10 lessons for the Republicans after the shutdown fiasco
1) The First Law of Holes: When you’re in a hole – stop digging.
2) Get a spine, John Boehner. The good of the Republican Party people, the traditional function of the Speaker and your responsibilities to the American people require that you stand up to your own minority of extremists and for the first time show the guts to defy the radio talk show demagogues and provide an effective, realistic and above-all constructive opposition. If you don’t, you and your precious congressional majority will both be gone in November 2014.
3) Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin are not Ronald Reagan or Dwight D. Eisenhower. These guys and their friends have been yeoman cheerleaders for you for a very long time. But Condoleezza Rice didn’t graduate from pom-poms to secretary of state without picking up a lot of learning and experience on the way, and they have not. Effective popular communicators to your own loyal troops have their place in the world, but not when they frighten the pets and the independent swing voters.
4) Stop demonizing great and responsible Republican presidents and learn from them instead. Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of the greatest and most successful presidents in modern U.S. History. George Herbert Walker Bush was a poor campaigner without Ronald Reagan, but his record as president was magnificent: deficit slashed, Cold War won, Communism collapsed, Germany united without setting off a new world war, Saddam smashed without any of the casualty levels or long-term costs his son later incurred. These guys were real grown-ups, real men: Do you have a problem with that?
5) No more My Lai rules in Congress. You do not destroy a village in order to save it: And you do not destroy the national economy and financial stability of the United States in the name of saving it. No more government shutdowns, ever. Look how your congressional approval ratings have flat-lined into single figures. If the Republican Party doesn’t stand for fiscal responsibility anymore, it stands for nothing. And Barack Obama didn’t do this to you. You did it to yourselves.
6) Quit treating Chris Christie like a leper. Get him to campaign for threatened House Republicans instead. But only the more sensible ones. That’ll be as great way for him to test his appeal outside New Jersey. And for some of you to learn some badly-needed commonsense from him.
7) Donate all your copies of “Atlas Shrugged” to the Democratic Party. Maybe that sociopathic, simplistic, ridiculous, selfish old monster Ayn Rand will rot the brains of the Dems as much as she has already destroyed yours.
8) Focus on exposing all the bungles and holes in Obamacare and on fixing them. The GOP had a deserved, 140-year reputation for competent, responsible successful government before George W. Bush came along. Thanks to Eisenhower, it was restored even after Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. You’re going to have to work hard to restore it after your latest childish tantrums in Congress, but it can be done. Focusing on the devils in the details is the place to start.
9) If you still think Paul Ryan is a financial and political genius, you’ve got problems. This is a guy who couldn’t even carry his own home state as a vice presidential candidate.
10) Barack Obama is the legitimate, twice-elected president of the United States: Get over it.
Martin Sieff is an editor at Sputnik, the Russian-owned news organization. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East (2008), Gathering Storm (2014) and Cycles of Change: The Three Great Eras of American History and the Coming Crisis that will Lead to the Fourth (2014). Follow Martin on: @MartinSieff