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Memo to Leader McCarthy: Talk About Pocketbook Issues, Not Freedom
From a good friend:
Listening to Uncommon Knowledge with Kevin McCarthy at the gym. The new House Majority Leader is making a big mistake. Why do conservatives keep using LIBERTY! in every interview? It adds zero-content and non-conservatives think it’s weird.
I need to be able to convince my moderate or self-critical liberal friends that Rick Perry or Rand Paul or Ted Cruz would be a great president. LIBERTY! is the worst conversational tactic imaginable (aside from pulling a Santorum on birth control).
Revolutionaries in Third World countries can shout LIBERTY! They have real dictatorships to fight. My friends don’t know why conservatives in the greatest nation on earth keep shouting LIBERTY! as though we are still a colony. We live in a country of incredible political and economic freedom. Sure, I wish we could sunset a few federal agencies, switch to a flat tax, implement a modern gold standard, etc. But America is awesome.
The GOP nominee in 2016 should make himself the Cost of Living Candidate. Pledge to aggressively cut specific taxes and regulations that will measurably reduce the cost of living in Americans’ energy, education, housing, and health care expenditures. Promise that when you’re done cutting, you will voucherize whatever program or subsidies are left standing.
That guy would win a lot of votes. He can then stand in the Rose Garden and shout LIBERTY! for his entire second term.
Well, good people of Ricochet, who’s right? My friend or Congressman McCarthy?
Listen to the whole episode here:
Published in General
He is right they need to be shouting TYRANNY, because if you destroy tyranny you get liberty.
McCarthy is right. Liberty is the foundation on which tax cuts and regulatory relief can be built.
Is your friend Mike Murphy? Come on, you can tell us.
I’ll watch Mr McCarthy later (and check my pocketbook after I do — I don’t trust these leadership guys). But LIBERTY seems a better way to get attention than the ‘focus on the economy’ stuff Sen McRomney and former Gov Cain tried.
Now, if your friend is saying the GOP should stop mouthing platitudes and actually make concrete proposals for rolling back Leviathan, I’m on board. But she gives off a vibe of thinking things are peachy (“We live in a country of incredible political and economic freedom.” Is this the ‘better than Somalia’ tactic?) and just wanting a cut in her inheritance tax.
Call me a bomb-throwing idealist, but I don’t think that’s gonna fly.
At the risk of sounding like a triangulator, I think it’s best to campaign on both. Have some issues with practical, low-ideology kind of appeal (though preferably based on principles) to get votes from people without real ideological committments, or who think mostly in terms of how politics directly affects them. Then also campaign on the big picture, the basic principles, the long-term ideas that must guide the daily politics.
It may be that you’ll use one set of issues when campaigning for one group’s votes, and use another set of issues to appeal to a different group. these will not be in conflict with each other, because one set is derived from the principles of the other. But different people have different ways of thinking, and we need different (but complementary) ways of appealing to them.
Fundamental principles stated only in abstract terms leave a lot of room for doubt as to how they’ll be applied in a situation, while practical “solutions” unguided by any principles can degerate into…well, the kinds of failures our forefathers warned about in democracies. Each needs the other.
That said, I want to hear FREEDOM!!! shouted plenty.
If McCarthy were running for President (which I assume he’s not) I would tend to agree. Presidential candidates do best when they get specific (as in “here’s what I would do about [insert problem here]) and the audience can connect to that.
However, in terms of setting an agenda and a tone for the other 233 members of his caucus (and hopefully the 240+ that he’s predicting after November) I think it’s right on. Liberty (or Freedom if you prefer) should drive the legislation of this and the next Congress, standing in stark contrast to the tax-heavy, regulation-abundant, privacy-threatening stance of the other side of the aisle and especially the current President. It resonates.
Strongly seconded.
Big Picture stuff needs to be illustrated by tangible, easily-understood pocket-book like details. Details — in turn — need to be shown to fit into a Big Picture.
Pocketbook issues are the tools to garner attention from non Conservatives. Liberty is our base, our bedrock, and that includes economic liberty. Right now the major challenge to the nation is economic – healthcare, jobs, inflation, debt. And most people, regardless of party or ideology feels that.
Pocketbook focus is a way to counter the touchy-feeley ‘I feel your pain’ bromides that the left consistently runs on. A big part of the Democrat play book is empathy – Democrats feel your suffering, and those evil GOPers only want to take things away from you, and make you suffer more because Hate & Intolerance!™
Liberty has to be part of our message, but economic pain is something everyone shares.
I’d be happy if the happy if the battle cry were: “Federalism”!
Local decision making would go a long way to rolling back leviathan.
The two are linked and need to be presented that way. Obamacare took away some of your freedom. You had less choices, less liberty, and the result, you are now spending more for coverage that may not be as good as what you had before. Freedom is a pocketbook issue.
Uh, Peter. I disagree with your conclusion. The next President must scream Liberty at the top of his/her lungs. The next President has to do a Reagan and remind each and every one of us Americans how great our country is, was, etc..
The past few years has been anything but from our President. Chris Matthews has this old saying about the new President being the opposite of the previous. So, who would be the anti-Obama.
From what I see, Obama is all about telling how rotten we are. So, the anti-Obama would tell us how great we are.
Get my drift- Liberty is the campaign issue, though not like you pontificated.
Peter’s friend is right. Almost everyone in western societies takes freedom for granted, so it makes little impression to say you’re in favor of it. It’s like campaigning as the pro-oxygen party.
But talking about “cost of living” isn’t enough to win elections either. It sounds too selfish to the modern American who votes for the candidate who makes them feel the most virtuous — i.e., the “nicest” candidate.
Instead we should be talking about raising poorer Americans out of poverty/economic stagnation. Liberty in the abstract is meaningless unless we give concrete examples for why it is also virtuous.
How far astray have we gotten where “Liberty” is a dirty word in American discourse? Patrick Henry weeps.
“Give me more bang for my buck, or give me death!”
Anyway, should we be promising “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”? Because the last guy who did that didn’t really deliver.
Ummm, aren’t pocketbook issues directly related to freedom and liberty? When I’m forced into buying useless and expensive “health” “insurance,” that is an assault on my liberty and my pocketbook. When I am forced to subsidize the sexual perverts at Planned Parenthood, that is an assault on my liberty and pocketbook. Not one or the other. Both.
As has been said before, “It the economy stupid”
The people want prosperity. People want to make money so they can live a comfortable life, maybe even go on vacation occasionally. When I say people I am not talking about the Fortune 500 companies or just the top 10 cities or just government workers. I am talking about the whole country, all the people, no matter race, sex, creed, gender, etc. Freedom and liberty mean little if people can’t provide for their family needs. Federalism makes even less sense since from most people’s points of view government is government and the fighting between the different levels is meaningless to them. Tell the people how you are going to allow them to make a reasonable living that can be improved upon with hard work. Tell them how this will make the country strong and make us the world leader we know we are. Tell them why we are great and the plan to make us even greater while making their lives better. That is what they want to hear. The person that can explain that and make the people believe it wins. The person that does that makes history.
I don’t think Peter’s friend is insinuating that “liberty” carries a negative connotation — just that the abstract invocation of “liberty” doesn’t motivate anyone to vote for you who doesn’t already share a conservative or libertarian political philosophy. People take liberty for granted, so campaigning on it is meaningless to them.
But is it a valid long-term strategy to keep repeating the lie that the government is responsible for prosperity? (It can retard or destroy prosperity, of course.)
“My friend wants to kill polar bears. What do you think?”
“My friend wants to focus on Cost of Living issues. What do you think?”
Mr. Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge is your place for asking questions, but here on Ricochet some us would like to hear what you think?
It’s a lie? From my point of view it is a country’s only purpose of being. For if a country can not create the conditions for its people to be prosperous it has no purpose and does not need to exist.
No, we shouldn’t be promising anything. We should stop talking about liberty in the abstract and instead give concrete examples of liberty creating prosperity and making poor people better off.
Look at history. No one ever thinks loss of liberty is a problem until it’s too late. It’s fine to be dedicated to sounding the alarm, but it just isn’t an effective electoral strategy. Liberty should be our candidates’ governing philosophy, but prosperity should be their campaign slogan.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of prosperity?
OK. When the government is the size it was during the gilded age I will stop requesting additional liberty.
Just a note: I’m currently listening to this interview, and I am about 23 minutes in, and I’m wondering what interview Peter’s Friend listened to.
“The GOP nominee in 2016 should make himself the Cost of Living Candidate. Pledge to aggressively cut specific taxes and regulations that will measurably reduce the cost of living in Americans’ energy, education, housing, and health care expenditures. Promise that when you’re done cutting, you will voucherize whatever program or subsidies are left standing.”
So says the Friend. Did I not hear McCarthy ‘splaining about energy costs, and pocketbook issues, and hiring bonuses paid at Mickey D’s in North Dakota? Maybe it is later in the video that he starts to declaim like the Liberty Bell itself, but he seems eminently practical to me. Around 22:30 hes outlining California’s finances.
I’m impressed. I like.
I’m glad you got me to watch this Peter, but tell your Friend to put a sock in it.
After losing two winnable elections to Obama and the Left and with everything that Obama and the Left do turning into disasters, does the GOP “braintrust” really still not know what it takes to win? (These ideas were written about a week after the 2012 debacle. Feel free to co-opt any of them, Kevin.)
Wow, way to get me depressed going into a weekend.
I completely agree, so I must point out that McCarthy does that admirably in this interview.
Ronald Reagan mentioned freedom and liberty a lot. Didn’t get him anywhere, did it?
The message is irrelevant. It’s the means of communication that matters. Until we deal with that, we can talk ’til we’re blue in the face and it’ll all be for naught.
There’s a reason 93% of blacks, 80% of Hispanics, and 70% of Asians (or whatever the numbers are) vote Left, and it’s not because they reject conservatism. It’s because they reject the distorted, caricatured version of conservatism that the Leftist media have sold to them for years.
Why do we continue to allow this to happen??
The people we need to reach will not come to us. They won’t subscribe to Ricochet or National Review or the WSJ. They won’t watch FoxNews and they won’t listen to talk radio. They won’t, because they already don’t! And they have no need to, in their minds. So debating what our message should be without addressing our use of the same ineffective, discredited means of communication is friggin’ insane.
The GOP lives in a bubble, in a vacuum, wholly undisturbed by and learning nothing from the disasters of 2008 and 2012.
They said non-conservatives think it’s weird. That’s not positive.
No, genferei, the friend in question here isn’t the good Mr. Murphy. I’ll tell you only that he lives and works in Manhattan–which is the reason he wants me to describe him only as “a friend.” If I named him, outing him as a conservative, he’d run into trouble everywhere from his place of work to the board of his condo.
Instead of just saying we want liberty and freedom, Republicans should keep bringing up all the small tyrannies that we live with in the “Land of the Free”. Mark Steyn is the best at this. For example his recent exposure of the hassles two teenage bag pipers have had to go through to take their bag pipes through the Canadian Border.
In America we are so on edge about large tyrannies that we are drowning in small tyrannies.
Bringing them up where? How? By what means? To whom? We need to reach voters. How do you propose communicating “all the small tyrannies” to the voters? How do Kevin and the GOP leadership intend to reach the voters effectively with whatever message they settle on? Same ways they did in 2008 and 2012? Great. One of the definitions of insanity, and all.
This is my point at #26. Doesn’t matter what we say, if the means by which political ideas are communicated are controlled by the Left. Which they are.
What do you intend to do about that, Kevin? That’s the question we should be debating, not whether Kevin is right or Peter’s friend is right. Fact is they’re both wrong, because whatever the message, it’ll be the proverbial tree falling the woods with no one to hear it.
The only sound it’ll make will be Hillary’s first inaugural address.