Moral courage

Conservatives that win in liberal-land have a lesson to teach.  Reagan twice was elected Gov of California by large margins.  Coburn won the Yellow Dog Democrat 1^st District of Eastern Oklahoma.  Ryan wins his heavily Dem district by 66%.  How do they do it?

     Not all Dems are the sort of secular progressives that the news media promotes or the leftists on the coasts think the party should be.  They still believe in the social safety nets, want good government and don’t distrust it, and they are patriotic.  To people like these, Reagan/Coburn/Ryan appeal because, though more conservative, they are willing to promote realistic solutions with political courage.  Secondly, they can explain their ideas in plain talk. 

    I was sitting 10 feet away from Senator Tom Coburn in his recent town hall when he got asked what he thought of the choice of Ryan just the day after.  The Senator beamed, “He has moral courage.” And I could tell he thought of Ryan as a kindred spirit.  In his book, The Debt Bomb, Coburn talks about how Washington is full of careerism on both sides of the aisle.  Everyone is interested in hanging onto his seat in the next election more than actually doing something courageous and leaderlike about the problems. (of debt and entitlements)  So Conservatives talk a good act, grandstanding to the conservatives back home, but won’t stand for anything controversial.  They spend like crazy on earmarks and won’t touch the train wreck that is coming with the debt and with Medicare.  What sets Coburn and Ryan apart is their willingness to stick their necks out for a possible solution, put their name on the bill and, win or lose by the political result.

    Nor do they compromise their beliefs much.  While some pols pretend leadership by compromising—John McCain, Arlen Spector come to mind—Ryan and Coburn seem to be more on the lookout for areas where agreement can be had and are clever to use that agreement.  But because areas of agreement between the parties is hard, the result can be misread as simply compromise by those who are easy critics.    

    Ryan did this with his budget.  His plan is slow to bring budget balance, but it is workable politically.  Then he did a masterful job selling it to reluctant careerist Republicans by persuasion—and getting think tanks and opinion writers to look at it and give their blessing.  Vision, strategic thinking about how to get something done, persuasion of people who don’t have this thing in mind at all are the signs of true leadership.  Romney has such vision, and perhaps the strategic thinking, but he isn’t terribly persuasive sometimes.  He has 59 points to explain his rescue of the economy when 3 would be better to explain.  Ryan is a brain with that rare ability to condense complex facts into simple language.  He is not Barack the soaring rhetorician or a master of the emotions. Not a terribly dynamic speaker but that only adds to his appeal of being ordinary Joe telling the emperor he has no clothes (and by golly Paul Ryan knows where the clothes are, too).  That’s why he appeals to crossover Democrats. 

    Coburn uses the same no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is problem solving.  He caught guff from Conservative purists who didn’t like him signing onto Simpson-Bowles.  Tom shrugs and says it was sure not to pass exactly as worded, but provided a desperately needed starting point for fiscal sanity.  No fiscal sanity means the debt bomb will surely explode.

    That is where we are in this election.  If we don’t stop the deficit spending, the international bond market will kill our credit in a rapid crash.  And with that, our economy will lie in waste for years, our social safety nets will become full of underfunded holes.  And that breeds opportunistic tyrants like stagnant water breeds mosquitoes.  Yet even if Romney and Ryan are elected there is no guarantee that the careerists in Congress will be moved to stop the bleeding. The Senate which refuses to pass a budget may continue under the Dems. Congress may get cold feet about repealing Obamacare.  There is much work to be done.  All I know is that it will take someone heroic and willing to live or die by the politics of Moral Courage.