How the Reps can win, restore balance

The GOP's case for big change in November

By: Hugh Hewitt Examiner Columnist

January 4, 2010 Nov. 2 is 10 months away, and if the Republican Party stays focused on three big issues, voters may reward it with a chance to check the huge lurch to the Left that President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid engineered in 2009.

First, the government takeover of private life is deeply alarming. The massive thrusts of Washington, D.C. into the control of health care, the car business, the banks generally and the home loan industry specifically -- all these are obvious and disquietingly huge intrusions of the federal government's presence into private life.

Americans hate to be pushed around, especially by the federal government. The president's plans for even more power grabs via the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior using "global warming" as an excuse haven't yet touched most Americans, but they are out in the open and coming. Only a rebalancing of power in D.C. will forestall further metastasis of government.

A second reason to rebalance the House and Senate by voting for the GOP is the simple fact that must be repeated again and again: Lower taxes equal job growth. Whatever minor improvement in the unemployment numbers that emerges in 2010 -- if any -- will be threatened by the looming lapse of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 unless Congress obliges the president to abandon his "spread the wealth" gospel that views every tax increase as a form of economic justice, regardless of the cost in real jobs.

Finally, the GOP needs a majority in the House and significant gains in the Senate in order to force accountability on the president's foreign policy and national security fecklessness. The withering of our defenses was on display on Christmas Day, and Obama's months of dithering on Afghanistan following months of apologies and bows abroad telegraph the need for a robust congressional check on the president's deeply ingrained instinct for appeasement.

"Balance" is an appealing concept to voters in the middle of the political spectrum, especially as they, like conservatives, are troubled by the refusal of the president and his congressional team to engage in any of the promised bipartisanship.

The endless blaming of George W. Bush has also become an obvious dodge of responsibility, a childish complaint that satisfies only the hard Left. The president has played that card so often and in so many circumstances that the mention of Obama's predecessor by any senior administration official has become a laugh line or a cue in a drinking game...

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