The New Guy

As of last week the Republican National Committee has a new Chairman, Micheal Steele of Maryland. I have seen him on several news programs, and have heard and read about him in a few places, and if my initial impressions of him hold up, I'm quite happy with this choice.

It is my understanding that Mr. Steele is a true Conservative, and the only drawback that I have hear of so far is that it is said that he supports Affirmative Action (maybe one of these days I should do a post on that, and why I oppose it), but even if that's true, that's OK, little single issue disagreements can be dealt with over the course of time, and maybe we can change his mind, but again, even if not, we can still work with him quite well as long as he is, overall, the strong Conservative that I believe him to be.

The really important thing is that Mr. Steele understands that what the GOP needs to do to win elections is to clearly explain the Conservative positions and hold to them. Time and time again it has been proven that Conservative Republicans (and even Conservative Democrats as far as that goes) win elections, while "Moderate" or liberal Republicans tend to lose them, and damage the party as a whole. You need only to look as far as Presidential Politics to see this. Ronald Reagan, a true Conservative, won two landslide victories, the second one larger than the first, and both far larger and more significant landslides than the slight and overblown win that Obama pulled off in November. And, as a side note, a few million more people watched Ronald Reagan's first inauguration on TV than watched Obama's inauguration a couple of weeks ago, but the media doesn't like to let that one get out too much (make that, at all). Anyway, going forward, George H.W. Bush won the Presidency one time only, he won the first time because he had been Reagan's Vice President, and people thought that he might be as good as Reagan, but being that he was a moderate Republican instead of a Conservative like Reagan, people decided not to bother keeping him around for more than one term. The same thing would have happened his son, George W. Bush, if it hadn't been for the fact that we were in the middle of an armed conflict and people tended to trust him on that subject more than the Democrat challenger. And as we saw with John McCain, when you're so liberal that you are nearly a Democrat yourself, people will just go ahead and take the authentic Democrat.

Only be being Conservatives can the Republican party start to win again, but beyond that, even if we did manage to win by being slightly less Democrat than the Democrats, any victories would be meaningless. Contrary to what some have come to believe, politics is not a game to see which party can win the most elections, it is about ideas and doing what is going to be best of the Country, Conservative Principles work, liberal ones lead to disaster, every time.

Speaking for myself, I have high hopes for Micheal Steele, time will tell if they are well founded.