Think about it this way:

What good has Obama’s stimulus package done? Our national unemployment is ranging between 8.6 & 9.1%, and it only appears that low because those keeping tabs on it stopped counting people who have given up on ever finding jobs. Moreover, because of the Democrat’s tax and spend approach, our national debt is now at $15, 182,756,264,288.80, and Obama’s plan to change this is “more EPA, more NLRB, more Dodd-Frank, and more Obamacare.”

As Larry Kudlow put it: “Obama’s economic policies have failed.”

And if you want a microcosm of Obama’s failed presidency, of his ridiculous approach to economic policy, look no further than the Chevy Volt. The sticker price on a Volt is $40,000, but the cars are so technologically challenged that each one is subsidized to the tune of approximately $250,000. Now that’s Obama-nomics in a nutshell: Brag about your car company’s $40,000 electric car, but never mention that the $40,000 price tag costs tax payers a quarter of a million dollars per car.

To date, Obama has spent approximately $3,000,000,000.00 subsidizing Volts. And what have the American people gotten in return? A car that only a handful of people want and that has a tendency to catch on fire while sitting in the garages of the few purchasers Obama’s been able to scrounge up.

No wonder this guy has our economy in the tank.

And it gets worse. Apart from the asinine price per vehicle, the Chevy Volt is an electric car with a range of 30 miles (and that’s if you’re driving downhill). Actual range is closer to 25 miles or so. What good is a car that goes 30 miles? That’s like hunting with a gun that shoots 2 feet or boarding a cruise ship that never leaves dock. What’s the point? (To be fair, the Volt has a gasoline engine that kicks in once the charge is gone, and on the gas engine it can travel another 300 miles.)

Yet I don’t know about you, but a car that travels 300 miles on gasoline and only 25 miles on electricity sounds more like a fossil fuel vehicle than an electric one to me. And that’s precisely why it’s the perfect microcosm of Obama’s presidency. It’s all show, no substance. It’s sentimental mumbo jumbo about hope and change divorced from any real way to fix economies or create jobs or stop the dollar from imploding.

If GM were honest, their advertisement for the car would feature a photo of a Volt captioned thus:

The Chevy Volt: an electric car that runs on gasoline, proudly brought to you by Barack Obama, a president who knows even less about car manufacturing that he does about economics.

As an original tea party organizer, this shift doesn’t surprise me. By “this shift,” I refer to the the tea party’s popularity waning among Southerners and people aged 18 to 29. The poll shows that a full 50 percent of Americans now have a negative view of the tea party.

Sure, there may have been some chicanery with the questions to skew the results. But only a true shift in sentiment would result in change this big. After a year of wall-to-wall coverage of “tea party,” this downshift should come as no surprise.

I think there are several issues here:

1. Rand Paul’s performance since the primary has been a net negative.  I pointed out on Larry Kudlow’s show on CNBC the day after Kentucky primary that Paul’s candidacy is not a referendum on the tea party movement. Nothing is. But he and some tea partyers insisted on linking the two, and his handling of controversy has been less than spectacular.
2. In Nevada, Michigan, and elsewhere, leftists have created fake “tea party” parties that have damaged the brand by running Democrats pretending to be tea partyers. The idea is to split the center-right vote to allow the like of Harry Reid back into Congress.
3. In-fighting among tea partyers has left a foul taste in the mouths of many. This development shouldn’t be a surprise. The tea party movement has no structure or hierarchy to keep order, and it’s filled with people who are new to this arena. We make mistakes, people.  Get over it.
4. Some disenchanted Republicans who were early tea partyers have returned to the GOP. That doesn’t mean they won’t continue to fight the good fight. It means they’ll do so under a banner they’re more familiar with.
5. Zealots and purists have splintered off and driven away more pragmatic reformers. We’ve seen this in numerous places across the country.  When the zealots lose, they tend to take their balls and go home. They also tend to turn off the people who just want their country back.
6. After a year of hearing “tea party, tea party, tea party,” many people are probably just tired of hearing about it.  I am tired of hearing about it. I want to rack up some damn wins and get about fixing the country, and really don’t care what was call the thing that does it.
7. We’re in The Dip

These shifts in sentiment should come as no surprise. Instead, they indicate that our movement is growing up.  Part of that maturation process involves channeling our energies into outgrowths of the tea party movement.

Ensuring Liberty and similar organizations allow the tea party passion to yield actual results. The tea party movement is indispensable for its passion and energy and new blood, but 10,000 angry people don’t win elections. Ten thousand voters, multiplied by tens of thousands precincts, win elections. Ensuring Liberty—founded and directed by local tea party organizers from several states—combines the spirit and values of the tea party with strong campaign experience and a Congressional caucus.

Together, the people, the passion, and the principled accountability give grassroots conservatives a tool for managing Washington that we’ve never had before.

So what can  you do?  How can  you take this passion, this glorious coming together that we’ve experienced since February 27, 2009, and turn it into a wild victory celebration on November 2?  Let’s start with this list:

1. Invest in an organization that is engineered to win important races and to hold the new Congress accountable.  I helped launch Ensuring Liberty to do just that, and we need your support to get there.  Please join today so you can tell your kids, “I helped ensure your liberty. Now clean up your room.”
2. Take personal responsibility to register everyone in your house to vote.
3. Launch a community building  project like St. Louis’s Block Captain and Liberty Evangelism project. Give people the power of personal freedom by handing them a Constitution with your email address on it, saying, “Please take this as  a gift. Please read it and decide for yourself whether Washington is living up to the promises in those documents.”
4. Use the buddy system to make sure everyone you recruit votes in the primary and on November 2.  That means you commit to getting someone to the polls, and someone commits to making sure you vote.  Take ownership of this job.  Let nothing stop you.
5. Put in for vacation on November 1, 2, and 3.  Do it right now. Your kids need you to get out the vote on their behalf.  Let nothing stop you. (You will still be partying on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m., so you might as well not even think about working that day.)
6. Vote early and get your friends and neighbors who agree with you to vote early.
7. Every night before you go to bed, write a positive journal entry describing the feeling, the sounds, the news of November 2 and 3.  Go ahead and project. Describe Ed Martin’s victory speech when he unseats Russ Carnahan in Missouri.  Or write about Nancy Pelosi breaking down in tears as she kisses the Speaker’s Gavel good-bye.  What will Frank Rich say?  How about Paul Krugman?  Keith Olbermann? What could be more fun than hearing Chris Matthews describe the “Tea bagger temper tantrum” that overturned Congress?   Write Rush Limbaugh’s opening monologue for November 3.

The name of the movement doesn’t matter. It never did.  Names are symbols.  The name came from the name of an event—a “tea party” held to demonstrate that we’d had enough. That phase is over.  Everyone knows we’ve had enough.  Now it’s time to act.

What is Fair?

Hillary, Nancy, Harry, Obama and many others on the Left use the fair share argument, which is nothing more than a class-warfare tactic, as a prelude to raising tax rates to pay for social welfare programs. Stephen Moore, who was also the show and has been fighting this fight for years, and ably so, pointed out that the top 2 ½% of income tax payers pay the same amount in income taxes as the bottom 97 ½%.  It is also fact that the bottom 50% of income earners pay almost no income tax at all. If that is unfair in the minds of the Left, then clearly they want a chosen few to pay for everything and believe FDR when he said: “increasing the tax paid by individuals in the higher brackets . . . was the American thing to do and increasing still further the taxes paid by individuals in the highest brackets was even more the American thing to do.”

Of course, the problem with such policies is that wealth moves in the form of businesses and their owners moving away, along with sensible people realizing that it is not worth their time to risk everything only to have the state confiscate their rewards, and for still others to simply engage in tax evasion such as under reporting income and bartering.

Wherever and whenever in history the tax rates have become too confiscatory they have destroyed the economic vitality of the city or state that pushed them in the name of fairness.  The result has been lower income, less jobs, poorer people and , oh yes, less tax revenue.  That is why Keynes said that the high tax rates defeat their own purpose.

Capitalism Requires Capital.

For Robert Reich, who has had government job after government job, the notion that capitalism needs capital appears to be downright Greek to him.  While advocating for higher tax rates, he stated that there were higher tax rates in the 50’s and 60’s and there was more economic growth than today.  Such rhetoric is fraud by omission.  While it is true that the top marginal rate was 94% under Truman, 91% under Eisenhower, and 70% under Johnson, Kudlow and Moore well pointed out what Professor Reich conveniently forgets or never knew: there are multitude of other taxes now on the books, or that are much higher than ever before, that have produced an overall tax burden much higher than in those years.

Beyond that, the regulatory burden businesses faced in the 50’s and 60’s is dwarfed by the burden they face today.  Finally, the only sustainable growth economic periods, over the last 40 years, were all touched off by the cut in the marginal tax rates in 1965 from 91% to 70% by Johnson, from 70% to 28% by Reagan, and George Bush 2003 tax cuts.  By contrast, the 50’s had no less than 3 recessions because the high marginal tax rates choked off capital formation and the government spending of the day couldn’t sustain the US economy.  Sound familiar?

In the face of such facts, Reich offered the theory of the social-welfare Left for economic growth: “investing” in “people” through education and social welfare programs leads to job and economic growth.   As Reich listed the many such programs for which he wants the rich to pay their fair share, which he surmises will lead to jobs, Stephen Moore attempted to interject multiple times:  “What about businesses?”  You know, the outfits that actually hire people?

Reich wouldn’t bite – he just doesn’t accept that if you raise the costs on businesses and their owners, you deprive them of the very capital they need to survive, grow and add employees – let alone pay income tax.  And that, in a nutshell, is why the welfare state of the Left which they have long sought is choking off American prosperity today.

Fortunately, recent Rasmussen polling today indicates that 2/3rds of Americans believe like Kudlow and Moore that tax cuts are the key to economic revival not tax and spend policies.  As the 2010 midterm elections approach, the Congressional Republicans need to join that choir in earnest and start winning back the hearts and minds of Americans on the issue of economic prosperity.

This is your moment, Larry Kudlow, and you have a grass roots movement behind you, the likes of which the state of New York has never seen. You see, even though the Harvard trained, professional politician won his last election with 71% of the vote, and believes it to be his birthright to get reelected, there is good reason to believe that Chuck may be just a tad worried. There’s something rotten in the state of Eliteville these days.

Chuck is not a big tea party fan and was a bit shaken up by the Massachusetts results.  In fact, in his fundraising efforts to keep the “Kennedy seat” in the right hands, Chuck derided Scott Brown as a “far right tea bagger”. I guess Chuck doesn’t think many New Yorkers are sympathetic to the tea party movement. Let’s show him how wrong he is, Larry.

Chuck is also troubled that political correctness—one of his choice methods to protect his favored ‘victims’ (i.e., voting blocs)—is now under attack. Whereas most Americans are sickened by the insidious political correctness that has taken hold of the United States Army and the resulting Islamic terrorist infiltration and massacre at Fort Hood, Chuck insists that guns were the true culprit.

Chuck also seems anxious that the attempted Democratic/media monopoly on speech—which he worked so hard to maintain—is under assault. You see, Chuck believes passionately in the Fairness Doctrine where fair and unbiased people like FCC Diversity Czar, Mark Lloyd (a big Hugo Chavez fan), get to control the radio airwaves. When recently questioned about it, Chuck reiterated his support for the Fairness Doctrine and likened it to regulating porn.  Chuck definately supports free speech, as long as he gets to choose the speakers.

Of the recent groundbreaking Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that effectively ends the media monopoly on political speech, Chuck whined, “the Roberts Court has turned back the clock on our Democracy by over 100 years”. You see, Chuck doesn’t believe that groups of people, including businesses, unions, and virtually any type of affiliation of individuals, should be able to express political opinions. No, that should be left to the experts like CNN, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, and other enlightened people like Chuck, who know what’s best for us. Chuck definitely does not like losing his monopoly on free speech.

As for corporate interests, Chuck is much more comfortable when corporate free speech is filtered though him. The Washington Examiner revealed that, of the five most politically active industries, Schumer is the top recipient of campaign cash from three of those. This way, Chuck can promote–behind the scenes, of course—the only type of capitalism he approves of; crony capitalism. Chuck’s $30 million war chest is brimming with corporate money from industries he has cowed into submission. Yes, even though Chuck likes to browbeat capitalists, he is always happy to take their ‘donations’. And like all of his uber-liberal cohorts in Congress who want to lord over entire industries, Chuck has never run so much as a lemonade stand.

This in your moment, Larry Kudlow. In his now famous A Time for Choosing speech, Ronald Reagan crystallized the issue of the 1964 Presidential race.

“This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

With your participation, the 2010 New York Senate race will be come down to the very same issue and no one epitomizes the little intellectual elite better than Charles Schumer.

Carpe Diem, Larry Kudlow. Carpe Diem, New Yorkers.

Pick Up the Mantle

I don’t know Kudlow well. We met several times during the Reagan years but it was at Buffalo Congressman Jack Kemp’s 2009 memorial service that I got reacquainted with the pro-growth enthusiast. Kudlow has been on on my STONEzone TEN BESTED DRESSED LISTtm since 2008. I admire him as an unabashed apostle of hope and optimism and opportunity on television and radio. His are the politics of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, who Kudlow calls his mentor.

It goes without saying that Chuck Schumer needs a vigorous challenger; he is perhaps the most odious, pushy, abrasive and self-absorbed jerk in Congress today. His pork-fests are legendary, and he narrowly escaped indictment for corruption as an Assemblyman before becoming the master of the “pay to play” game in Washington.

But Kudlow’s potential candidacy is about something even more important than sending Schumer packing.

Today leftist historians are rewriting history, burying supply-side economics and recasting what really happened under Ronald Reagan.

Relight the Torch

Their mantra – the Reagan tax cuts caused the deficit – is dead wrong. Government revenues soared under Reagan – so did Congressional spending which is the real cause of federal deficits.

Reagan and Kemp transformed the Republican Party from the party of the wealthy to the party of the workingman. It was the Bushs who carted us back to the country club. Still, the 1992 defeat of President George HW Bush who raised taxes demoralized those who understood the need to keep the “read my my lips” pledge. Although W. was a tax-cutter the insane levels of spending undermined growth and tax-cutting became dicredited.

As a result, the pro-growth wing of the Republican Party has no leader today, no one to carry the banner of growth and opportunity and free markets.

Larry Kudlow can make a case for economic growth at center stage in the media capital of the world. In the United States Senate, Larry Kudlow would have the bully pulpit. And make no mistake – he would use it wisely.

It has bothered me to no end that The Washington Post never ran an obituary of Jack Kemp, whose 1988 campaign for President I ran in New Hampshire. The newspaper only mentioned his death in passing, relegated to the sports page.

The message behind the Beltway Bible’s dismissive treatment of one of the lions of the Reagan Revolution is this: tax-reduction didn’t work, so Kemp’s greatest achievements were on the football field.

Conservatives cannot let them rewrite history, and Larry Kudlow can snatch away their pen. He was present at the birth of the economic prosperity Ronald Reagan brought to America. So it is up to him to pick up the Kemp banner; he must relight the Reagan torch.

Win or lose, a Kudlow campaign would re-energize the growth wing of the Republican Party. That alone is worth running for, but he can certainly beat Schumer whose approval rating has dipped to a record low.

Some decry Kudlow, saying he was wrong in his economic predictions as our global economic meltdown approached. But who was right? Here is what we do know: taxing and spending got us to where we are today, and higher taxes and more pork spending are making it far worse. This is Chuck Schumer’s Washington, and it is NOT the answer.

But the 2010 campaign is not about the past, it’s about the future.

Kudlow would run an uplifting, erudite and issue-oriented campaign in the style of Jack Kemp. Although he cannot match the $19 million in blood money packed in Schumer’s war chest, Kudlow is well liked on Wall Street and at the Tea Parties and he can raise significant late dollars – big and small – to be competitive on television. As a skilled communicator in America’s Medium, Kudlow would wear well with a broader audience.

In the end, it was a popular draft movement that pulled Jim Buckley and Alfonse D’Amato into their New York Senate races, and they both won tough campaigns. In perhaps the most important draft since Goldwater, Larry Kudlow would attract thousands of young conservative activists and he would re-invigorate the Reagan/Kemp wing of the Republican Party.

Pick Up the Banner?

I say run, Larry, run.

Just eight months later, there is a remarkable potential candidate in the Kemp mold who may oppose – and defeat – uber liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). New York Republican, Conservative and Tea Party leaders are talking up the potential candidacy of CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow, a former advisor to Kemp and Ronald Reagan.

For decades, Chuck Schumer has bullied his way to victory at the polls. He’s a prodigious fundraiser, a tough campaigner, and has long been thought unbeatable. But as former New York Assembly Republican leader John Faso noted recently in the New York Post, Schumer’s “image of invincibility has been fed by the failure of Republicans in New York and Washington to aggressively attack his vulnerabilities.”

Many New Yorkers agree: it is difficult to find a federal legislator as odious as Schumer. He is personally responsible for much of the bad policy that led to the economic melt down of the United States. He stands firmly in favor of health care reform that is bad for New Yorkers and he supports a tax on banks that is poison for the Empire State.

And when the Obama administration announced plans to make Manhattan a terrorist target again by trying al Qaeda terrorists in the city – at a cost of hundreds of millions of tax dollars – we didn’t hear a peep of complaint out of our Senator until after the White House shifted its position.

Just one year ago, Schumer took to the Senate floor to explain his affection for pork barrel spending. “Let me say this to all of the chattering class that so much focuses on those little tiny, yes, porky amendments,” he lectured. “The American people really don’t care.”

In minutes, his tone-deaf commentary was featured on YouTube. Fully ten percent of 270,000 video viewers left colorful comments disagreeing with the Senior Senator from New York – an extraordinary rate of reply for the Web site. Ten days later, CNBC’s Rick Santelli set off another Reagan Revolution by calling for “a Tea Party in Chicago.” Schumer’s hubris helped.

Just in time for the Holidays last year, voters in New York were regaled with another story of Schumer’s antics. Told to shut down his cell phone on a US Airways shuttle from New York to Washington, New York’s senior Senator instead called a flight attendant a foul name. Even after he said the phone was off, it rang again.

“It’s Harry Reid calling,” Schumer said loudly. “I guess health care will have to wait until we land.” Perhaps thanks to that flight attendant, Schumer’s health care public option may never take off.

Today, Schumer has turned his guns on his own ranks, pretending only he may decide who among Democrats can and cannot run against his hand puppet, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Meanwhile, he’s conniving to replace Sen. Harry Reid as the leading Senate Democrat.

Until Scott Brown was elected to the Senate in loopy liberal Massachusetts, nobody thought it ever possible to rid New York of the self-serving, mean-spirited, virulently partisan liberal. Now the game has changed. Enter Larry Kudlow.

A graduate of the University of Rochester, Kudlow also worked for New York’s legendary Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A chief architect of the Reagan era tax-cuts that sparked one of the greatest economic booms in modern times, Kudlow is recognized as a leading anti-tax supply side economist. He holds Jack Kemp out as his mentor and is one of the few people in politics today determined to carry the Buffalo Congressman’s legacy forward.

Kudlow has run a business, met a payroll and toiled for decades in the corporate, policy and media arenas. He’s also endured the alembic of personal crisis and come out tempered with character and humility. In contrast, Schumer has been in politics all his adult life and, after countless mean-spirited public episodes, his character is in question.

Kudlow is also a thoughtful, well-spoken and original analyst and one of the most effective debaters on the Right. This capacity is vital against Schumer, who is vicious and smart on the stump.

Importantly, Kudlow may raise just as much money from his stellar contacts as Schumer does from his own. Insiders say he may even beat the longtime legislator among Wall Street donors, who are quietly but completely tired of Schumer’s shakedowns.

On the one-year anniversary of Schumer’s snotty miscalculation of Americans’ appetite for pork, Larry Kudlow is seriously considering a bid for his seat. Kemp fans are especially intrigued and in just three weeks more than 15,000 Americans enthusiastic about his potential candidacy have signed up here.

This election year, Chuck Schumer may meet his own Scott Brown, even his own Jack Kemp. And nobody deserves it more.

But a candidate might emerge. New York Tea Party leaders are talking up the potential candidacy of CNBC Talking Head and former Reagan Advisor Larry Kudlow. A graduate of the University of Rochester, Kudlow is one of the architects of the Reagan tax-cuts that sparked one of the great economic boom in modern times. Kudlow who also worked for New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is recognized as a leading anti-tax supply side economist. Kudlow is also know as one of the most effective debaters on the Right.

Kudlow is  known to have beaten an addiction to cocaine which almost derailed his career. Kudlow was addicted to coke and he beat it, Schumer is addicted to special interest campaign contribution and that’s a bigger problem today. Kudlow is the kind of candidate who could raise tea party money across America . Kudlow could also command the Republican and Conservative nominations and might even be able to petition his way on the ballot as the Libertarian party nominee.

Kudlow was mentioned as a possible candidate against Chris Dodd last year. Kudlow owns a home in Connecticut.

Chuck Schumer is a corporate whore who was whole-hog  for the expansion of Freddie Mac and  Fannie Mae and is as responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crisis as anyone in America. Now he has crowned himself the King of New York, deciding who can and cannot run for public office. More and more New Yorkers are fed up with this self-serving schmuck.

Run , Larry, Run !