Stevens wants time to appeal his case, although he has already been convicted by one jury for corruption. The Republican Party should not wait for the appeal, but should force Stevens to leave the Senate. Otherwise, it will show that it is not serious about changing its ways and becoming a reform party once more.

It looks like Stevens will be re-elected, although the votes are still being counted. If indeed, he is elected, he should either resign or be forced out. Then, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin can appoint a new Senator to represent the state in Washington, D.C. This is a chance for Sen. Mitch McConnell to show leadership and initiative by starting the process of ridding the Republican Party of one of its most corrupt members. If he fails to show leadership it will be a huge mistake and will reflect poorly on the GOP, which still seems to learn its lesson before it changes.