Governor Haley Barbour
It surprised me when my old friend Mallory Factor asked me to write the afterword for his book on conservatism and the Republican Party. Even though he and I have been friends for years, he could have asked any number of outstanding, bright, young conservative leaders whose futures are still in front of them, unlike mine.
Yet I soon understood Mallory’s thinking. He figured, correctly, that since I will never again run for office, I can freely offer the truth of today’s political reality to the faithful in unvarnished terms.
Mallory’s book is about the conservative movement, but my focus is its party, the Republican Party.
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH: Purity Is the Enemy of Victory; the Goal Is to Win Elections
Grassroots activists of either party must be reminded, constantly, that the ultimate goal is to win the ability to govern. In our system this means that victory lies in our party winning elections in order to control government and set its policies. The goal is not to be pure, for purity is the enemy of victory. The goal is to win elections. Period.
The Republican Party is not identical to conservatism, but it is the only vehicle available for conservatism. There is no viable third-party option. There are no breakaway mass movements that have the ability to shape law and governance. Like it or not, the Republican Party remains the only real repository of conservatism in American politics. That may be an ugly, unpleasant truth to some, but it’s a truth nonetheless.
Let’s discuss, therefore, the Republican Party.
In our two-party system, both parties, by reasons of necessity, are coalitions. Factions don’t win elections, coalitions do.
It takes more than 60 million popular votes to win enough electoral votes to elect a president. (Obama received 66 million votes in winning a second term.) Both parties, therefore, must offer themselves as coalitions broad enough and diverse enough to attract the millions of supporters needed to win in November every four years. Not to mention electing fifty governors, 535 senators and congressmen, and enough legislators to control fifty state legislatures in the hundreds of other elections over the four-year political cycle.
Make no mistake: the Republicans are the conservative party in the United States, and the Democrats are the liberal party—or the Progressive Party, as they like to brand themselves these days. Though their numbers have shrunk to endangered-species status over the last ten years, there are still Democrat elected officials who are politically to the right of some Republican officials and some Republican elected officials to the left of some Democrat officials.
Of course, there was a much greater overlap thirty and especially fifty years ago when the South had a one-party system. G. V. “Sonny” Montgomery, who was my Democratic congressman in the third district of Mississippi, used to say, “When I came to Congress in 1967, there were 125 conservative Democrats in the House. When I left in 1997, there were only ‘a Dixie dozen.’ ”
During the thirty years Sonny served in the House, Southerners, who had historically voted Republican for president, began to elect Republicans to Congress. In the House, more and more Republicans replaced conservative Democrats, and more and more liberal black Democrats replaced moderate and liberal white Democrats. So when older, more conservative Democrats retired, Republicans were elected to replace them. This shift was primarily a result of realignment between the two parties across the South and elsewhere.
Some of these retiring Democrats actually supported the conservative Republicans who replaced them. When the GOP picked up two of Mississippi’s three open Democrat congressional seats in 1972, the retiring Democrat congressman in each of those two districts publicly supported his GOP successor in the election. (Of course, many Democrats in those days were not that loyal to their party in other ways. But that’s another book and not what I’m here to discuss.)
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH:
In Congressional Elections Today, the Fight Is Usually in the Primary—Not the General—Election
More recently, the general realignment in the South has had less to do with the election of fewer white Democrats to the House than it has to do with gerrymandered redistricting. This holds true outside the South as well, and it is another important unvarnished truth. Of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, fewer than 100 are competitive in the general election today. The only serious chance of defeat for more than 75 percent of all House incumbents comes in the primary. This is true of nearly 200 House Republicans and more than 150 Democratic House members.
The Democrats, therefore, work hard to make sure no one gets to the left of them, while Republicans try to prevent anyone from getting to the right of them.
This brings out the worst in our candidates and congressmen, the worst for our party, and the worst for our country. It also gives people, including grassroots members of both parties, the impression that the party, in larger terms, is narrow and that almost everybody agrees on everything.
That is a mistaken belief, and it is ultimately a dangerous one.
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH:
If Everyone in Our Party Had to Agree on Everything, We’d Have a Mighty Small Party
Maybe the vast majority of Republicans whom you know personally do agree on most issues, but even among your closest friends there can be stark differences of opinion. And that is healthy, if for no other reason than it reminds us that fellow Republicans, including folks we know to be fine, upstanding citizens, can agreeably disagree with one another and remain loyal friends and party members.
Well, multiply your friends by the 60-plus million people who voted Republican for president last year, or even the nearly half million people who voted for me for governor in 2003 in our one little state. It is simply absurd to think everyone in such an enormous group could agree on every issue, let alone on every facet of every issue. Hell, my wife, Marsha, and I don’t agree on everything, but Marsha says I have the right to be wrong sometimes.
As you read this book’s thoughtful essays, filled with hard-fought lessons and hard-won wisdom, strong convictions and considered conclusions, forward-looking ideas and solid thinking, you learned a lot.
But it is highly unlikely you agreed with everything in it. And that’s as it should be.
The conservatives who wrote these essays, all of whom are politically solid, don’t agree with one another on every single issue. In fact, there may be significant differences on critical issues among them.
Yet all but one are Republicans in good standing—indeed, leaders of our party—and all are strong conservative leaders.
When I was chairman of the National Policy Forum (NPF), a Republican think tank, I edited Agenda for America, a book written under the leadership of a stellar group of NPF policy committee cochairs who explored, explained, and drew consensus on a range of topics regarding economic, trade, military, foreign, and social policies.
The authors of the chapters, written in 1995 by a task force of experts who served as NPF committee members, included many of the greatest thought leaders in our party: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp, Robert Bork, Tommy Thompson, William Bennett, Dick Cheney, and so on. Yet not all of them agreed on every single issue. Nor did I.
When I wrote the introduction to Agenda for America, I had to note in it that I didn’t agree with everything in the book—and I was the NPF chairman and the book’s editor!
The unvarnished truth is that ironclad agreement does not a good policy book or good party policy make. Moreover, my admitting it up front in the introduction made the larger point that disagreement is simply a function and healthy by-product of being part of a big party—the only kind that can triumph in a two-party system.
If everybody in our party had to agree on everything, we’d have a mighty small party. And left-wing Democrats would control government at every level, while we’d be split into a brawling, sprawling ragtag rabble of small factions.
The fact that our party must function well as a broad coalition led Lee Atwater, a great political operative but also a deep thinker, to declare that the Republican Party had to be a “Big Tent.”
In the Deep South, when Lee and I were earning our spurs in the field as GOP operatives and, eventually, young leaders, our party wouldn’t have dreamed of excluding converts for imperfection.
Better than anybody else, we Southern Republicans, trying to build a second party in a traditionally one-party region, knew our door had to be open and our tent large.
Conservatism, like the Republican Party that represents it, must be a Big Tent.
My old boss, Ronald Reagan, also understood this cold, which is why one of his favorite sayings was, “The fellow who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is your friend and ally, he’s not some 20 percent traitor.”
Reagan, considered the most conservative president of my lifetime and one of the most ideological, flew under bold colors and fought tirelessly for what he believed in. Yet as president he compromised on everything. With large Democrat majorities in the House during all eight years of his presidency, he had to master the art of compromise or get nothing done.
A former union president, Reagan knew how to negotiate. “When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento,” he wrote in his autobiography, An American Life,
a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn’t like it. “Compromise” was a dirty word to them and they wouldn’t face the fact that we couldn’t get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take anything. I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. . . . If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.
Through compromise, he got Congress to pass the Reagan economic plan that tamed high inflation and astronomical interest rates while launching a quarter century of economic growth not just in the United States but across the globe. It was not only “Morning Again in America” but around the world.
Through compromise, he rebuilt our military and won the Cold War, putting the Soviet Union out of existence.
Reagan achieved good policy, which led to good results. And, to do so, he repeatedly compromised with a Democrat majority in the House. I should know. I served as the political director of the Reagan White House part of that time.
Remarkably, he also united and strengthened the Republican Party in the process.
Beginning with William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, down through Dewey and Robert Taft in the 1940s and early 1950s, and on to Rockefeller and Goldwater, there had been two wings of the Republican Party for nearly seventy years.
Reagan’s conservative policies, their impressive outcomes, and his great leadership skills resulted in our party’s coming together into one broad mainstream, which, in turn, resulted in GOP presidencies for five of seven consecutive terms, majorities in at least one house of Congress for twenty-two of thirty-two years, and powerful, creative Republican state governments leading all across the country.
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH:
Politics Is About Addition and Multiplication—Not Subtraction and Division
Reagan knew what some seem to have forgotten or never grasped: you make your party stronger and more successful by making it bigger. Politics, after all, is about addition and multiplication.
Twice in my lifetime (and Reagan’s) Republican candidates have received 60 percent or more of the popular vote for president, in 1972 and 1984.
I have always advocated that we manage our party—our coalition—in a way that 60 percent of voters would feel welcome in the party or at least be open to consider voting for the GOP nominee for president.
I still think 60 percent should be our number for the Big Tent, and we should run our party accordingly. There are virtually no voters in the other 40 percent who would ever vote for a Republican (unless he or she were unopposed). Be polite to the 40 but make sure that the 60 percent supermajority is welcome and feels welcome.
We are not all going to agree on everything, but everybody who wants to get his or her time at bat should get to have a say. And if a person’s view is in the minority, it wouldn’t be party policy but that view would be tolerated. Good, reasonable people can disagree agreeably.
More important, odds are we would still agree 80 percent or so of the time. Thus, we’d continue as allies, working together on all those things on which we do agree.
Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont was up for reelection when I was chairman of the Republican National Committee in the 1990s. I was asked as chairman to go up to Vermont to campaign for him. When the word got out, a lot of conservatives criticized me for campaigning for the most liberal Republican in the Senate.
“It is absolutely true that Senator Jim Jeffords is the most liberal Republican in the U.S. Senate,” I told my critics and the media. “But let me remind you, Jeffords is also the most conservative member of the Vermont congressional delegation. We will not elect anyone more conservative than Jeffords in that state.”
Everybody knew I was right. The complaining disappeared, and Jeffords got reelected. He was later succeeded by Bernie Sanders, the first self-described socialist elected to Congress in six decades.
Regrettably, we have seen a new version of that scenario play out repeatedly in the last four years. And every time it’s happened, it has allowed the Democrats to win a seat in the U.S. Senate that should have gone to a Republican. Hence, today, instead of fifty-five Democrats in the Senate, there should be only fifty or fifty-one. And maybe fewer.
It started in 2010 when some Delaware Republicans and the developing Tea Party decided Congressman Mike Castle was too liberal, a RINO (Republican in Name Only). Even though Castle, a multiterm former governor of Delaware and an eight-term incumbent congressman representing the entire state, was the overwhelming favorite to pick up a Democrat seat and succeed Joe Biden, who had been elected vice president, the fight was on to deny Castle the nomination.
Enter a young woman who had once worked at the RNC and had tried unsuccessfully to run before, in 2008. Add some political consultants more interested in making money than in the GOP winning elections. In a low-turnout Delaware GOP primary, Castle lost to a virtually unknown “non-witch” because of a narrow group who successfully portrayed him as not conservative enough.
While Castle was branded as ideologically impure, the Democrats elected a liberal senator who votes just like Biden, far left. The quest for purity among some Republicans gave the Left a seat we should have today. We lost in Castle a senator who would have voted right 80-plus percent of the time.
Regrettably, this is only one of at least four instances in the 2010–2012 cycles in which the GOP lost the general election because a skewed nomination contest chose an unelectable or far weaker candidate as our nominee. The same thing happened in Colorado in 2010 and in Indiana and Missouri in 2012.
In the Missouri Republican primary for the Senate, Democrat political action committees (PACs) effectively nominated the weakest Republican in the field. Astoundingly, GOP Congressman Todd Akin’s biggest donors in the primary were independent expenditures by PACs controlled by Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and incumbent Missouri Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill, Akin’s opponent in November. This fact is documented by Federal Election Commission reports.
Having helped defeat Akin’s stronger, more electable opponents in the primary, McCaskill handily defeated her cherry-picked opponent that fall.
The real kicker for our purposes is that Reid-McCaskill helped Akin win the primary by running TV ads that touted him as the most conservative Republican!
Indeed, many would add the 2010 Nevada Senate race to the list of seats blown by Republicans in the primary, when Sharron Angle upset Sue Lowden, again with Angle’s effort being heavily boosted by Harry Reid’s PAC.
Republican primary voters ignored the Buckley Rule: nominate the most conservative candidate who is electable. Had they heeded the advice of one of the country’s greatest conservative icons, the late William F. Buckley Jr., we might have five more Republican senators fighting Obama’s terrible left-wing policies.
As disgusting as Reid’s shenanigans were in distorting GOP primaries, I am equally dismayed by the way some ostensibly Republican PACs used their money to defeat Republicans in GOP primaries.
In the last two cycles, a New York–based GOP PAC has spent piles of money, given by Republican donors, to defeat Republican candidates in primaries. And the damage done by full-throated attack ads run by Republican PACs against Republicans in primaries played a major role in the GOP’s losing the seats.
Republican attack PACs even went after former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, the father of welfare reform in the United States, as being too liberal.
Contributors to operations like these Republican attack PACs need either to exert more control on how their money is spent or to give it to other organizations. I can’t believe any of these donors intend to help the Democrats, but in competitive races these PACs have helped elect more left-wing Democrats in the last two cycles than they have Republicans.
Reagan may not have written the Republican Party’s Eleventh Commandment, but he inspired it, lived it, and was the political Moses who carved it in stone: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.
Like some other commandments, it’s a mighty good doctrine, though extremely hard to follow in practice. The reasons are threefold:
First, “Politics ain’t beanbag,” as the late Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill used to say. And he was right. Though viewed as sport by some, politics is not a game. The stakes are extremely high; the results of many a presidential election have set the country’s course for generations.
Second, the media gives the most attention to the shrillest attacks, the loudest critics, the lowest blows. Wanting to win, candidates and consultants see what the media, including the social media, gobbles up; and they serve it to the media on a plate, hot and steaming.
Finally, in so many House races in partisan strongholds, it is virtually automatic that whoever wins the primary will win the general election.
It isn’t easy to always stay on the right side of the line dividing fair and legitimate criticism on policy from manufactured negatives and phony analysis, not to mention sleazy character assassination. In my opinion, party leaders should not take sides in primaries. The RNC never did while I was its chairman. They should respect the process by blowing the whistle on those who cross the line.
I’ll repeat what bears repeating: conservative voters should follow Buckley’s Rule on primary voting and support the most conservative candidate who can win in November.
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH: The Closer One Gets to the Grass Roots, the More Conservative the Party Is
After forty-five years of active participation in Republican politics, I know that the closer one gets to the grass roots, to the base, the more conservative the party is. This realization came to me when I was executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party in the early 1970s, and I’ve never seen it contradicted.
This explains why primary results are so often more conservative than might be expected and why the results of a caucus or another smaller turnout process are almost always even more conservative. Likewise, in the Democrat Party, the closer to the grass roots, the more to the left the base will vote.
So if I’m a primary voter or am attending my precinct meeting to choose a nominee, I am at the base, the foundation of the party.
In conservative states like mine, the primary voters are very conservative, with the candidates spanning the conservative gamut. We are the rural party, and in rural states mainstream conservative Republicanism is the midstream of political thinking for the state as a whole.
Therefore, in Mississippi and many other Southern, Great Plains, or Mountain West states in which the general electorate is fairly conservative, voters can pick primary candidates about as conservative as themselves and still follow Buckley’s Rule by picking the conservative candidate with the best chance to win in November.
Not long ago we were also the suburban party. We don’t dominate the suburban vote anymore, and the suburbs aren’t as stable as the rural areas.
The fast-growing, fast-changing suburbs are not as conservative as they once were. They are far more diverse in a variety of ways: economically, ethnically, educationally, and so on. They are more diverse politically, too.
In some areas or whole states, moderately conservative or moderate Republicans have the best chance to win. That’s just reality, and it will become a fact in some other areas as our country grows.
But the changes in America, particularly in suburban areas, are not just demographic. There are changing views on a wide spectrum of issues: national security, social, etc. As suburban and exurban areas attract more voters from the central cities and urban areas, political affiliations shift. Currently, these trends are making suburban America less conservative.
But America remains a center-right country. After all, more voters thought Romney would do better on the economy, foreign policy, and managing the government. Subsequent polling in 2013 confirms that most Americans prefer center-right policies.
In 2012, Romney received a wide majority of the votes cast by Caucasians, but lost by much larger margins among Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans.
Much of the reason for the poor showing among voters of color was not about policy. It was because large numbers of Asian Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans thought Romney and the Republican Party did not care about them or their problems.
Indeed, a stunning finding in exit polling done for the networks on Election Day 2012 was the response to this question: Regardless of for whom you voted, which candidate, Obama or Romney, do you think cares more about people like you?
The answer: Obama, 81 percent; Romney, 18 percent!
Even if all the Obama voters (51 percent of the total) said Obama cares more about them than Romney, the math tells us that 62 percent of Romney voters believed Obama cares more about them than the man they voted for.
In most elections, the GOP candidate, unlike Romney, will not get so personally and viciously smeared that 62 percent of his or her voters end up believing that the Democrat cares more about them than their own candidate.
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH: It’s Easier for People to Vote for You If They Think You Like Them
But we must recognize, the answer relates to the Republican Party, not just to Mitt Romney. The unvarnished truth is that minority voters see too few Republicans in their neighborhoods, and even fewer Republicans are at their events seeking those minority voters’ political involvement or support.
The great former Republican governor of Georgia Sonny Perdue used to say, “It is easier for people to vote for you if they like you.”
We now see a corollary to Sonny’s Rule: It’s easier for people to vote for you if they think you like them.
I doubt we’ll see future GOP campaigns in which our candidate calls for “self-deportation” of millions of illegal immigrants. But in 2012 many Latinos heard Romney’s statement as “Send Mama back to Mexico.” It is a wonder Romney received even 27 percent of the Latino vote. All I have to say is those 27 percent are some strong, faithful Republicans.
GHB’S UNVARNISHED TRUTH: To Succeed, the Republican Party Must Be a Big, Broad Coalition
I believe the GOP future is very bright, with many outstanding Republican governors leading the way. But some of us have to come to grips with the realities of two-party politics. Although it has served our country well for more than two centuries, large coalitions are hard to manage.
When I was RNC chairman twenty years ago, I considered my main job to be managing our coalition. This was the only conclusion I could come to after what was then twenty-five years of organizational GOP politics. Every position I held prior to becoming chairman—field organizer in 1968 for Nixon for President in Mississippi; coordinated campaign director in 1972 for Nixon Reelect in Mississippi; executive director, Mississippi Republican Party, 1972–76; regional director for seven states, Ford for President, 1976; county chairman, Yazoo County Republican Party, 1976–80 and 1982–84; campaign chairman, Cochran for Senator, 1978, Mississippi; regional director, Connally for President, 1979–80; candidate for U.S. senator, Mississippi, 1982; chair, Southern Regional Advisory Group, Reagan Reelect, 1984; Republican national committeeman for Mississippi, 1984–97; deputy assistant to the president and political director, Reagan White House, 1985–86—taught me the same lesson: To succeed, the Republican Party must be a big, broad coalition, the Party of the Open Door, the Big Tent Party.
And managing a big, broad coalition is hard work!
Leaders in the two-party system must come to the same conclusion as I did. They have to understand and respect that not everybody is going to agree with them on everything or like their stand on every issue. Similarly, voters have to understand and accept that there will be no perfect candidates from their party.
As I have told conservative crowds for years, “Only one perfect person has ever walked on this earth, and He is not running next year.”
You won’t agree on every issue with any candidate. And every elected official will have to compromise sometimes to get legislation passed.
Especially in a divided government in which the GOP controls only the House while Democrats control both the Senate and the Obama White House, we can’t impose our will on the Left.
Honest politicians admit this. We can block some legislation; we can reduce spending levels at the margins; we can expose wrongdoing; and we can fight against bad policy. But we can’t impose our will on the Left when they have a president and a Senate majority of their own.
That said, sometimes we can achieve more by indirection or by giving the Democrats part of what they want in order to achieve more of what we want to do. This requires judgment, and, as Reagan reminded us, not everybody will agree with every strategy and tactic.
The bottom line is, we won’t be able to put our agenda in place to get the country back on track until we win enough elections to control the government—White House, Senate, and House.
If we win enough elections to do that, you will not think every elected conservative is pure or perfect. Nor will they be. But some of the best, strongest, and most successful will, like Reagan, know how to get good policy enacted and achieve maximum results.
The majorities we put together to win center-right or conservative victories in other states will probably be a little different from the coalition in your own state. Like members of your own family, each state is a unique individual. And as we allow states to learn from one another, they can act as laboratories of democracy.
For instance, when we passed comprehensive tort reform in Mississippi during my first year as governor, many states learned from us and passed tort reforms that fitted their own situations.
Controlling spending and running Medicaid are problems every governor faces, and there, too, we learn from one another, though the solutions usually differ because our states differ.
It is critical for Republicans to stick together, grow our coalitions, and practice the politics of addition and multiplication. My number one unvarnished truth: purity is the enemy of victory and a dead-dog loser in politics and elections.
In closing, I’d like to illustrate this by telling the story behind one of the huge state victories Republicans won it 1994, the greatest midterm majority sweep of the twentieth century.
Minnesota is a tough state for Republicans. In 1984 it was the only state the Democrats carried in the presidential election. (Yes, Walter Mondale won Washington, D.C., but it’s not a state.)
By 1994 we had elected a Republican governor, Arne Carlson. Carlson was pro-choice and rather outspoken about it. Indeed, he could be outspoken about a lot of things.
Abortion had been a very divisive issue at the 1992 GOP convention in Houston. Afterward, the liberal media elite continued to write about abortion as the issue dividing the GOP.
When I was elected RNC chairman in January 1993, I made it plain, “If we let abortion become the threshold issue of Republicanism, we need our heads examined.”
Since I had been publicly pro-life for more than a decade, most pro-choice GOP leaders recognized I was trying to unite the party around the issues we agreed on. My goal was for pro-life GOP voters to support pro-choice Republican candidates, especially if the Democrat was pro-choice, and for pro-choice GOP voters to support pro-life Republican candidates.
For lots of reasons, Minnesota turned out to be a crucial state in the watershed 1994 election.
This story explains why and how. The Minnesota GOP has a convention to choose its nominee for governor, but the results can be appealed to a party primary.
One Friday night in early 1994, Curt Anderson, one of the RNC’s regional field operatives and the one responsible for Minnesota, called me from the state party convention. Curt cut to the chase in his plainspoken manner, “Carlson’s going to lose the vote tomorrow. By a big margin.”
“Have they had some sort of straw vote or pre-caucus?” I wondered out loud. “How are you so sure?”
“No, they haven’t. But it’s obvious. Carlson’s got all the power structure, the rich guys, the ones who winter in Florida. They’ve got suntans. The regular fellas, the dairy farmers and working class, they’re white as snow from being up here all winter. Haley,” he said with a pause, “the pale ones outnumber the suntans about three to one.”
I laughed out loud.
“I’m not kidding,” Curt said before hanging up. “Wait until tomorrow.”
Sure enough, Alan Quist, the pro-life challenger, beat the incumbent governor at his own state party convention by about two to one!
As you can imagine, the New York Times went wild, and I was on the defensive about Minnesota and abortion for a while. Later that year, Governor Carlson came back and beat Quist in the primary by about two to one the other way.
Minnesota, I realized, presented a special opportunity—for my goals as chairman, my party as an emerging Big Tent, and our future path toward majority control.
Republicans had nominated conservative, pro-life Congressman Rod Grams, a former television news anchor, to try to succeed retiring GOP Senator David Durenberger. Grams and Carlson would be running on the ballot as the GOP ticket. Carlson, not only pro-choice but the most liberal Republican governor in the country, teamed up with conservative, pro-life Congressman Rod Grams. And I loved it. The pairing of these two candidates was a case study to test my model for 1994 campaigns and voter behavior.
Senator Bob Dole and I jumped on a plane to Minnesota to raise money for both campaigns and the state party. The candidates and campaigns cooperated with one another, and both won in November. Carlson later told me that more than 90 percent of the Republicans who had opposed him in the convention had actively supported him in the November general election.
That year, a spirit of Republican unity and cooperation from coast to coast witnessed pro-life Republicans voting for pro-choice GOP candidates and pro-choice Republicans voting for pro-life GOP candidates. In 1994, purity was not allowed to prevent victory.
We party leaders emphasized the core issues that united us: smaller government, less spending, lower taxes, rational regulation, open markets and free trade, rule of law, private property, free market capitalism, peace through strength, internationalist foreign policy, toughness on crime, and strong families.
In return, the GOP electorate did not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. We did not let purity prevent victory.
Of course, unity is not enough by itself to ensure victory. That Big Tent party has to be well organized and effective, not only in including all the voters who share its ideas but also in motivating them to actively support our candidates and actually vote on Election Day.
We must raise enough money to be able to communicate our ideas to the American people, and we must use cutting-edge communication technology to deliver our message near and far, and by every medium.
Most important, we must regain our rightful position as the party of ideas—positive ideas and practical programs that will grow our economy and spur job creation; ideas that will extend prosperity to those who have had the least of it; and ideas that equip all our citizens and their children with the tools needed to share in the American dream.
The party of these ideas is the conservative party, which understands the roots, the lessons, and the future of American exceptionalism, the only proven path to upward mobility for all who truly believe that our country can once again arise proudly as that shining city on a hill.
And now, sit back, pour yourself your beverage of choice (mine happens to be Maker’s Mark), reflect on what you learned in this great book of essays, and consider joining the political battle that will return America’s government to the path that will lead our children and grandchildren to the better, more prosperous, and more secure future they can have and deserve.