Commentary By Phyllis Schlafly
Conservatives bounced back strong after the elections of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and we'll do likewise again in 2010. The Gallup Poll just reported that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states, and the trend is up. President Obama is aiding our task of reinvigorating conservatives.
A speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1975 to the Conservative Political Action Conference contains a message worth repeating:
"I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, 'We must broaden the base of our party' - when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents ...," he said.
"Our people look for a cause to believe in ... raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people. ... Let us explore ways to ward off socialism. ... A political party ... must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency," Mr. Reagan said.
Here is our banner of bold colors:
1. Restore fiscal responsibility. Conservatives must call a halt to Mr. Obama's reckless borrowing and spending. This means defeating the wildly extravagant health care bill and the cap-and-trade bill, which should be called cap-and-tax.
2. Stand tall for American sovereignty. This means rejecting all United Nations treaties including the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the U.N. Treaty on Women. They all invade our sovereignty by creating committees of hostile foreign bureaucrats to monitor our compliance.
Standing for American sovereignty also means repudiating all devious ways of erasing our borders by deceitful code words such as "economic integration," "labor mobility," "North American Union," or "Free Trade Area of the Americas."
3. Make foreign and military policies serve the national security of the United States. George Washington's advice to be "at all times ready for war" means, at long last, deploying an anti-missile defense that can protect our people from attack by rogue nations. As Margaret Thatcher reminded us, Mr. Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
4. We must recapture the three important voting blocs that abandoned conservative candidates in 2008: Reagan Democrats, unmarried women, and young people.
We lost the Reagan Democrats by fumbling the jobs issue. Millions of well-paying blue-collar jobs have gone overseas where workers are paid only 30 cents an hour. We must make clear that conservatives stand for maintaining middle-class jobs that support a family. We must rewrite the unfair trade agreements that allow foreign countries to pretend to reduce their barriers against our products but substitute an equivalent border tax called the VAT (Value Added Tax) that discriminates against U.S. products. Conservatives must reject the trade agreements that allow foreign countries to subsidize their exports by rebating their domestic taxes, while U.S. companies pay very high corporate taxes.
We lost 70 percent of unmarried women because the Democrats are the party of generous handouts to unmarried mothers. Conservatives must stand up for marriage as the basic institution of society and must not allow the liberals to undermine marriage by using taxpayer-financed incentives in the multibillion-dollar welfare, child-support, and domestic-violence agencies to promote divorce, fatherless children, and the matriarchy sought by the feminists. Mothers should look to husbands for financial support, not depend on Big Brother Government to be the provider. The liberals will always be the party of bigger taxpayer handouts.
We lost the majority of young people largely because of what they are taught in the public schools, which 89 percent of kids attend. We must demand that public schools teach respect for patriotism, the Constitution, moral standards, Western civilization instead of multiculturalism (all cultures are equal), diversity (all behaviors are OK), and "social justice" (the false notion that students are victims of an unjust, oppressive and racist America, which makes them ripe targets for community organizers to mobilize them to vote for socialist candidates). The National Association of Scholars defines "social justice" as "the advocacy of more egalitarian access to income through state-sponsored redistribution." That is academic verbiage for Mr. Obama's pledge to "spread the wealth around," which sums up his current policies.
If conservatives deal with these challenges, they can be the Comeback Kids in 2010.
Phyllis Schlafly is a founder of the modern conservative movement in the United States and has been a national leader on a panoply of national and foreign-policy issues.
