Think Big: Republicans should embrace Paul Ryan's Road Map.

For Republicans, the Road Map authored by congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the most important proposal in domestic policy since Ronald Reagan embraced supply side economics in the 1980 presidential campaign. It’s not only the freshest, boldest, and most comprehensive Republican thinking, it’s also the most relevant. If Republicans adopt the Road Map as their basic ideological blueprint, it offers them the prospect of a landslide in the midterm election this year, followed by victory in the presidential election in 2012.

For sure, that’s a lot of weight for a policy statement drafted by a 40-year-old House member to bear. But the Road Map is perfectly timed to deal with the crises of the moment: economic stagnation, uncontrolled spending, the deficit and long-term debt, soaring tax rates, health care, the housing problem, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

Yet Republican leaders are wary of endorsing it, and for understandable reasons. The Road Map is sweeping and politically risky. It would overhaul popular programs like Medicare, relying on individuals to make decisions now made by government. Democrats are already attacking it. When Ryan delivered the weekly Republican radio address in late June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put out a press release under the heading, “Republicans Make Key Advocate of Privatizing Social Security and Ending Medicare Their Spokesman on Budget.”

Democrats insist focus groups have rejected Ryan’s reform of Medicare. When swing voters learn Medicare would become “a voucher system . . . it has a massive impact,” Democratic strategist Robert Creamer wrote in the Huffington Post. “People like the Democratic program of Medicare.”

Republican leaders fear the Road Map might jeopardize, or at least minimize, what is expected to be a decisive Republican victory in the November midterm election. Their advantage in the congressional generic poll is at an all-time high, and President Obama’s approval rating has dropped to the mid-40s. Given these usually reliable indicators, why give Democrats a target to shoot at?

There are three reasons Republicans should ignore their jitters about the Road Map. The first is that the nation’s disenchantment with Obama and Democrats will take Republicans only so far. There’s a residue of bad feelings toward Republicans from the years the party ruled Congress, spent too much, and produced scandals.

Voters have memories. To overcome their qualms, Republicans need to provide more than a litany of Democratic faults. Voters are frightened about the future of the country. They’re looking for a serious solution to the mess we’re in. The Road Map offers exactly that, plus the opportunity to win more seats than Republicans are likely to capture solely by zinging Democrats.

The second reason should be obvious after the ignominious Republican defeat in May in the race for John Murtha’s old House seat in Pennsylvania. Democrat Mark Critz won by running to the right—against Washington, Obama, spending, the deficit —and Democratic candidates across the country are taking the same tack.

Republican candidates need to put some daylight between themselves and their Democratic opponents. The Road Map will do that. Democrats can’t endorse it for fear of alienating their liberal base, which loathes anything that reduces the size of government. The Road Map stamps Republican candidates as the real conservatives, which is what voters happen to be looking for in 2010.

The third reason is the Republican message (or the absence of one). In Pennsylvania, it was “send a message to Nancy Pelosi.” Voters declined. I like the Republican slogan that worked so well in 1946—“Had enough?” But a slogan is not a message. The Road Map is a message. The country is falling apart, we’re going broke, government is on a takeover binge, the economy is wobbling. The Road Map is the solution. That’s a pretty good message.

Those who tremble at the thought of pushing a big idea should remember the campaign of 1980. Reagan, who for years had warned of the evils of government spending and overreach, suddenly became the champion of an across the board, 30 percent cut in tax rates for individuals and business.

That was very risky. The elder George Bush called it “voodoo economics.” Democrats were certain the whopping tax cut would turn the country against Reagan. Quite the opposite occurred. Reagan would have defeated Jimmy Carter without it, but not by the 10 percentage points he actually won by. The tax cut showed Reagan was serious about reviving the economy and not at all a weakling like Carter.

In 1994, the Contract With America wasn’t as risky. It wasn’t a big idea either, but a collection of smaller ones. Democrats, however, believed it would doom Republican chances of a substantial victory. It didn’t. It can’t be proved, but I think the Contract enlarged the Republican landslide.

For now, the Road Map has a relatively small but growing cheering section. A dozen House members have endorsed it. Senator Jim DeMint praised it in his book Saving Freedom. Jeb Bush likes it. On CNN last week, economic historian Niall Ferguson called Ryan “a serious thinker on the Republican right who’s prepared to grapple with these issues of fiscal sustainability and come up with a plan.”

Ferguson sees the Road Map as “radical fiscal reform,” which it is, and said Washington should recognize it as the alternative to “the Keynesian option,” which Washington doesn’t. “I’m depressed how few people in Washington are prepared to talk about” the Road Map option, he said.

Ryan isn’t depressed. “As soon as people become informed and know the details, the more they like it,” he told me. He says the Road Map is “based on a fundamentally different vision” from the “government-centered ideology now prevailing in Washington . . . and restores an American character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and opportunity.”

We must consider that we are analyzing Paul Ryan's plan against a context, a set of assumptions, which elected politicians overwhelmingly do not share. With few exceptions, professional politicians are looking for the safe route to reelection they are not looking for solutions to problems. Therefore when an elected Republican official is confronted with a decision whether or not to support the Ryan plan, he does not ask "is it constitutional?" or, "will it work?" or even, "can I find legislative support for it?" Rather, he asks, "will this advance or retard my reelection?"

We here at Free Republic tend to measure the Ryan plan against conservative values and, to our credit, against the Constitution. If the general electorate did the same, there would be no variance between what we want and how our elected Republican representatives behave. Unfortunately, the general electorate measures these plans against an entirely different matrix, one that is extremely short in its time horizon and one that is exceedingly selfish. So, the electorate does not respond in general to cries of doom that the deficits or even the debts are getting out of control and threaten future generation. The great undecided middle of the American electorate, the mushy middle which actually decides our elections, asks, "what's in it for me?" If they are told the sky is falling, they ask, "how soon, do I have time to get mine before hand?"

Progressives, whatever name they are operating under this week, know this and exploit it brilliantly. Progressives also know that the middle of the electorate tends to blame the messenger. That is, if the electorate is confronted by a politician with the reality that Social Security is unsustainable in its present configuration, they blame the politician and execute him for touching the third rail of American politics.

Sometime ago at about the time of the elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, I wrote a vanity which attempted to understand the interplay in this context as it was manifested in the The Party Movement. Back then the issue was whether the movement would split away as a third-party or attempt to exert influence within the Republican Party. That matter has largely been settled and we now know that the movement will operate within the Republican Party. But the observations about the tea party movement contained in that vanity are still true and one need only substitute the Republican Party for the tea party to distill the reality:

At this point the Tea Party movement is a protest movement and not a reform movement. It is clear about what it is against. It is against taxing and spending, taxing and borrowing, borrowing and spending. It is also clear that it wants to throw out representatives of either party who trespass on these three taboos. But what does the movement stand for ?

The Tea Party Movement has no plank on whether to cut Social Security as a means to balance the budget because it has no platform and the movement has no platform because it is not a party. Would The Movement raise taxes to maintain Social Security at current levels and standards? Would it tax to maintain our national defense capabilities at their current levels? Would it tax to pay down the debt? We do not know and, revealingly, we do not even know whom to ask.

Clearly, The Movement as a general principle would prefer to reduce spending rather than raise taxes. Would the movement choose to reduce spending on Social Security rather than raise taxes? Would it cut Medicare to reduce taxes? To balance the budget?

These are questions that the Tea Party movement has not addressed and professional politicians, like those despised Republican elites in Washington for example, know that the trajectory for entitlements like Social Security and Medicare are such that if they are not reduced they will ultimately consume the entire federal budget and then bankrupt the country. Even Barack Obama himself has acknowledged this and, in an Orwellian triumph of illogic, has exploited this reality to justify spending more on health care reform to keep the already bankrupt health-care system from bankrupting the whole country. But it doesn't matter who says it, there simply is not enough room in discretionary spending, even if it we eliminated all military spending, to get the budget under control. Whenever you hear a politician say that he will solve a fiscal problem by curbing waste fraud and abuse, use one hand to cover your wallet and the other to cover your genitals because you will need to protect both.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves,

Why does the professional politician tell us that he will resolve these massive shortfalls by eliminating waste fraud and abuse? Because that's how he got to be a professional politician in the first place and that's how he remains a professional politician. The unattractive truth about us as voters is that we seek out those politicians who will pander to our eagerness to dodge reality. One needs look no further than the neck and neck race in New Jersey where Corzine is able to remain a viable candidate for just that reason. The very strength of the Tea Party movement is that there is no one in charge who must answer to this conundrum: Do we tax the people more or cut grandma's Social Security and deny her end-of-life Medicare treatment? The closer the Tea Party Movement gets to political power the less easy it will be for it to dodge these kinds of questions and the more political power will elude it. The more it answers these questions, the more it will fracture. That is simply the lifecycle for all political movements.

So long as the Tea Party movement remains in the "protest" stage, it is playing offense not defense, and it need not answer these questions. One might note that the Obama presidential campaign succeeded in riding protest right into the Oval Office without ever once being forced into the "reform" mode. It succeeded in this by exploiting media bias and presuming on the generous nature of the American people who wanted to settle the problem of race in America once and for all. Director of White House Communications, Anita Dunn, has recently revealed in a taped interview how the Obama campaign contrived through artifice to avoid confronting these hard questions.

As conservatives, we are asked in this context to make a very difficult decision, do we campaign on the 10th amendment and fiscal responsibility even though that inevitably implies reconfiguring Social Security and Medicare in order to save both the Constitution and the Republic, or do we campaign much as the tea party did at the time the vanity was written and confine ourselves to what we are against?

The Democrats will do everything within their power and within the power of the media to force the issue upon Republicans which Paul Ryan has attempted to solve: Will you cut Social Security and Medicare in order to cut taxes? Will you raise taxes in order to save Social Security and Medicare? Do not forget that a large percentage of the tea party protesters were protesting threatened cuts to their Medicare entitlements when they protested Obama care. This is hardly a principled Free Republic stand.

There is a potential irony at play: the more the Democrats succeed in their timeworn strategy of claiming that the Republicans in green eye shades are trying to put grandma out on the ice flow and condemn the poor to dumpster diving, the more the Republicans are likely to turn to the Ryan plan. The degree to which the Republicans can find refuge in the Ryan plan depends on the level of public appreciation of the real and imminent threat to our economy which really means the public's way of life. That means, boiled down to its essential, are there jobs? If the public has come to the conclusion that Obama will never give them the jobs they need, they will turn in desperation to virtually any siren.

Fortunately, the Ryan plan, although hardly the hard baked 10th amendment solution we on Free Republic cherish if we could have our way, is a plan which makes fiscal sense and one which provides political cover for those politicians who will always behave as, well, politicians so long as the electorate behaves the way it always has.

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