I’ve come to a cross roads, and I believe many of you are with me. I no longer have faith that members of the Grand Old Party can represent me as a classical liberal or more specifically as a Conservative-Libertarian, and neither do I believe the majority of the members of the party share true forms of those ideologies.

This feeling began developing after the 2010 election when several friends and colleagues of mine and I developed ConservativeCongress.com to assess every single candidate self-proclaimed to be running as a conservative in the entire country. Thousands of unpaid and thankless hours were put into the project by myself and my friends. I myself put in roughly 2,000 to 3,000 hours alone. Then I watched as various state Tea Party groups and supposedly conservative minding groups signed off on the status quo. I became sick as state after state sent D.C. main stays and beltway insiders back to flap their gums about conservative principles while we all watched continuous compromise and a lack of any leadership with the House at their disposal.

The final blow personally for me was when I watched a man take my home district who had not lived in his home state in 18 years and also did not even own property in the state in which he was running for office. I’ve had the great privilege in my lifetime to travel extensively and live in various areas of our great nation. I remember very clearly living abroad in Australia some seven years ago and then upon returning spending the next four years moving around for graduate school and work. When I made it back home I hardly recognized the place in which I grew up. Everything had changed.

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Issuing tough words in the wake of Newt Gingrich’s dramatic South Carolina victory, Gov. Chris Christie said on Meet the Press that Mr. Gingrich has “embarrassed” the Republican Party in the past and that he doesn’t know “whether he’ll do it again in the future.”

Mr. Christie, who was himself widely courted by top Republicans to enter the GOP presidential race earlier in the primary season, told NBC reporter David Gregory that he believes “Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the [Republican] Party over time.”

Mr. Gregory then asked the New Jersey Governor to explain what he meant.   Mr. Christie, who has publicly endorsed Mitt Romney for president, replied:  “He [Gingrich] was run out of the Speakership by his own party.  He was fined $300,000 for ethics violations.  This is a guy who has had a very difficult political career at times and has been an embarrassment to the [Republican] Party.”

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As Newt Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary upended all previously held notions surrounding the unfolding GOP primary race, a common and vocal narrative has become increasingly prevalent; namely, that while he excites the Republican base, Gingrich is an unelectable, personally unlikable candidate that will be trounced in the general election.

This notion is utterly false.

While it is certainly accurate that any of the four remaining candidates for the Republican nomination will provide a stark, and compelling, contrast to the failed policies of the Obama administration, it is Newt Gingrich who has of late tapped into a visceral chord of discontent that permeates throughout much of the nation.

And, contrary to the narrative promoting Gingrich’s un-electability, the anger and discontent felt throughout the nation is not relegated to the conservative base of the Republican party. Nearly every political demographic in the nation, left, right, and middle, is frustrated with the Obama administration’s failure to improve the economic health and overall condition of the country.

Right direction/wrong direction polls have consistently shown that more than three-quarters of the country feel as though the nation is on the wrong track. In a recent poll released by Rasmussen Reports, only 24% of American feel the country is headed in the right direction.

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On the heels of Newt Gingrich’s trouncing of Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary, Republican Party brass are privately expressing deep concerns that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s high unfavorable rating in national polls could prove catastrophic to the so-called “down ballot”–the House and Senate races under the presidential race–and may even threaten the Republican Party’s control of the House of Representatives.

GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who previously served as Sen. John McCain’s senior campaign strategist, told MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow that if Mr. Gingrich wins next week’s Florida GOP primary, there will be “a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language. People will go crazy.”

Mr. Schmidt said he believes Mr. Gingrich’s near universal name recognition indicates that perceptions of Mr. Gingrich have calcified over time and are therefore unlikely to change.  With a national unfavorable rating that he puts at 60 percent, Mr. Schmidt says he believes a Gingrich candidacy could spell disaster for Republican hopes of holding the House and regaining the Senate.

Newt Gingrich has a 100% name ID, has a 60% national unfavorable number and it’s a number so high that with the 100% name ID it’s impossible to come back from. You’re not electable in a general election, in a 2012 presidential election if your unfavorable numbers are that high. Particularly against a president, that while vulnerable, is still a net positive in that number. So people look at Newt Gingrich and don’t see him as a plausible candidate in the general election, so the Republican establishment who thinks that the president is vulnerable and beatable is going to begin to melt down if Gingrich’s momentum continues.

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Conservative Senator Jim DeMint (R-S. Carolina) is not hoping that libertarian Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) drops out of the GOP race for the presidential nomination…at least not for the time being. In fact, he’s hoping that the other GOP candidates will learn something from him.

Sen. DeMint told The Daily Caller, “I really don’t want Ron Paul to drop out until whoever our front-runner is is collecting some of the ideas that he’s talking about.”

Though the senator has predicted that Mitt Romney will win the South Carolina primary, he himself has not endorsed any of the “not-Romney” candidates. Yet, Mr. DeMint has a suggestion for his party:

The debate in the Republican Party needs to be between libertarians and conservatives. … There’s no longer room for moderates and liberals because we don’t have any money to spend, so I don’t want to be debating with anyone who wants to grow government.

Sen. DeMint, who has spent much of his political career fighting against big government, went on to say, ““I’d like to see a Republican Party that embraces a lot of the libertarian ideas.”

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Presidential Candidate Ron Paul’s growing libertarian movement within the Republican Party is causing a high degree of angst among American liberals, who historically deflected any criticism of their crony capitalism by attacking Republicans as sycophants for the “American empire and big finance.” But with Ron Paul’s decades of authentic opposition of the “Military Industrial Complex” and the Federal Reserve, the left is being challenged as their vitriolic moralizing is boomeranging back at themselves and their Democrat allies.

An article: “Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals”, by Mat Stoller of the Roosevelt Institute and former Policy Advisor to Democrat Congressman Alan Grayson, describes Ron Paul as:

“dedicated first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him.”

Stoller confesses that liberals treasure the Federal Reserve as a power-tool of big government they wield to advance their social and military agenda. He concedes Paul and his staff have been effective by working with “vigor and principle” to force greater transparency regarding the Fed’s central banking practices and is disturbed that as Paul’s libertarian movement grows the power of the Fed to advance the liberal agenda will be diminished.

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I’ve grown weary reading about the disappointing nature of the Republican field for President.  So allow me to take a contrarian view: We have a solid field of candidates that seems to be leading to an exciting choice.

First, a disclaimer.  Way back when there were twenty or thirty names being tossed about, Newt Gingrich was my first choice—largely because of the clarity with which he sees the civilizational challenge from the Islamic world.  So it may appear cheap and easy for me to laud a process that has resurrected my candidate after I (and almost everyone else) had left him for dead.

Next, a concession.  There are plenty of great candidates who bowed out of the race.  Personally, as a fourth generation Brooklynite, there is something I find refreshingly familiar about Chris Christie.  It would have been a real pleasure to have a President who understands the difference between arrogance and chutzpah.  Perhaps some other time.

Finally, the field we do have.  As we head towards the political hiatus also known as Christmas, the two leading candidates appear to be Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.  It is hard to imagine two more different politicians:

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In the late 1940s — when the Democrat party began shifting from denying equal rights to southern blacks to championing them — race became a central tenet of American politics. Although the Democrat party fought for slavery during the Civil War, formed the KKK during reconstruction, and used Jim Crow laws to keep blacks from enjoying their rights well into the 20th century, blacks seemed more than willing to look the other way in exchange for a few social programs that promised to bring them the equality they so sorely desired.

Eventually, these social promises (cemented in wealth redistribution programs like the “war on poverty” and racial quotas like affirmative action) came to define the Democrat’s relationship with black voters. Over time the focus on race became so integral to everything the Democrats did that blacks began to define themselves not as black Americans but as “African-Americans” (and soon “Mexican-Americans,” “Italian-Americans,” and every other conceivable people group followed suit). In effect, the language of race became paramount over all other language, and allegiance to race over all other allegiances.

We were reminded of these things in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected in part due to the color of his skin (and the promise of America’s first “African-American President” and a fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr’s dream). Now just look what this focus on race got us: an inexperienced president whose solution for the ailing economy was to raise taxes, take over healthcare, nationalize certain automobile manufacturers, and regulate the financial sector to death (literally). And this is what makes Herman Cain’s announcement that he’s a black American rather than an African-American so refreshing: he’s turning back the dial on this race-above-all-else bunk.

Cain Said: “I do not try to use race to my advantage. I don’t even bring it up unless somebody asks me about it, and I have said repeatedly [that] this is not about color. This is about the content of your ideas, and your character.” Talk about the fulfillment of MLK’s dream! MLK said he dreamt of a day when people would not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character — which is exactly what Cain’s saying. And it’s 180 degrees from what Obama and the Democrat party are saying.

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Regarding our country’s current fiscal issues, Republicans are right to draw a line in the sand. We have an obligation to say “no” to tax increases that do nothing to either stem or support the profligate, big-government spending favored by the Democrats. Unchecked government spending is a road that, if traveled, will further plunge our nation into economic anemia due to massive debt and uncontrollable entitlements. This malaise, Democrats will argue, may only be solved by “redistributing wealth” through back-breaking tax increases that will erode the spirit and principles that distinguish our country, leaving only a shadow of its past greatness. That is what is at stake; the stakes have never been higher.

Conservatives cannot allow Republican lawmakers to soften or defect on the party’s fundamental principles, or worse, align with those who are diametrically opposed to everything the GOP stands for:  free enterprise, reasonable taxes, limited government and tort reform. Yes, tort reform — and here’s why.

Ignoring tort reform has been devastating to taxpayers, the economy and American business. The U.S. is the most litigious nation in the world; it weakens us competitively and lessens respect for America’s legal system in the eyes of the world. The question isn’t how this critical issue fell from our sightlines to the sidelines. The question is: Why have we permitted trial lawyers to worm their way into our ranks to undermine GOP priorities and the party itself?

In state capitols across the country, there are legislators who proclaim to be conservatives yet block lawsuit reform. A look at just a few states quickly reveals several examples of Republicans who align with personal injury lawyers. (more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Michael Bowen to discuss how the split between Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft led to the transformation of the Republican party as a party of conservatives, which began with Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Republican Bob Turner’s win in New York’s 9^th Congressional District is a story the Frank Sinatra hit song, New York, New York, was written for. The GOP can now sing this tune about itself, specifically these lines:

If (we) can make it there, (we’ll) make it anywhere

It’s up to you, New York, New York

It was up to New York, and New York delivered big time. Just like Senator Scott Brown’s “unlikely” win in liberal Massachusetts, Turner’s election in a historically Democratic stronghold signals a sea change in politics. If Republicans can win this seat – considered untouchable for 90+ years – then how tough will it be for them to win in places considered toss-ups or GOP-leaning?

Of course, the Democratic Party is in denial, at least publicly. Debbie “Downer” Wasserman-Shultz dismissed any concern about Turner’s win, saying that the 9^th District is a difficult district for her party. Really?

Turner’s win, like the rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 Republican election victories, are also rebukes of the mainstream media and nearly every political pundit. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and revisit some of the obituaries written about the GOP a mere three years ago.

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I recently had the opportunity to ask Michigan’s 1st District Freshman Rep. Dan Benishek a few questions about the state of affairs in Congress in the wake of the battle between Speaker Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and President Obama over what to do with the budget for the remainder of the fiscal year. What follows are his responses, and a brief wrap at the close.

[Lead in to Rep. Benishek]
The debate over the budget for the remainder of this year was very contentious. There’s been a tremendous amount of pressure; from the media, to the President and the Democrats (including a great deal of rancor within the Republican caucus itself), the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1473) to fund the Government through September 30 had the attention of the entire country.

Many people have been very critical of Speaker Boehner and the process that got this deal done as well as what it actually contains. A great deal of attention has been paid to this fight by Tea Party folks and many others. A lot of Americans, both left AND right, believe they were “played” by Leadership on both sides of the aisle – sold a bill of goods filled with what we once called “fuzzy math” – and they are not happy. But the vote is done now, the bill has passed, and we’re moving ahead.

Q: In 2010 Americans sent a lot of new faces to Washington to change the direction of the country. Right now, people are feeling they’ve been sold out. Were they?

Congressman Benishek: People should not feel sold out. They can be frustrated. I am frustrated that the cuts were not bigger, but we have to remember Democrats still control the Senate and White House. I believe the Speaker did the best he could with the resources he had. I was not directly involved in negotiating with President Obama and Senator Reid, but I can tell you that as long as I am given the opportunity to vote for significant reductions in spending, I will be a “Yea” vote every time.

Q: What happened, how are you going to handle negotiations differently going forward, and what do we all need to be paying closer attention to?

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At this very moment an historic press conference is taking place in Topeka, Kansas, to announce The National Tea Party Nominating Convention, also known as Freedom Fest 2011.

If you are a Tea Party activist or someone who is sick and tired of being forced to choose the “best available Republican candidate from among the worst,” then this is the event you have been waiting for.

The nominating convention will take place in America’s heartland, Kansas City, October 5^th-9^th, 2011.  Over 1 million people are expected to attend, including several of the U.S. Presidential hopefuls.

I am humbled to write that Yours Truly has been selected to act as emcee.

The purpose of the convention is not to be a third party challenge but instead, to vet U.S. Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates so that the RNC understands which candidates the grassroots Tea Party nation supports.  Should the Republican party choose to ignore the message, they will do so at their own risk.

As political pollster and author of the book Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two Party System Scott Rasmussen recently told me on my radio show, “I can’t imagine any Republican party Presidential candidate winning his party’s nomination without the support of the Tea party movement.” (more…)

Our last Republican to hold statewide office was Governor Pete Wilson who left the office in 1999. I’m not counting the last, failed action-star who just left the office and was about as Republican as Nancy Pelosi. Schwarzenegger supported both Cap and Trade, and Obamacare. The Republican brand has died in California. Many folks have been doing the post mortem. In the last election cycle, despite the Republican resurgence throughout the country, not a blip of hope was on the screen here.

How bad was it during the last election cycle? When the electorate chooses Barbara “general, call me senator” Boxer over a former HP chief Carly Fiorina, it’s bad. They chose an anti-death penalty Attorney General, Kamala Harris who even refused to apply a death penalty to cop killers. California chose Ms. Harris over Steve Cooley, a republican who was a successful DA from Los Angeles. Additionally, Ms. Harris had the lowest conviction rate of any big city district attorney.No Republican won any constitutional office in the state in 2010. It was a wipeout.

“There’s been a broad repudiation of traditional conservative Republicans in California,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP analyst and co-editor of the California Target Book, which tracks state politics. “There are almost no areas in the state that can be considered safely Republican anymore.”

To add insult to injury, since 2004 GOP registration shrank by 317,000 at the same time Democrats picked up 563,000. That’s a whopping democrat advantage of over three quarters of a million voters.

Where’s our leadership? Here’s where -attending mock funerals for the party. There was one recently held for the GOP where Duf Sundheim, a former state GOP chair declared, “Republicans, as a brand, are dead.” Can we please resolve now not to elect GOP chairmen named; Duf, or Biff or Buff or any other caricature names of the idle white and rich?

Ok, we get it. It’s now time for our wake up call. We need to shift gears and get this beat up truck down the track. I haven’t heard much in the way of new or inspiring ideas from any of the state GOP party apparatchik.

Here are some positive ideas:
Focus on economic issues.
Face reality. As much as they’re important to many of us, social issues are a loser in California. Although the GOP won on the defense of marriage initiative; they just barely won. It’s not a winner issue for the GOP particularly if they want to attract new and younger voters going forward. That’s just the facts.

We need to focus in on putting statewide ballot propositions before the voters that are sponsored by Republicans working in coalitions and improve the GOP brand. Ideas that show we are the leaders.

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On September 23, 1779 in the midst of one of the bloodiest engagements in naval history, John Paul Jones was struggling against the forty-four gun Royal Navy frigate Serapis and although his own vessel was burning and sinking, Jones would not accept the British demand for surrender.  Instead Jones declared, “I have not yet begun to fight.” Little more than three hours later, the Serapis surrendered and Jones took command.

The voice of the American people was heard this November 2^nd for the first time in the past two years.  The Republican Party regained control of the House of Representatives, picking up a historic sixty seats and possibly sixty-five or more seats as final votes are tallied.  Six Senate seats were gained by Republicans with another two seats possible as close contests are resolved, further diminishing Democratic political power.  The Grand Old Party (GOP) also gained a net eight governorships and nineteen State legislatures changed over from Democratic to Republican control.

In the final days leading up to the election and in the hours immediately following, the President began to call for compromise.  Really?  After taking the oath of office in January of 2009, Mr. Obama declared, “Elections have consequences and we won!” He then led his fellow Democrats on an eighteen month assault against Republicans in Congress and against the will of the American people, pushing his left-of-center agenda.  Just before this week’s election he said the Republicans can come along but, “They need to sit in the back.” He also publically referred to his opponents as “Enemies.”

Now he wants compromise, but the only compromise that the American people clearly want is for the President and the Democrats to move off their agenda and come to them.

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Over the last twenty-two months, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have sown the wind. Today – if the polls are any indication – they will reap the whirlwind.

The portents have been there for a very long time. It all began on 19 February 2009 with a rant on CNBC on the part of Rick Santelli, which struck a nerve and occasioned the birth of the Tea-Party Movement. That the tide might be beginning to turn was made evident in mid-April of that year when the adherents of that movement successfully mounted demonstrations across the entire country, and the Democrats and their minions in the media began denouncing them as Astroturf, Nazis, racists, and tea-baggers. And to anyone who cared to notice, the seriousness of the opposition and the depth of their concern was made manifest that August when constituents confronted their Senators and Congressmen in town halls throughout the land and shouted them down. It was on 2 August 2009 that I first suggested that, if the Republicans embraced the Tea-Party Movement and articulated the grievances that had occasioned its emergence, a genuine political realignment might be in the offing.

As it happened – and it was by and large an accident – the Republicans were well-positioned to take advantage of this political opening. In January, 2009, many of the House Republicans and not a few of their colleagues in the Senate would have been willing to cooperate with the Democrats in promoting the agenda of the Obama administration. In 2008, they had received a drubbing at the polls, and they were appropriately cowed. But, campaign rhetoric aside, no one on the Democratic side was seriously interested in bipartisan accord. They had won the election; they persuaded themselves that they had a mandate; and though President Obama had presented himself to the voting public as a moderate, he and his fellow Democrats had not the slightest intention of seeking the middle ground. In the House, it would not have taken much to swing a sizable group of Republicans behind the Democrats’ program, but Nancy Pelosi was intent on revenge. So, when the so-called “stimulus” bill came up for a vote, she made sure that there were within it no earmarks for the Republicans, and out of pique nearly all of them voted against the measure.

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Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

Two central facts give shape to the historic 2010 election. The first is not understood by Republicans, and the second not admitted by Democrats.

The first: the tea party is not a “threat” to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn’t remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

In a practical sense, the tea party saved the Republican Party in this cycle by not going third-party. It could have. The broadly based, locally autonomous movement seems to have made a rolling decision, group by group, to take part in Republican primaries and back Republican hopefuls.

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From The Hill:

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies.

House and Senate Democrats have received approximately $1.02 million this cycle from such PACs, according to an analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics. House and Senate GOP leaders have taken almost $510,000 from PACs on the same list.

The PACS are funded entirely by contributions from U.S. employees of subsidiaries of foreign companies. All of the contributions are made public under Federal Elections Commission rules, and the PACs affiliated with the subsidiaries of foreign corporations are governed by the same rules that American firms’ PACs or other PACs would face.

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From The Hill:

Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.

This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.

The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.

The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.

More than one in every five Democrats (22 percent) in The Hill’s survey said their party was more dominated than the GOP by extreme views. The equivalent figure among Republicans is 11 percent.

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Just outside the DC Beltway, in Maryland’s sprawling first congressional district, an electoral battle is underway that exposes unique ideological fault lines beneath America’s political landscape.

The campaign pits freshman “Blue Dog” Democratic congressman Frank Kratovil in a rematch against Republican Dr. Andy Harris. Given the political tilt of the district, coupled with the Tea Party tsunami gathering force this year, one would think that this race should be a slam dunk for Harris.

A tall, affable family man, Harris is an anesthesiologist, Navy veteran, hardcore free-marketer, and constitutional conservative. By contrast, Kratovil, a former attorney, tries to portray himself as an “independent” who distances himself from Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic majority. However, the Washington Post reports that “Frank Kratovil has voted with a majority of his Democratic colleagues 84.6% of the time during the current Congress.” Among his least popular votes since taking office: support for the “cash for clunkers” program, for the near-trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending orgy, and for the hugely expensive “cap-and-trade” energy bill. Plus, of course, his vote to elevate the widely reviled Pelosi to the Speaker’s position.

Yet, despite all that, a recent poll finds Harris holding only a statistically insignificant three-point lead over Kratovil. This, while other GOP candidates are faring much better even in usually “safe” Democratic districts.

What’s going on here?

One of the most infuriating spectacles this election season is supposedly “Republican,” “conservative,” and “pro-business” individuals and groups supporting entrenched liberal incumbents against free-market, limited-government challengers. For many special-interest “insiders,” even on the right, philosophical convictions are far less important than sharing a “seat at the table” with the politically powerful.

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