As a result, South Carolina has seen foreign motor companies take root, like BMW in Greer, S.C., Honda ATV in Florence, and a proposed Volkswagen plant under consideration in Anderson. Mercedes has added a plant in Alabama, Toyota in Kentucky and Mississippi, and Nissan in Tennessee, all in the last decade. Many of those plants are increasing production, employing workers, stimulating local economies, and raising their fuel standards without a $20 billion hand from the government.

South Carolina's relative resilience has led the state's voters to respond to the true optimism of the free market and free trade. They sent Sen. Jim DeMint to Washington in 2004 over a protectionist Democrat and protectionist Republican primary opponent, former Gov. David Beasley, who was campaigning last week for another economic populist who found himself on the losing end of the Sandlapper electorate—Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee, who was unable to gain ground with non-evangelical voters in South Carolina, has said that Americans are looking for a candidate who can speak to them about economic troubles—"a candidate who looks like the guy they work with instead of the guy who laid them off."

He's right, to a point. Conservatives and Republicans do need to learn to speak about the strength of our economy and the resilience of the market in a way that doesn't discount the troubles of voters in a flurry of supply-side statistics and "suck it up."

But selling government-funded snake oil as a remedy is the Democrats' job. As the election moves forward, the economy wobbles in uncertainty, and voters make it their No. 1 issue, it's good to see that Romney's, McCain's, Huckabee's, and Rudy's economic stimulus proposals all contain significant permanent tax relief that would incentivize investment and risk-taking.

Long-term tax relief—perhaps making the Bush tax cuts permanent, as Rep. Jeb Hensarling, President of the conservative Republican Study Committee suggests—will keep worried businesses from scaling back in anticipation of the expiration of those cuts in 2011. Bush's 2001 tax rebates were not unhelpful to individual Americans, but it was tax rate cuts that stimulated the economy and changed behavior.

As we move forward, let's hope all Republicans—both those running for the White House and the one already in it—can remember that the greatest optimist to occupy that particular residence in the last 50 years did not declare America a "subsidized city upon a hill" or a the "last, best government-funded hope of man on Earth."

Optimism is not a uniquely American quality, but it is a very American quality, and Reagan knew a government program was a poor substitute for it. We forget that at our peril, and we're going to need all the clarity we can muster on our own side to protect against the ideas of the other:

"…We have systematically diminished the role and the responsibility of our government, and we have watched our market become imbalanced…I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market." -- Hillary Clinton, January 2008