As Conservative leaders prepare for the nasty fight ahead to win the White House, Ryan offered an alternative solution other than focusing solely on President Obama’s failed policies.  He mentioned the American people need a “clear choice of two futures” through a very specific vision of restoration.

Ryan warns if Obama is re-elected a severe debt crisis would likely occur within the next two to three years and if Republicans prevail, they will have the chance to preempt that type of economic disaster.  He mentioned the worst case scenario would be our country becoming a complete “welfare state” due to Obama’s agenda and current track record.  The Chairman states, “At CPAC I’ll make the case for clarifying the choice facing the American people: our principled plan to restore the American Idea versus the President’s failed agenda of debt, doubt, and decline.”

After the Ryan interview, I received some criticism from a liberal friend.  She harped, “you people have made Ryan a budget god”. To which I replied, “at least he has a budget.”  It highlights an important aspect of Chairman Ryan who develops and offers viable solutions like his budget plan and now the plan to offer a very clear alternative to President Obama failings.   He mentioned that at the speech on Thursday  he will give prominence to creating an “affirming” plan for Conservatives this election year, that offer valid solutions therefore giving us a “moral authority.”

Paul stressed, “As reformers, it is our task in the year ahead to make clear the reform agenda needed to get us back on track – to get our economy growing, to tackle the rising cost of health care, to strengthen health and retirement security for all Americans, and to lift the crushing burden of debt so that hardworking families can prosper. We need reforms that expand opportunity and upward mobility.”

As Occupy DC protesters prepare glitter bombs for the upcoming conference, Republicans like Paul Ryan are creating solutions.  “If we give the American people a clear choice,” Ryan emphasized, “I have faith that they will reaffirm our Founding principles, giving us the moral authority to get America back on track.”

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.

How in the world can I expect a man whom has not lived in my state in 20 years to understand the mindset, the true needs, and the conditions of the place he calls “home” and effectively execute the needs of those people with his representation in Congress? Furthermore, how can I trust party members that would attend Tea Party rallies and wax poetic about conservative ideals and then vote for this type of candidate? Consequently this gentleman has done nothing of any interest in his first term. Shock and awe!

This type of thing happens all of the time in D.C. and it is baffling. It is akin to Microsoft hiring as their CEO an 18 year veteran of Apple, whom had zero experience at Microsoft and then telling him he could run the company from Apple.

It was at this point that, while I was and am still heavily vested in the policy side of the tech/telecomm sector, my interest in politics and having any faith in the Republican Party died a very sad death. A death that has not seen any signs of life with the current GOP nominees for president.

It’s unsettling that Republicans who claim to be conservatives or “Tea Party’ers,” can without a hesitation hand over their support to an individual who seems to have learned the definition of “conservative” from Dictionary.com. Republicans have spent 4 years lining up outside to protest the healthcare bill and now they are lining up inside to throw their nomination at the man who is responsible for the model for Obamacare.

In fact, most of the entire line up of candidates, whether they realized it or not, were moderates in some fashion. Being that there is no political ideology in political theory for the terminology “moderate” I can only determine that the modern Republican Party is represented by a form of Neo-Con.

These were the individuals the Tea Party was going to take the GOP back from. But if you go by the evidence of the actions of the individuals reelected and those voted into office only one of two things can be determined, and my appologies in advance for my bluntness, but:

1) Either the majority of the Republican Party is now represented by fiscal moderates and  interventionists or some type of Neo-Con; or,
2) The party is represented by a majority of idiots who take to the streets and protest for one thing, but can’t rationalize how to apply that ideology to the appropriate candidate in the voting booth.

One has to realize that many of the founders of American NeoConservatism were Democrats. The whole movement, which arguably could be traced back some 60 years, but at a minimum to the 1980’s has moved the entire American political spectrum left. NeoCons are what Democrats were 33 years ago. The Democratic Party has transitioned into a party of progressive socialist principles and instead of  conservatives in the GOP holding their ground they have additionally taken a step to the left to replace the spot where the Democrats once stood while those of us promoting liberty seem to be doing so with a shrinking audience.

Peggy Noonan warned of this ratchet affect in 2010,

Imagine that over at the 36-inch end [of a yard stick] you’ve got pure liberal thinking—more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you’ve got conservative thinking—a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.

But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they’re dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It’s always grown! It’s as if something inexorable in our political reality—with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy—has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: “Hey, it coulda been 29!”

But Noonan anticipated  that the Tea Party would correct the course of the party, not just show up to rallies and then vote like they had always done when it was time to go to the polls.

The truth is that once a citizen gets in on the “gimme” game, they gotcha and then one is a slave to the dictator who can provide for you.

Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force. -The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 21, 1

The new conservatism is RINO.

No longer can you point out a RINO because the whole party is RINO and the majority of the GOP constituency is RINO.

To be fair the populous of the GOP are social cons. The support shared generally by all are now the issues of pro-life, traditional marriage, and fascist police state protectionism from “terrorism”.

This often makes little sense as we have done nothing to protect our own borders, but we love to go to the other side of the world and kill people. I’m personally guilty of this. And I’m glad I’ve grown a foul distaste for it. For whatever reason Republicans love getting boots on the ground and going to war, and often in ways that make little sense. We allow Iran and North Korea to build nuclear programs in broad daylight but we spill blood and treasure to liberate a country we had vague evidence of. for people who don’t appreciate our sacrifice.

Has anyone stopped to think that it is impossible to keep paying millions for bombs and hundreds of billions on wars and simultaneously lower taxes and get out of debt? It’s not just social programs that are destroying our nation. Bueller? Bueller?

The completion of the takeover of the Democrat Party by progressives was shown to have come to completion 4 years ago and today I think it’s clear that the Neo-Cons and moderate conservatives now control the vast majority of the GOP. That includes all the Tea Party’ers that walked out their doors November of 2010 and voted establishment beltway insiders back into office. Shame on you.

The GOP cries for another Reagan but it will never find him. Because the party of Reagan and Goldwater is dead. The tides have shifted. The Democrats will represent modern socialism. The GOP will represent wafflers, flip floppers, moderates, former Democrats, fiscal liberals that claim to be fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.

I have no agenda here. But those of us who desire liberty will either laugh and cry as it all falls apart around us or find a way to establish a third party that actually backs our talk of classical liberalism up with our support and votes. I’ve been a member of the GOP for my entire life, but as Zell Miller said about his beloved Democratic Party in 2004, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me.

Originally published at nickrbrown.com.

That will not change whether the Establishment’s candidate Mitt Romney wins in November or not.  After the election, the battle really starts; what is happening now are just skirmishes in a fight for control of the Republican Party.  Not the soul of the party – if it had one, it auctioned it off long ago – but the mechanism of the party.  The Grand Old Party matters only as a vehicle to carry our banner forward.

To do that, we need to seize control, and we do that by destroying the Establishment starting next November 7th.

Superficially, it might seem that we – the outsiders, the Tea Party, the conservatives, whatever the label – are outgunned by opponents with their hands on the reins of power, money in amounts we can’t hope to match, and pals in the media backing them.  But if we understand our strengths, and our opponents’ weaknesses, we can not only compete but eventually prevail.

First, let’s understand our opponent.

The GOP Establishment is an amorphous entity composed of politicians, media types, consultants, writers, lobbyists, party hacks and donors whose first priority is protecting their positions and privileges.  Power, and holding onto it, is more important than ideology.  That’s where we conservatives differ – we have no formal power or position, so changing the power structure doesn’t scare us.  We have nothing to lose; the GOP Establishment has everything to lose.

So, how do we beat it?

The Oscar-nominated film Moneyball tells the story of the Oakland A’s of the early 2000’s and how it had to adapt to compete with clubs like the Yankees with payrolls four times its size.  Under manager Billy Beane, the club reassessed what it thought it knew about baseball, gained a clear understanding of what made a team successful, and then focused ruthlessly on the long game to build a winning team.

What is the key to winning?  In baseball, it is runs – you get enough runs over the course of a year, you tend to be a winning team.  That’s the long game; the short game is the game tomorrow afternoon.  It’s nice to win that fight too, but the secret of moneyball is building success over time by playing the numbers.

In politics, winning takes the form of offices.  You win enough political offices, you eventually become the establishment.  And that’s what we want – numbers, as in numbers of offices our people hold.  We want our vision of a free market, Constitution-based, strong America to become the nation’s social paradigm – the right wing equivalent of the left’s current campaign to turn America into a western European welfarocracy.  We do that by getting our people into office in ever greater numbers over time.

That’s the long game, and we won’t lose it.

We won’t lose it because, despite what you see in the media and the rise of moderate Mitt, all of the energy and all of the excitement is with us.  All of it – a bunch of BYU kids bussed into Florida to yell at a Romney rally is not “excitement.”  It’s an admission of defeat.

The most important part of the Tea Party/conservatives’ rise since 2009 has not been its remarkably rapid rise to significance and its ability to affect marquee elections in 2010.  That’s the short game, and while it matters, what matters more is that it drew huge numbers of conservatives into the political process.

The next generation of GOP leaders will be Tea Party/conservatives.  They are the folks starting out now to compete for the kind of local and state party and political offices that lay the foundation for the party’s future.  These offices are vital – they are our farm team, a place for future congressional and senate candidates to gain experience and build resumes while implementing Constitutional conservative policies right now that will improve voters’ lives and win them over to our cause.

Billy Beane’s strategy was to find undervalued players – essentially, to sign players who got a lot of hits but didn’t cost much.  Why pay $7 million for a guy who gets on base 35% of the time when you can pay $600,000 for two guys who each do it 30% of the time?  He bought runs; we “buy” offices, and our currency is commitment, passion and effort.

We are uniquely positioned to do it.  In this environment, the moderates and squishy pseudo-cons that for so long dominated GOP lower offices will be scared off by the volatility of the Tea Party/conservative base.  It’s the Tea Party/conservatives who will be motivated to run, who have the excited backers to man phone banks and walk precincts, who have the passion for it.  Being a precinct captain or central committee member is a pain – you need to really want to do it.  And we do.

Of course, there is no way to centrally implement the strategy like Billy Beane did – he picked the players and built his team.  As the Tea Party/conservatives have shown, they are self-organizing – they don’t need a centralized organization to operate.  Conservative groups can facilitate the trend – running candidate boot camps, perhaps throwing a few dollars to down-ticket races – but this trend is happening on its own.  It’s grassroots, not astroturf.

The GOP establishment, by definition, is centralized.  That can be an advantage, at least in the major races.  There’s no question that the GOP Establishment has the edge in the short game – the money Mitt used to nuke his opponents proves that.  But the Establishment has little ability to influence anything except the most important and visible races – it’s neither that powerful, nor that rich, nor that organized.  This leaves a void that only we Tea Party/conservatives can fill.

So, in the long game, we will take over the GOP from the current GOP Establishment.  The old guard will die out, whether retiring, getting primaried out or being caught tap dancing in airport restrooms.  There’s no coming wave of button-down, “sensible” moderates honing their skills as school board members and rural water panel commissioners.

We are the future.  That’s the long game.  In a decade, the GOP Establishment we know today will be gone, swept away by time, disillusionment and voter disgust.  The nomination of Romney – which seems likely – will be its last hurrah.

Yes, if Romney wins, expect the GOP Establishment to decide that it didn’t need us.  And if it loses, expect it to blame us.  Who cares?  Let it revise history all it likes; its denial and smugness will only keep it from undertaking the kind of serious intropsection that might save it.

The GOP Establishment is a zombie, a dead power structure walking.  It will get a few punches in before it goes down – Exhibit A is Mitt, Exhibit B the pile of bodies that were the Not-Mitts – but go down it will.

The short game is important too as a supporting effort.  Understanding your strategic situation is a key to success, and that sometimes requires accepting hard truths.  The fact is that we are probably only a slight majority of a minority political party.  America is not a Tea Party/conservative nation – not yet.  That’s another critical reason to work at the grassroots and locally, to start implementing policies that will sway more Americans to our banner.  But in the short term, we simply are not strong enough to seize and hold the reins of power at the highest levels of government.

The Tea Party/Constitutional conservative movement is still an immature movement, not in the sense that it is childish but in the sense that we have not yet fully grown to our full strength.  We are having growing pains.  Candidates like the ridiculous Christine O’Donnell or failed Joe Miller in Alaska in 2010 were simply sub-par, but that was not because Tea Partiers are inherently incompetent but because we lacked experience and ended up with some flakes.

That will happen less and less as we grow savvier.  And conservatives will have less need to rally around massively flawed candidates with questionable non-Establishment credentials like Newt Gingrich.  We can and will do better.

That is not to say we should not fight in the short term; we can and should.  The conservative alternatives to Mitt, while each failed for their own reasons, still forced him to the right and are keeping him there.  The threat to Orrin Hatch, who saw his squish buddy Bob Bennett tossed out by Tea Party/conservative backers of the awesome Senator Mike Lee, has turned him sharply back to the right.  This is good.

Richard Lugar is now learning the Tea Party/conservatives are not to be trifled with as Richard Mourdock hits him with a primary challenge.  Also good.  Fear is our friend – if these spineless weather vanes are afraid of us at election time, maybe they’ll vote like conservatives in the off-years.

We need to start planning now for the battle after the election.  If Barack Obama was not such a fundamental threat to the foundation of our democracy, it might be conceivable not to support likely nominee Mitt Romney.  As it is, not voting for Romney is a vote for Obama, and the situation is simply too perilous not to do everything possible to toss Obama out in November.  We need to back Mitt even though we will get no credit for doing so.

If Romney wins, the focus needs to be on keeping him on the right despite his squishy instincts.  The best way to do that is to elect the most conservative Congress possible – and to draw a line in the sand on compromises over issues like repealing Obamacare.  We need to not be shy about the potential for a conservative primary challenger in 2016.

If Obama wins, our goal needs to be to steel the limp noodle spines of the GOP Establishment to fight a no quarter rearguard action against this lawless administration until 2016 rolls around with a crop of potential candidates who won’t seem to have piled out of a clown car.

The key to leveraging wimpy senators and representatives?  The 2014 elections and the ruthless primarying of non-performers.  There is nothing an incumbent hates more than the specter of a brutal primary – and at age five years, the Tea Party/conservatives will have a lot more experienced, savvy candidates looking to move up and ready to strike if they sense weakness in the guy holding what they see as their next job.  Again, fear of the ballot box is our ally.

Besides political offices, the Tea Party has a unique capability to undercut the current GOP-oriented media/think tank establishment.  Much of the conservative media and academia are already Tea Party/conservative-friendly.  The rest will find themselves marginalized more and more if they continue to distance themselves from the Tea Party/conservative insurgency.  And the Tea Party/conservative insurgency is, of course, actively creating its own outlets (like Big Government and the other Breitbart sites) as well as institutions and events, like BlogCon 2012.

Here are the facts:  We are getting stronger every day.  They are getting weaker.  And a little political moneyball – putting our strengths against their weaknesses in the long game – will do a great deal to hasten the GOP Establishment’s demise.

And no one will miss it.

The number of Republicans in the country inched up half a percentage point in January, while the number of Democrats, 32.5%, dipped to the lowest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports.

During January, 35.9% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 35.4% in December and the highest number of Republicans measured since December 2010.

Rasmussen Reports tracks this information based on telephone interviews with approximately 15,000 adults per month and has been doing so since November 2002. The margin of error for the full sample is less than one percentage point, with a 95% level of confidence.

Read more at Rasmussen Reports.

Mitt lambasted Newt for calling him “anti-immigrant,” and defended himself with the fact that his father was born in Mexico, and that his father-in-law was born in Wales. Romney also reminded Newt that Marco Rubio (whom has stressed a need for a republican immigration plan) recently called for Newt to end his “inflammatory” rhetoric. Newt then pressed Mitt for details as to how he would handle the 11 million immigrants that are already here illegally; “self-deportation” was Mitt’s response.

Now at this point, neither candidate has shown that they can secure the coveted 40% of the Hispanic vote, but the GOP has been given a unique opportunity to connect with the Latino community, which could help them towards that goal.

So, how do we “connect”? It’s easier than it might seem, as a recent conversation on the bus ride to work made clear:

“He promised us, we voted for him and he broke his promise. No more.”

Meet Lupe, once an immigrant from Michoacán (MX) and now an American from Ontario (CA). She is upset with President Obama. He not only failed to deliver on immigration-reform and job growth, but his administration actively pursued a hard-line approach to immigration that has deported hundreds of thousands. She has noticed.

Ask Lupe what she is all about, and she’ll tell you “work and church.” As she elaborated on the west-bound bus line, “We came with nothing but our belief in God. I raised my sons like men, and I have told them to work. I tell my husband, whose first job was in the fields, not to give them money for a car. They have to work for it. Otherwise, they’ll get lazy.”

Lupe is not alone; there are many like her. With these shared values, it can’t help but be asked, why did the Republicans lose so much of the Hispanic vote in 2008? The answer is simple—immigration. Immigration was a key concern, and illegal-immigrant “hawk talk” didn’t help. In fact, it did the opposite.

We could tell ourselves that immigration is not a defining issue for Latino voters and as long we have a young, charismatic and articulate Latino VP candidate, we will have a nice chunk of the Latino electorate in the bag this election year. We’ll emphasize social conservatism and jobs, couch it in ethnic language, and voila! 35-40% of the Latino vote! Now even if otherwise conservative Latinos wanted to overlook the perceived Republican hard-line position on immigration, it’s just not that easy because initial impressions are not easy to erase. The fact remains that a majority of Latinos remain suspicious of the Republican Party so much so that President George W. Bush’s achievement of 40% of the Latino vote in 2004 was considered an electoral miracle. But he earned it not only by emphasizing family values, but by advocating positions important to the Latino community.

Fast forward to today.  Throw in a new wave of tough enforcement-only rhetoric, buttressed by SB1070-type laws, and you got plenty of ammo with which the Republicans can proceed to shoot themselves in the foot. Just think of it. If you’re a Democrat strategist, and you know Hispanics are upset with your party’s President, wouldn’t you be counting on the GOP to sabotage themselves with calls to “deport now”? Luckily, the current GOP candidates aren’t completely unaware of this, and in the last Florida debate, both Mitt and Newt dismissed the idea of indiscriminately “rounding up people and deporting them.”

Now with so many reasons for Latinos to be wary of the Republican Party in 2012, we should really consider it a godsend that Republicans have been granted a unique opportunity this year to regain some of this Latino vote. And why shouldn’t we? It is still true that Latinos and Conservatives are natural allies; these two groups share a similar core of values.

The good news is that even though Latinos as a whole may have reservations about the Republican Party in general, they are DEFINITELY not completely at home in the Democratic Party. We share, on a very deep level, the social and economic ethos of the conservative movement, and some of us are more than willing to do our part this year to increase the Latino presence in the Republican Party. But… you gotta work with us here! We cannot make the case for the GOP to our fellow Latinos; if that means that we also have to defend the hard-line on immigration. It’s not gonna go over too well with our friends, family and fellow church-members. Just trust us on this one!

The other piece of good news is that most Latinos have yet to hear a real immigration plan fully laid out. Notice that the media does not ask much about Newt’s plan, and there’s a reason. It’s palatable, with compassion, common sense, and uncompromising standards, respecting the rule of law. Somos Republicans, the largest Hispanic Republican organization in the country, has endorsed Newt Gingrich precisely because he has a decent plan, and has struck the right tone on a thorny issue. His plan, has also been commended by other Hispanic Republican commentators as a good start with 10 positive points.

Here’s the truth: Romney has already been painted with the immigration-hawk label among many Latinos, and it’s not going to be removed easily. If he is indeed the nominee, and that is starting to look more and more likely, then he needs to take a page out of Gingrich’s playbook on this one: not only in tone (which he did better with in the last debate); but also in substance (which still needs improvement). Newt hasn’t earned favor among Latinos for anything – he’s gone out on a limb, often in front of very conservative audiences and given voice to this more sensible approach to immigration, and he’s outlined a plan that emphasizes things like a guest-worker program, residency, building towards achieved citizenship for those who have established long deep roots in this country, and other common sense ideas; while also emphasizing issues of border security, assimilation, etc. The eventual Republican nominee would be smart to adopt some version of this plan and not leave it for tomorrow. It’s an approach that would be popular among the American population in general, and which remains true to conservative principles of free markets, rule of law, and family values. Not only that, but the votes we are working for are of a conservative-minded and rapidly-growing people. The two groups who, according to David P. Goldman, are increasing the population of this country with bigger families are of course Hispanics (namely Roman Catholics) and Evangelicals; neither of whom shy away from having more kids, which is evident from the Baptism line-up at church to the local little-league roster. These are groups that share a similar core with us.

Now is the time to increase the ranks of the conservative movement with millions of people that already share our values, are rooted in this society, are willing to labor, and like many Americans aren’t afraid to take risks by starting small businesses from their homes. Let’s offer them a clear choice to think about this election year, and let us not have immigration become a distraction. Rather, let’s make it an opportunity for conservatives to take the lead in offering common sense solutions that will not only help to grow this economy and increase the conservative base, but also provide real hope for the future of our Nation.

There are plenty of problems with a Newt Gingrich nomination – most of them a direct result of Newt’s own antics – but the developing conventional wisdom that he will be toxic to Republican Senate chances may just be totally off-base.  In fact, a Newt nomination could be the best possible thing for winning a GOP Senate majority – ironically because of people who don’t think he has a chance in hell in the general election.

The GOP has great expectations for the Senate in 2012 – winning just four seats (five if Senator Kirk fails to recover from his recent stroke and the Democratic governor of Illinois appoints another Roland Burris as the replacement before his traditional indictment) will capture the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body from the clutches of Harry Reid and the Democrats.

With the Democrat party playing defense on many more at-risk seats, the percentages are in the GOP’s favor.  Moreover, many of the senators up for elections are “conservative Democrats,” which mean flaming liberals who talk a good game about being “fiscally conservative” and “moderate” back home in their blood-red states.  With the Obama economy especially painful in the middle of the country – the administration’s stimulus money disproportionately rewarded the urban and academic communities whose support Obama is unshakeable – it should be a cakewalk not only to grab the majority but press on toward the magic number of 60.

Enter Newt.

With Romney, people expected an inoffensive technocrat who would not scare the children or horses – someone who could get the votes of the moderate voters who get turned off by things like “ideology” or “confrontation” or “beliefs.”  Maybe Mitt would not be much of an asset to an aspiring GOP Senate candidate, but he would certainly not drag anyone down.  That is the conventional wisdom about Mitt.

But Newt shakes up that paradigm.  The new conventional wisdom is that Newt’s caravan of baggage will so turn off voters that not only will they hand the GOP a rejection of Mondalian proportions in November but they will further take out their anger on the GOP’s senate candidates.  So, the conventional wisdom goes, Obama will sail to reelection with a rejuvenated Senate majority and perhaps even the House.  There goes the Republic.

Except the conventional wisdom, upon closer examination, makes little sense even on its own terms.  It assumes that the voters are at least disappointed, if not angry, with Obama – if they weren’t, he would win no matter who we nominate.   It also depends completely on the assumption that the intense dislike that the majority of voters feel for Newt personally is the reason for his inevitable failure.  These two currents do not flow together – they collide.

Voters rejecting Newt would therefore be doing it not because they wanted Obama – they do not want Obama.  They just want Newt less.  But that personal animus toward Newt would not necessarily be transferred toward the GOP senate candidates themselves.

Newt is uniquely polarizing, argues the conventional wisdom.  If so, then it will be an easy matter for GOP Senate candidates to distinguish themselves from the guy at the top of the ticket.  Candidates always scatter like roaches when an unpopular presidential candidate wanders into town.  Just look at Obama when he flew into reddish Arizona– he wasn’t met by a herd of donkeys but by Republican Jan Brewer, whose politeness in doing so was met with characteristic ungraciousness.

In fact, distaste for Newt coupled with distaste for Obama could help GOP Senate candidates.  Holding their nose to vote to reelect the president does not mean they want to give him the ability to keep going with the politics of division, bailouts and class warfare that have wreaked his approval numbers.  Suddenly, voting for the Senate GOP candidates becomes much more attractive, even to moderates, when splitting the ticket means kneecapping the Obama campaign to transform America into the United States of Greece.

Voters aren’t dumb.  They know that a GOP senate is the best check on a lame duck Obama, and they may even be willing to split the ticket to vote out Democrat warhorses like Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who might otherwise have no chance of defeat, in order to balance their vote against Newt.  In other words, Newt dragging down the top of the ticket might well give a boost to the bottom.

Newt has problems as a candidate – huge ones that may or may not be insurmountable.  However, even if he goes down in flames there is no reason why the GOP hopes for the Senate must burn with him.  The GOP needs to recruit quality candidates and needs to support them with money and resources.  The candidates themselves must play their hands wisely, and must not hesitate to cast-off from Newt if one of his periodic implosions threatens to sink the national ticket.

If the GOP and its candidates do these things, the conventional wisdom, as it often is, may once again be proven wrong.

Think how many tax cuts we could have with the money we are spending. If you’re a Republican – think how many tax cuts (federal, state and local) could be bought with the money you’re spending to lock people up for something as dangerous as drinking. Think how many poor people could be helped with that money. We need to reform our drug laws as soon as yesterday by stopping the prohibition of marijuana and regulating its sale.

If you think the drug war makes you and your children safer, think again. The International Center for Science in Drug Policy stated: “Drug prohibition likely contributes to drug market violence and higher homicide rates.” But you don’t need to be a scientist, or the governor of a border state, to understand why: the drug war creates violent criminals.

Criminals deal drugs because drugs make them money, a lot of money. When that kind of money is in play, people kill for it. Entire armies of crime have built up on our streets and across the border in Mexico. But we can stop that tomorrow – with drug policy reform. We know that prohibition makes prices higher. Our own history with prohibition proves that. When we make something illegal, we keep the supply artificially low, and that keeps the price artificially high – and that means violence.

When marijuana is legal, farmed and taxed, we will suck the lifeblood from violent gangs and place the money in the public good. We tax and regulate alcohol and cigarettes, and we prevent kids from using these dangerous substances. Marijuana is no more dangerous than those, and yet Democrats and Republicans can only unite to allow this weed to fund entire armies of crime.

These criminals take to violence because, in absence of normal market regulations, only violence controls territory and market. Liquor stores don’t shoot each other over territory. If a newsstand up the block starts selling cigarettes, are you going to do a drive by and shoot their family?

Take for example the AP report on New York City. New York’s lowest-level marijuana-possession charge – criminal possession of marijuana in the 5th degree, a misdemeanor – has been the most common arrest charge in the city for much of the past decade, and the numbers have been steadily rising. So far this year there have been 38,359 reported arrests. Last year, there were 50,377 arrests citywide, up from 46,492 in 2009, according to statistics from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. That represents about 616 arrests per 100,000 city residents.

A report done earlier in 2011 by the Drug Policy Alliance concluded it cost an estimated $75 million in 2010 to process, jail and prosecute the low-level arrests in New York. That figure was a compilation of estimated court costs, police manpower and jail time, averaging about $1,500 per arrest – a cost shared by the state and city. The city budget alone is $65 million.

Every experiment in drug reform and decriminalization has met with a drop in crime. When New York State reformed its harsh Rockefeller drug laws, the precipitous drop in crime rates continued. When Portugal decriminalized drugs, crime dropped. Drug use dropped. New HIV infections dropped. Brute force has failed. And we should know better – our own experiment with prohibition virtually created organized crime in our country. Prohibition doesn’t work – users and addicts find a way to use drugs anyway. All prohibition does is create a black market that kills innocent people, when the DEA isn’t shooting them already.

I’m not soft on crime – as Governor I presided over a drop in the crime index from of almost 20%. If I had the tools to treat drug use as a public health hazard rather than a crime, I could have made that even lower. Thousands of retired drug enforcement agents, police and district attorneys join me in wanting to overhaul America’s drug laws. Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to understand, but as millions of people leave the two parties, independents can find new solutions. So join countless law enforcement officials, and a humble two-term governor; together we can save this country from crime – and our broken two-party system.