Time for GOP to reaffirm liberty, individual responsibility
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
We suspect many conservative columnists are at work on reaffirming Ronald Reagan’s principles of freedom and individual responsibility that they believe still hold sway with the majority of Americans.
Our own Tony Blankley (see page opposite) is among them in offering ideas for regaining Congress in 2010 and the presidency in 2012.
Tuesday night was not a pleasant time for those of us who value re-energizing individual responsibility versus group rights and personal liberty versus big government’s mandates.
The election results, however, contained some bright spots.
Conservatives in Nebraska held ground with the election of former Republican Gov. Mike Johanns to the U.S. Senate and Republicans Lee Terry, Jeff Fortenberry and Adrian Smith to Congress.
Nebraskans voted decisively for Amendment 424 which establishes equality before the law, a good thing.
No longer can governments, universities or any public agencies grant preferences to one individual over another based on race or gender. That change in our state constitution is one that Reagan would have welcomed.
It is also a principle that rebounding conservatives should enshrine going forward.
So-called “affirmative action,” the granting of these racial and gender preferences in universities, has always been a big thing with liberals. Now, they head Congress and the Administration. Presumably they can find programs that will prepare black people, women and selected others to compete without preferential help.
Nationally, California, a proven bellwether for trends, defeated Proposition 7 which would have hurt the state’s economy by mandating that half of the state’s power come from renewable energy sources by 2025.
Californians also beat back Proposition 10 calling for $5 billion in bonds to fund alternative fuel activity.
We congratulate Barack Obama on becoming the nation’s first African-American president.
But we shudder at the prospect of America’s economic and security future in the hands of the all-liberal Democrat triumvirate of Nancy Pelosi in the House, Harry Reid in the Senate and Obama in the White House.
Labor unions, political activist groups such as ACORN, Congressional spenders, and high tax advocates of all stripes seem poised to be in line for quick access to the Obama Administration.
How our audience of small business men and women can possibly gain from any of this is hard to figure. Obama and the Democrats are committed to repealing the secret ballot in union elections – hardly comforting small business owners and raising the specter of intimidation to enforce union membership.
Wasteful earmarks took the usual pummeling before an election. But afterwards, this practice of spreading federal payola around is forgotten under the unspoken mantra of tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.
Not many conservative candidates on the stump do a good job of explaining that when one senator gets a boondoggle appropriation for his state, he is obliged to vote for the boondoggles of 49 other senators.
True, some projects have merit. So why not fund them directly in local communities? Why send the local dollar to Washington bureaucrats, who extract 30 cents as their cut, and have only 70 cents coming back?
One would suppose that Obama’s election as America’s first African-American president would draw a line under the racism issue in this country, but that does not appear the case.
Some post-election talk shows Wednesday morning were already back to flaying America’s former “Jim Crow” system of segregation.
Typical was the cable channel appearance of former New York Mayor David Dinkins, who hailed Obama’s becoming our first black president, but was still picking on the racism scab of 70 years ago in U.S. society, particularly in the military.
White voters as a group obviously have moved on from racism or Obama could not have been elected.
How to account for the 95 percent of black people who voted for Obama? Was this also racism or merely a preference for what the black man stands for did not come up with Dinkins.
November 2008
