Brown Gives the GOP Its Message
Jennifer Rubin
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In addition to distilling the national-security message for conservatives, Brown provided a handy slogan for challengers in 2010:
Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the agenda of a new establishment in Washington.
It has the benefit of being true, getting to the nub of voters’ complaints, and focusing on the biggest issues that unite the Center-Right coalition. The chattering class is obsessed with forcing Republicans to develop a message other than “no.” But “no” is working very well, and “no” won back the House for the Democrats in 2006. And “no” is easily translated into positive policy statements: lower taxes (don’t raise them), create market solutions for health care (don’t allow the government to run it), and prosecute the war against Islamic fundamentalists robustly (don’t give the lefty lawyers at the Justice Department the final say). Certainly, there are other issues Republicans will run on — spending and the debt, for example — but they could do a lot worse than to follow Brown’s lead. He did, after all, figure out how to win a state the GOP lost by 25 points just a year ago.
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Brown on Terrorism
Jennifer Rubin - 01.20.2010 - 8:35 AM
We remarked last night that the Christmas Day bombing and the Massachusetts candidates’ differing reactions may have been more telling than political observers imagined. The Scott Brown campaign agrees, as Andy McCarthy notes:
It was national security that put real distance between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. “People talk about the potency of the health-care issue,” Brown’s top strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review’s Robert Costa, “but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants.” There is a powerful lesson here for Republicans, and here’s hoping they learn it.
Brown’s remarks on national security last night picked up where the campaign left off. They were noteworthy:
And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation — they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.
Now that’s a message, stated simply and matter of factly, which I suspect will resonate strongly with the public in 2010, unless the Obami get off their “not Bush” anti-terrorism approach. Perhaps the Obami will retreat on giving KSM a civilian trial. Maybe they’ll decide to utilize military commissions to try terrorists. But if not, and if KSM’s trial (at the cost of at least $200M per year) moves ahead, expect it to become yet another issue that Republicans will utilize to great advantage. It’s precisely the sort of “What could they be thinking inside the Beltway?” issue that will appeal to both Republicans and independents, as well as many Democrats who can’t figure out why we’d pay hundreds of millions of dollars to provide a publicity platform to those who want nothing more than to recruit more followers to the cause of murdering Americans.
It’s not simply a national security argument, as Brown pointed out, but a financial one too. And most important, it highlights the populist message Brown rode to victory: the ultra-leftists running Washington D.C. are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Obama likes to say he’s defending “our values” when he declares his intention to close Guantanamo, cease enhanced interrogations, and give terrorists the same constitutional rights as common criminals. Brown argued that Obama has it backward. Our values and our Constitution require no such accommodation to butchers; they require we use all reasonable methods at our disposal to defend American lives and destroy the enemy. Brown’s position has the advantage of being right on the merits, and both right and potent on the politics.
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