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Government in Exile

~ When Your Guy Doesn't Win

Government in Exile

Tag Archives: Politics

Should Republicans Have Taken More Of A Stand On The Fiscal Cliff?

10 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Brett J. Talley in Uncategorized

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conservative, fiscal cliff, government, Politics, republicans

I’ve received some criticism for my stand on the fiscal cliff. Some conservatives seem to believe that the Republicans should have stood in the breech, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, unwilling to retreat from their principles. It’s a nice thought, but people seem to be forgetting an important point—the Spartans were slaughtered, and there’s no reserve army waiting back home if the Republicans go down.

We live in a Representative Democracy, and the people weren’t with us on this one. They didn’t want spending cuts. They wanted tax increases. If you doubt that, look at the campaign Obama ran. He was the first candidate in a long time to run explicitly on raising taxes. He offered no spending cuts. And he won.

There is no political will to finally get our fiscal house in order precisely because there is no public will to support such actions.

Now is not the time for kamikaze actions in the House. It’s a time for sharpening our message, reaffirming our ideals, and selling them to the American people. As Paul Ryan said, now that the fiscal cliff is out of the way, we can get to the debate we need on spending. Trying to hold Americans hostage to economic collapse to get our way would have been foolhardy. And if we had gone over the cliff, they would have blamed Republicans.

Instead of attacking each other, we need to work together to change the mentality of a society sliding towards dependency. If we don’t do that, then soon it will be a small minority indeed that supports spending cuts. And in a Representative Democracy such as ours, small minorities rarely get their way.

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A Conservative Blog With Libertarian Flavor

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Posted by Brett J. Talley in Uncategorized

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conservative, Politics

Presidential campaigns are zero-sum games. For months (and years, for some), the campaign team and the candidate pour everything they have into the effort. Every action, every public statement, every moment, is spent in pursuit of one goal. By the end, campaigns are twenty-four hour, seven-day a week operations. For those on the inside, the campaign is their life.

Then election night comes–and it’s all over. One team wins, the other team loses. And there’s no consolation prize. The winner gets the presidency. His team and his party gets the good jobs. For the next four years, they are the ones who pull the levers of power, and they are the ones behind the curtain.

What happens to the losers? They write political blogs.

And that’s why we are here. I spent ten months in the Rapid Response and Writing shops of the Romney Campaign. It was my job to attack the President, usually by drafting articles that explained why Barack Obama was wrong in his views and wrong for America. I was good at it, and we’ll do some of it here. But we won’t hold our fire from the Republican Party, either. The GOP never quite rallied around Mitt Romney, mostly for reasons that have become cancers within the party. Conservatism is great, but it needs some Libertarian flavor.

It’s time for happy warriors everywhere to unite. There’s so much worth fighting for.

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