Posted on 03/17/2014 8:25:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
JFK won Macomb County, Michigan in 1964 by 75 percent. In 1980, Reagan won it by 66 percent. This heart of ‘Reagan Democrat’ country was closely split by Gore and Bush and Bush and Kerry… until Obama won it 53 to 45 in 2008 and by 51 to 47 in 2012.
The Republican Party doesn’t need to worry about the Latino vote nearly as much as it should be worrying about its inability to connect with white working class Americans. The pro-amnesty GOP establishment’s electoral vision of a party of corporations and minority voters already exists.
It’s called the Democratic Party.
The Republican Party’s fate in 2016 will be decided in places like Macomb County. It will be decided by white men and women earning $20,000 to $50,000 a year. It will be decided by working families struggling to get by and searching for answers from a government that keeps betraying them.
That is the point that Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator who has stood tallest against amnesty, makes in his National Review article “Becoming the Party of Work.”
Sessions argues that slowing down immigration in a time of tremendous economic turmoil would actually be the populist thing to do. Three to one of those earning under $30,000 want to see reductions in immigration. Instead the Republican Party is alienating them further by championing illegal aliens.
“To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos,” Sessions warns.
Too many Senate Republicans act like members of a globalist party who legislate while detached from the concerns of ordinary working Americans. McCain, the GOP candidate in 2008, and the most aggressive GOP proponent for amnesty in the Senate, whose daughter has made a career of “outreach” to her own class of hip young wealthy people, represents the opposite of what the GOP should be doing.
McCain’s infamous claim, “There are jobs Americans won’t do” was seen as embodying the detachment of the pro-amnesty elite from working Americans struggling to get by.
“Mitt Romney,” Sessions points out, “lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.”
In 2008, McCain won only 25 percent of voters whose incomes fell below $15,000, 37 percent of voters whose incomes were between $15,000 and $30,000 and 43 percent of voters in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. That is not what a party that aspires to represent the silent majority of Americans looks like.
Inflation has changed income and demographics have changed as well, but still the only income group that Reagan lost in 1984 were in the under $12,500 range and even then it was close. Even in 1980, Reagan did not lose any income group by more than 10 percent.
George W. Bush was able to win back some Reagan Democrats, but the party never again equaled Reagan’s performance.
Senator Sessions however has some proposals for changing that from merging 80 means-tested poverty-assistance and welfare programs into one to be administered by a welfare office that doubles as a job training program to cracking down on corporate outsourcing and repealing ObamaCare.
The Republican Party has been able to put forward a credible pro-business agenda, but it needs a credible pro-worker agenda without assuming that talking about Staples is the same thing as connecting with Staples employees. If it fails to do that, it will be hammered by minimum wage and overtime measures until its voting base is limited to a shrinking upper middle class.
“Wherever the policies of the Left have been faithfully implemented, as in Detroit, human tragedy has followed. The future offered by the Left — a shrinking work force struggling to fund a growing welfare state — is not only unsustainable but uncompassionate. Compassion demands that we spare no effort in helping millions now jobless to realize the dream of financial independence. This is the urgent economic task of the 21st century,” Sessions writes.
The Republican Party has to stop merely running against welfare and start running on opportunity. The left’s response to the GOP’s anti-welfare rhetoric has been to swell the welfare rolls making more and more Americans complicit in the welfare state.
Instead of turning to 47% rhetoric, the critique of a political movement that has given up, it has to reclaim welfare voters and transform them into working voters.
Session’s agenda challenges the GOP to stop trying to plug a work culture hole with immigrants. Instead he urges the Republican Party to “help the millions struggling here today — immigrant and native-born alike — transition from dependency to self-sufficiency.”
Reagan understood that welfare was morally crippling. In his 1985 State of the Union address, he said, “Let us resolve that we will stop spreading dependency and start spreading opportunity; that we will stop spreading bondage and start spreading freedom.”
In a ringing critique of the welfare state, he stated that, “Policies that increase dependency, break up families, and destroy self-respect are not progressive; they’re reactionary. Despite our strides in civil rights, blacks, Hispanics, and all minorities will not have full and equal power until they have full economic power.”
This is the critique that Sessions and David Horowitz return to.
Last year, David Horowitz said that the “historic assault on Detroit’s African American population was absent from all the speeches and all the political ads of all the actors supporting free market solutions in the 2012 elections. The word ‘Detroit’ wasn’t mentioned.”
Amnesty for illegal aliens may be an even bigger assault on both lower income whites and blacks than anything before. Instead of countering it, too many Republicans are providing cover for it. Instead of offering American solutions to American problems, they take refuge in abstract free market ideology.
Sessions confronts the intersection between immigration and unemployment, between the welfare state and the open border and urges the Republican Party to stand up for American workers.
Amnesty is an assault on the economic freedom and opportunity of the voters that the Republican Party needs to win in 2016. The Republican Party has critiqued the Democratic Party’s debt slavery, borrowing trillions to be repaid in the future, but with amnesty the GOP is selling off its base of today in the hopes of buying a new demographic of voters from a new nation.
The United States cannot survive as a welfare nation, but the Republican Party cannot win it back until it relearns how to speak to the national interest instead of the global interest, to the American worker and the American businessman.
I *do* like the bumper sticker encapsulation of this thought.
GOP should be silent. Vote on nothing. Discuss nothing. approve nothing. Don’t mention Immigration in any way shape or form. Dems are using this like Abortion. It is a buzzword. Now abortion doesn’t work so thus Immigration reform. Who cares about reform. Ship them all out. Hold hearings every day on why Obama won’t enforce the current immigration and other laws.
The Left is sinking. Why would anyone want to “pull them up” from the right?
In the past thirty years we have accomplished nothing of a conservative nature besides lowering their taxes and this is how they respond to us. No more. We need to raise them and make them pay through the nose.
Above what income level should we begin the confiscation?
I would like to see Jeff Sessions as the majority leader of the Senate.
Remember when Palin said that she and Todd would be happy to make stops in MI for McCain, after McCain said that MI was not worth it? McCain was a fool for not listening to her. She & Todd would have likely made a huge difference, even after McCain’s comment. He could’ve clarified it later, but no, he was not really into winning that year, apparently. He literally handed the election to Obama. There is NO OTHER WAY to put it! Now he thinks he might give it a run again? Who would vote for him? He’d be laughed out!
I am not advocating confiscation, just a little bleeding and if that doesn't work maybe al ittle more. At what level that requires some thought. The upper 2-6% is still with us maybe it would be the upper 1/2%. If they are going to help obama create a socialist state just because they think they are going to receive short term advantage proving Lenin's dictum that the “capitalist will sell the rope to his own hanging” then they should pay socialist level taxes until they come to their senses(if it goes that high). I have always supported business and big business in everything they do. But, when they began supporting amnesty it is like the scales fell from the eyes. I feel like the dutilful wife who thought she had a perfect marriage and found her spouse was cheating and the marriage was over. I mean how stupid are we for constanly bending over for the class of people who own the media considering what they are doing to us and the country(that is another issue with them).
The Democrats will use the immigration issue in the midterms. Session's article should be the Reps' response.
"Democrats in Washington have already cast their lot. A recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows that all net employment gains from 2000 to 2013 — a period of record legal immigration — went to immigrant workers, and yet the immigration plan championed by the White House and congressional Democrats would triple the number of immigrants given permanent legal status over the next decade, and it would double the annual flow of guest workers to compete for jobs in every sector of the U.S. economy. The Democrats’ plan delivers for international corporations, open-borders groups, and even workers now living in other countries — all at the expense of American workers.
So Republicans have a choice. They can either join the Democrats as the second political party in Washington advocating uncontrolled immigration, or they can offer the public a principled alternative and represent the American workers Democrats have jettisoned. Republicans can either help the White House enact an immigration plan that will hollow out the American middle class, or they can finally expose the truth about the White House plan and detail the enormous harm it will inflict.
Nonsense. When the rich do well, we all do well. Haven’t you noticed?
No we do not need to raise taxes, those at the top are the ones that produce things and hire people.
The answer is much simpler, Republicans need to STOP reaching out to the Democrats and start reaching out to conservatives. The conservatives I know that earn $30,000 or less did not vote for Obama instead of Romney to get hand outs or as a message to raise taxes...they stayed home or just left the President box open on their ballot. Romney and the GOP said they didn’t need conservatives, but as it turns out they did need their votes.
But how do you get the Republicans to reach out to the rest of us. The answer is by hitting them where it hurts in their pocket book. They are helping the Dems turn this country into a Dem majority how does that help to “produce things”? Does it help to proudce things by destroying our immmigration enforcement and creating a third world society just waiting for take outs. is it helping to produce things by running aup a huge debtr and probably crashing the country eventually? Who is going to win by that? Theyhave to be stopped. We are on a train to doom and we need to drastically change course of the people running this country.
“Nonsense. When the rich do well, we all do well. Haven’t you noticed?”
That is present tense and past tense. Just look at what is happening around yoou. They are destroying our immigration enforcement to enrich themsleves and don’t even see how that is going to turn on them in the future. Look at the debts we are running up. Our country is on the way to being dstroyed and it is their fault. They and their media.
Class warfare is a Leftist tactic. I’m not going to be a part of it. Your idea is not going to get the support of the Conservatives.
“Class warfare is a Leftist tactic. I’m not going to be a part of it. Your idea is not going to get the support of the Conservatives.”
They are either a part of the solution or they are not. I think what is being waged against us by abcnnbcbs is total war. And frankly I blame the GOP upper clas for not buying media like the wealthy Dem’s do. This is not a matter really of class warfare. this is getting them to become conservative since this is about the only way to do it. On the other hand if we continue down the road we are then given the feckless, duplicity and trachery of the GOP upper class conniving with the Dem upper class than why shouldnt they pay for the damage they have done to this country and us. If you break it then you should pay for it. It is time for new tactics and frankly it is time to question what we have been doing since it obviuosly does not work. I know what I am saying goes against the grain of what a lot of people here have been thinking(including myself). I know it scares a lot of people here, but then again just think how much it will scare those wuss’s in charge of running the GOP and the country.
I highly doubt that.
Also the voters in Michigan should be worried about the southwest becoming immediately Democrat and making it easier to pass nationwide gun control laws.
If you look at North Dakota as well. They aren’t passing gun laws in the state. But both the Senators made the southwest more Democrat voting for 12 million new Democrat voters.
What sort of anti-gun agenda happens to the courts, Congress and White House if Democrats win every single election in the southwest.
Me too.
Bingo. The super rich are mostly liberals now. Many don’t even think of themselves as Americans. Why do so many conservatives think that “global citizen” billionaires should pay lower tax rates than the middle class?
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