Donald Trump, Ben Carson and the other GOP hopefuls are pandering to fears many conservatives harbor about losing their culture and country to immigrants and the social engineers in Washington. That strategy may win enough primaries to clinch the nomination, but will sadly fail the GOP standard bearer in the general election.
Hillary Clinton, even with her integrity impugned, beats GOP hopefuls in head to head polls, because she addresses issues voters care about.
Jobs, fairness, education, health care, and equality!
Republicans instead offer repackaged Reaganism—for example, Job Bush’s tax package and incredible promise to accomplish 4 percent growth.
Conservatism—and by derivation Republicans—must change with the times, and recognize solutions that worked for the Gipper don’t resonate today.
Democrats have an advantage. European-style democratic socialism offers plausible sounding, even if tragically flawed, solutions.
Clinton has a fresh list of free stuff and wrong-headed mandates for private business, even though two generations of handouts and affirmative action have failed to raise the African-American living standards to anywhere near parity with other Americans.
Palliatives nearly always fail—subsidized student loans, grants and government coerced minority and low-income enrollment have driven tuition costs out of sight. Medicare prescription drug coverage for seniors has accelerated the rise in drug prices.
For conservatives to win, they must offer understandable proposals that get to the root causes of job loss, student debt, unaffordable health care, and remaining discrimination—or they simply won’t triumph at the box office.
Globalization is victimizing many Americans by driving down wages and pushing too many workers into the contingent economy—where they work erratic hours, get poor benefits and face zero job security.
Trade agreements with China and others have offered virtually unimpeded access to U.S. markets, while foreign governments target American jobs with artificially cheap currencies, subsidies and discriminatory regulations.
GOP candidates must promise to do whatever it takes to eradicate the $500 billion trade deficit and restore 4 million good paying jobs.
Americans can’t compete without affordable universities, but a river of federal student loans has only left a generation too heavily in debt and that harms the economy. The GOP candidate should promise to cut off federal aid to institutions that don’t slash tuition by 20 percent and limit future increases to inflation.
No matter what they earn, Americans increasingly are up against monopoly abuse. Each year computer and communications technologies become less costly but home cable bills rocket, banks pay hardly any interest for deposits but still charge double digit interest rates on credit cards, hospitals and drug manufactures enjoy government subsidies but extort prices a Pharaoh couldn’t afford, and fuel prices may be down but air travel becomes more expensive and uncomfortable.
Big businesses in all these sectors have merged and acquired smaller competitors, snuffed out competition and jacked up prices. In the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt, the GOP should promise to bust up monopolies and get ordinary folks a fair shake in the marketplace.
Health care in the United States is 50 percent more costly than in Germany and Holland, which also have mandatory private insurance and quality care, because prices there are much lower.
Repealing Obamacare is no longer practical—too many folks could not get back their old policies, and businesses have rearranged practices to accommodate it. The GOP candidate should promise to require drug companies, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies to benchmark prices and practices against those in western European countries with mandatory private insurance.
Hillary’s trump card is gender—many Democratic women would like a woman president and that will give her a strong base in the general election. The GOP candidate has to convince women that he (or she) feels their pain—by explicit example.
Simply stated, half of his (or her) cabinet and political appointees must be female—corporate America would be compelled by that example to follow suit. If the GOP candidate does not commit to that, then President Hillary Clinton will surely enforce the same.
It’s all very radical but conservatives should be about empowering ordinary people—be they white or not, male or female, gay or straight.
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