The Republican Who Can Win

The Republican Who Can Win
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
6-3-2011

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.

From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it's impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.

Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.

The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn't going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don't like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they're stealing from the young. They've spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they'll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.

The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren't sitting around worried to death about big government—they're worried about jobs and what they have in savings.

The candidate would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president's view of the American nation.

That view was made clear early, in candidate Obama's repeated reference to that happy time ahead when America would once again be worthy of respect—which we had presumably lost through our immoral policies—and when we would regain the trust of friends and allies around the world. That vision, still alive and well two and a half years into his administration, has been nowhere clearer than in Attorney General Eric Holder's determined effort to give 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the benefit of a trial in an American court, with full constitutional protections. Only with such a trial, Mr. Holder argued, could America prove to the world the fairness of its justice system.

The Republican candidate would have to make clear just how far removed from reality, how alien to the consciousness of most Americans, is this reflexive view of the nation as morally suspect, ever obliged to prove its respectability to a watching world. The attorney general still refuses to drop charges against two CIA employees accused of using enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists—notwithstanding the recommendations of investigators looking into the case that the charges merited no prosecution.

The candidate will have to speak clearly on foreign policy—and begin, above all, by showing he actually has one. The near silence on the subject among Republicans consumed by domestic policy battles has been notable. Not till President Obama delivered his speech relegating Israel to pre-1967 borders did outraged Republicans come to roaring life—as Democrats, too, largely did—about a foreign policy issue.

The Republican candidate might bear in mind, for use on the campaign trail, the grand irony in the spectacle of candidate Obama holding forth on the stump about our friends and allies whom the United States had so alienated under George W. Bush—allies who would have to be won back. Fast forward to September 2009, when the Obama administration virtually overnight cancelled the planned missile defense system that was to be established in Poland and the Czech Republic—a shock to both allies but a gift to the Russians. The Kremlin was indeed grateful.

In March 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let it be known that the United States no longer supported the British in the matter of the Falkland Islands, which have been British territory since 1833, and that "negotiations" with Argentina were in order. P.J. Crowley, then the State Department's spokesman, expressed the new neutral stance of the U.S. by referring to the Falklands and then adding, with his usual ostentation, "or the Malvinas"—the Argentinian name—"depending on how you look at it."

The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.

At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring "USA! USA!" at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Journal's editorial board.