Redstate

Posted at 11:36pm on May 7, 2008 The Next Big Thing for the Right?

By Bluey

Conservatives and Republicans have whined for the past year about their disadvantage vs. the left's activism, fundraising and journalism websites. I've monitored it closely on blogs and heard about it during countless panel discussions. There has been continuous talk about how to grow, adapt and change.

That discussion has revealed the monumental challenges facing the right -- both online and offline. There's frustration with the non-existent "Republican brand" and resistance among many conservatives to embrace technology. I've witnessed these challenges up close both on Capitol Hill and in my job at The Heritage Foundation, a 35-year-old institution that is (slowly) trying to strengthen its footing in the digital world.

Changes are happening all around, including here at RedState. As Erick reported earlier today, this site will undergo its own restructuring as part of version 3.0. The new RedState will fill important voids on the right, particularly at the state and local level, one of the fastest growing areas for citizen journalism.

Posted in conservatism | fundraising | Online Activism | politics | Technology | Technology — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:25pm on Dec. 6, 2007 Romney's Kennedy Moment

Successfully Defusing that Mormon Thing

By Hunter Baker

I have not seen the speech, but I have read it. Religion and politics is my academic specialty. While I would quibble with the way Romney presents the founding of the Republic and what it did or didn't settle about religious liberty, I think he did an outstanding job of framing the overall discussion.

1. The United States has traditionally been a nation that recognizes freedom must be paired with religion and morality if it is to persevere in political society. Mitt said it. Libertarians need to hear it. So do secularists. When Mitt embraces that point of view, he puts himself squarely in the conservative camp, not only the religious conservatives, but the traditionalist Burkeans, too.

2. Though his faith has some unique features (so unique that thinking of it as "Christianity, but different" is a BIG stretch), he plants his flag on American values such as freedom, democracy, human rights, religious liberty, and limited government. He is right to do so. It is perhaps imperfectly understood that Mormonism is an American religion with a major preference for American values. Mormon missionaries spread their faith and its unique doctrines, but they also spread pro-Americanism. I think you'd be hard pressed to find Mormons abroad who hate America.

3. He correctly recognizes that while the church must always seek to encourage the state, to critique the state, to urge the state toward justice, it must never be part of the state. When the church is part of the state, it either becomes a useless Department of God, as is the case of European established churches, or it becomes a dangerous theocracy of the sort we find in many Muslim lands.

Overall, this speech showed tremendous sophistication on religion and politics. I'm not a Mitt supporter. But he listened to someone who understands the issues well.

A+++ for this one. Attaboy, Governor Romney.

END.

Posted in 2008 | politics | religion | Romney — Comments (50)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 4:30pm on Apr. 20, 2007 Lessons in political suicide.

That knife you bring to the gunfight should be aimed away from your chest.

By Thomas

Running into the 1988 Presidential election, Bloom County -- for those of you who were even more children than I at the time, a left-leaning comic strip penned by, what else, an Austinite -- took to calling the two major party nominees the Wimp and the Shrimp. The joke -- with respect to one of only three one-term Presidents of the twentieth century -- took aim at the elder Bush's penchant for genteel, Rockefeller Republicanism; love of bipartisanship; and general image of softness, compared to the giant who came before him.

Little did we know that the truth of that image would come back to haunt us throughout the man's presidency, culminating (but hardly ending) in that great bipartisan moment in which President Bush (1) decided that everyone who'd read his lips scant years before had been suffering from mass dyslexia.

One of the great worries many of us had in 2000 -- aside from the fear that we'd soon have an android in charge of the nuclear codes, and that his alien masters would overrun us all -- was that the Wimp's wimpiness was congenital, and a dominant gene. This did not overly concern me, because, first, any idiot -- and George W. Bush is not an idiot -- could figure out what cost his father the Presidency; and, second, I watched the younger Bush absolutely annihilate that old crone Ann Richards, and not gently, either. Sure, he liked the bipartisan game, but he knew where the long knives were kept.

I maintain that I was right, but to a point; and the beginning of my error is the beginning of the explanation for the absolute fecklessness of the last two and a half years of President Bush's last term.

Read on.

Posted in Clausewitz | George W. Bush | knife fights | politics | Republicans | Republicans | wimp — Comments (39)/ Email this page » / Read More »