Reclaim Conservatism

John Hawkins offers Six Keys to Turning Around The Republican Party. Over the next week I hope to examine each of those keys in detail. For this morning let’s just take a look at his introduction and list the keys that he sees.

If we want to fix what ails the Republican Party, it’s worth taking a few moments to diagnose what went wrong, while acknowledging what the Democrats did right. Once we’ve diagnosed the disease and figured out how another patient overcame similar problems, we can start to get the GOP’s health back on track.

First off, the Republican Party succeeded from 2000-2004, not — as some people think — because they softened their ideological edges, but because the GOP had an edge over the Democrats on foreign policy issues, which were the dominant issues of those election cycles. However, by the 2006 election, the war in Iraq had turned into a net negative for the GOP and domestic issues — where the party’s agenda has become stale and out of step with the base — had become much more important.

The image that I’ve had regarding this is that conservatives, operating under the Republican Party umbrella, have been offering the cheep store brand product and trying to tell us it’s the same as the name brand.

Here are John’s Keys that we are going to discuss:

1. The job of the loyal opposition is to oppose
2. Stop conceding so many groups of voters
3. Rebuild the party brand
4. Expanding our domestic agenda
5. Support the home team
6. Stop thinking that the rules of politics don’t apply to Republicans

You (and I) may not agree with John’s assessment, but it is a good place to start a discussion. Check back later for the discussion of the first key.

As always, your comments are welcome and encouraged.

Cross-posted from bRight & Early.