4. Stop demonizing our neighbors.
We called Bill Clinton every name in the book and even impeached him, and that didn’t work. We called Obama every name in the book, and all we did was help him to portray his failures as Bush’s fault and energize his base all the more. We called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and all we did was scare even more skittish advertisers away from conservative talk radio.
Yes, there is a double standard here. You should see some of the Tweets I receive after appearing on MSNBC, like when someone tweeted after I defended Richard Mourdock he hoped my daughters would get raped. We watch homosexual activists glitter bomb conservatives and can only imagine what would happen if we returned such fire. It’s not fair, but it is what it is.
I am as fiery as the next guy, and at times have not been able to hold my tongue, especially when it’s fun not to. But I’ve learned that while we don’t need to moderate our principles we do need to temper our approach. Ann Coulter shrillness may sell books to the already-converted, but it’s losing the culture at-large. We no longer have a country that accepts many of our premises, so we have to go into evangelism mode. That requires a relationship and trust, and it’s hard to build that rapport with people while demonizing them. Pardon the cliché, but we need happy warriors. As the late D.L. Moody once said, “When you’re winsome you win some.”
Most of our neighbors we are angry with for voting the way they did don’t go to church and were taught things about this country in public schools that are contrary to this nation’s actual history. How should we expect them to vote given those circumstances? We’re not a silent majority anymore. We’re a plurality in danger of becoming a minority. If you want our neighbors to vote differently, then we have to change their worldview.
5. We need solutions – not just values.
Obama won young voters again despite the fact they’re the group hardest hit by his policies. They will be saddled with all the debt we’re tacking on, and live in a more dangerous world in the long run with the emergence of the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and a nuclear Iran.
We are losing them by trying to win them over to values that make freedom possible – Judeo-Christian morality, personal responsibility, limited government, etc. – yet they have been educated in an environment that makes these values foreign to them. It will only get harder to win them over as they get older.
For example, they don’t see the Second Amendment as a requirement to keep freedom secure from government tyranny, but rather gun control as a means of stopping little children from being killed by gang violence or gun accidents. See, they’re not looking for values, they’re looking for solutions.
For better or for worse, there is one Republican who has been attracting younger voters in the past two presidential primaries, and that’s Ron Paul. Granted, some are those whose only goal is to legalize marijuana, but that’s also a lazy stereotype. Many of them are young people who don’t understand why it’s their responsibility to pay for the lack of fiscal discipline of their forefathers, and why they have to die in foreign lands nation-building when our nation is declining here. Paul is offering them solutions to these problems and not just values. I don’t agree with all of Paul’s solutions, but I do think we could learn from this approach.
Do we have a solution for these young voters to their problems? Furthermore, do we have solutions to the problems with healthcare and job creation that middle class voters think much more about than they do the deeper moral crisis in the country? Changing worldviews is a long-term goal, but in the short-term we can still win elections by coming up with real conservative solutions to people’s problems as opposed to a general discussion of values.
Working class whites in Ohio who typically vote Republican and voted for Obama don’t see him as a Marxist putting us on the road to Greece. They see Obama as the guy that saved daddy’s job at the Chrysler plant and thus kept food on the family’s table.
Solutions trump values every time because people always vote out of vested interest.
Read the conclusion HERE.
