Peggy Noonan claimed, correctly in my opinion, that the Tea Party saved the Republican party (Why It’s Time for the Tea Party -The populist movement is more a critique of the GOP than a wing of it, Wall Street Journal / Opinion Journal, September 17, 2010). A year ago (The Democrat’s Fragile Advantage – August 18, 2009)  I stated that the Republicans will not be resurrected by the same old faces. The future of the Republicans are not the faces of Gingrich, Huckabee, Romney, McCain, or even Palin. It is the face of Chris Christie of New Jersey, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, and Marco Rubio of Florida and others. They are clear speakers with substance rather than mere eloquence and  real governing experience.  They are both knowledgeable and intelligent.

This is not to suggest that the old guard are bad candidates or not qualified.  It is just to suggest that change may require new faces with new energy.  Competence and experience  must also count.

The Democrats are relying on old faces (by old I do not mean aged, but stagnant) but the drawing power of the Clintons has become as irrelevant as the Republican old guard. The Democrats need some new faces with new energy.  Obama’s claim to bring new ideas and change has been nothing more than the rehashing of failed old ideas.

Just as the Republicans were pulled from the ashes by a grass roots movement the same can happen for the Democrats.  If the Republicans can restrain their movement from succumbing to ethnocentric intolerance they will retain the independent voters. If the Democrats can restore the fiscal common sense of Clinton or Kennedy while regaining the reputation for tolerance and openness their brand will be sustained.

If both parties will discuss the issues with some actual depth rather than partisan bickering and juvenile behaviors the voters may benefit as well.

I do not pretend to speak for the other voters.  I was fortunate to be traveling during much of October so I missed most of the trash and noise masquerading as campaign information.  I truly do not care about college pranks, high school indiscretions, or even disagreements on some interpretations of constitutional intentions. I don’t care if you have made a bad loan or business decision in your life, if you were divorced, if you served in Viet Nam, what you read or what you don’t read.  I don’t care if someone in your family cured cancer, won the Nobel Prize or was convicted of rape.

I don’t care what position you played on the high school or college football team. I don’t believe any candidate hates children, the elderly, baseball, women, or poor people.  I don’t care what your religion is or isn’t, how often you go to church, or whether you teach Sunday school.

I don’t care if you smoked pot in college or got a DUI 20 years ago.

What I do care is that:

You will vote against the Union Card Check Bill.

You will vote against Cap and Trade.

You will vote to repeal the Health Care Bill.

You will vote for sane regulation rather than government micromanagement of industry and the economy.

You recognize that no group of elites understands the economy as much as all of the American consumers and producers do.

You respect the citizens who know better how to run their lives and their families than anybody in Washington.

You will think long and hard before your send Americans to die on foreign soil, or interfere in the affairs of other nations.

You recognize that we are a nation of laws; not a nation of ideologies.

From the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, OCTOBER 28, 2010
There They Went Again
The 111th Congress fits a familiar Democratic pattern.

In the midst of the final moments of another contentious election The Wall Street Journal points out a pattern that it seems no one has  yet learned.  The Republicans fall out of favor in a substantial way: Watergate, Iraq etc. The Democrats take both Congress and the White House, proceed to govern  hard left and are then quickly shown the door. Yet again they have read the voters’ signals wrong. The rejection of Nixon or Bush was not a mandate to govern from the hard left.

Excerpts:

Far from being a unique historical event, a GOP victory on Tuesday will repeat the pattern we have seen since the 1960s. Four times Democrats have won control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and four times they have attempted to govern from the left. Each time Americans saw that agenda and its results, and they rejected it at an early opportunity. Maybe there’s a lesson here.

The larger lesson is that we are learning for the fourth time in 45 years that America can’t be governed from the left. Democrats exploited the recession and the accident of 60 Senate seats to push the agenda of their dreams, and the American public has recoiled at the effrontery and the results. Repairing the damage of the 111th Congress will take years, and perhaps decades, but the first step is ousting the liberals who once again drove their party off a cliff.

In the October 2010 Commentary Magazine Jeff Jacoby writes What Public Sector Unions have wrought (subscription required for full access). An excerpt:

Organized labor in the United States achieved a milestone in 2009 that once would have been unthinkable: for the first time, union members working in government jobs outnumbered those working in the private sector.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the number of unionized private employees fell last year to 7.4 million. That represented just 7.2 percent of the private-sector labor force, the lowest proportion in over a century. By contrast, union membership in the public sector topped 7.9 million, or 37.4 percent of all federal, state, and local government jobs. The share of government workers belonging to labor unions, in other words, is more than five times the unionized share of the private sector. Union membership in private industry peaked at 35.7 percent in 1953 and has dwindled ever since. In the public sector, unions surpassed that level years ago and show no sign of weakening.

There was a time when even pro-labor Democrats objected to public-sector unionism. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the head of the National Federation of Federal Employees. In the private sector, organized employees and the employer meet across the bargaining table as (theoretical) equals. But in the public sector, said FDR, “the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.” Allowing public-employee unions to engage in collective bargaining would mean opening the door to the manipulation of government policy by a privileged private interest.

from the Wall Street Journal online Notable & Quotable
Former George W. Bush adviser Mark McKinnon on union funding for political campaigns.

Former George W. Bush campaign adviser Mark McKinnon, writing at The Daily Beast, Oct. 24:

A record $87.5 million has been spent by one union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to elect Democrats. Paid not by voluntary contributions from its members, but by forced union dues from workers—who are paid by taxpayers. . . .

Contrary to what Obama and the Democrats would have us believe, the Tea Party is largely fueled by small- dollar donations from American citizens in amounts of $200 or less. Beyond being untrue and unproven, the Obama money charges against Republicans are completely hypocritical. The guy who promised to “change Washington” completely reversed his promise during the campaign to abide by the limits of public financing. The Obama campaign spent almost $1 billion—and $400 million was spent by outside groups on his behalf, most of which did not disclose their donors. Now we discover unions are the largest outside spenders in this election, not the Chamber [of Commerce] or groups tied to Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

HKO addition- over half of union membership in the U.S. are now government workers.