We can win in November with ease.
All Mitt Romney and Republicans need to do is follow the GOP’s script from the historic midterm elections of 2010.
In case you’ve forgotten, 2010 wasn’t just a Republican wave. It was a tsunami. The GOP gained 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate, plus they picked up five governorships and a record 680 seats in state legislatures.
Republicans won in every corner of America for one important reason -- the election was about the economy, not social issues.
Independents and Democrats swung to the GOP because they had lost their jobs, lost their houses and had already lost hope in President Obama’s ability to fix anything bigger than a parking ticket in Chicago.
The tea party deserves most of the credit for the conservative counterrevolution of 2010. It was their principles, passion and energy that rejuvenated the Republican Party, dethroned so many Democrats and scared the liberal media.
But it may surprise you that it was the tea party’s use of Reaganesque campaign tactics that made so many Republican wins possible.
Despite its reputation, the tea party is not as ideologically stubborn or politically suicidal as the mainstream media like to think and pray it is. It knows that what unites Americans is the economy and what divides us are issues such as abortion.
Two years ago, the tea party realized that stressing economic issues was the key to uniting Republicans and attracting independent voters. It also knew it was important for Republicans to downplay divisive social issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception.
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For example, I’m a Reagan conservative, not a card-carrying tea partier. But I give a lot of speeches around the country on behalf of the tea party. Written into my contract with the agency that books my tea party speeches is this smart line: “Please don’t talk about social issues.”
That’s the way my father Ronald Reagan thought. He always looked for areas of agreement. He asked, “Where do we agree? How can I bring people together in that agreement and move the ball forward? Let’s not try to find the areas where we disagree.”
We can’t allow ourselves to get tied up in social issues. Look at what happened when one obscure congressman from Missouri said something insensitive and stupid about rape or pregnancy. The Democrats and their soul mates in the liberal media feasted on it and the Romney campaign had to spend a week denouncing Todd Akin instead of Obama’s failed economic policies. That’s exactly what Democrats and Obama want Republicans to talk about -- social issues.
I am a pro-life guy. I’ll be speaking on pro-life issues this fall. But when Republicans insist on putting the abortion issue into their party platform, all they do is force Republicans to spend time in the media defending the GOP platform instead of debating the economy.
We should let the Catholic Church debate the social issues while we debate the economy and jobs.
Because the best thing to help women in this country is a job for their husband, a job for themselves and a job for their children who are graduating from college and aren’t able to find one.
If we really want to help women, the economy is the area we need to debate. Because that's where we win.
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