Rebuttal

Dear Kenny,

John McCain did not lose the election because he didn't get enough independents. In fact, his election demonstrated, that a campaign purely focused on moderates and independents will get you beat every time. The McCain campaign insisted on this strategy, despite warnings from many Repbulicans that it would not work. (See below for much more important reasons why McCain lost the election.) John McCain did not get a strong turnout of the Republican, conservative base. This turnout would have been even worse if he had not picked a conservative like Palin. Her choice invigorated the base. Up until that choice, conservatives were apathetic toward the McCain campaign. Furthermore, Palin has just as much economic and foreign policy experience as our president-elect Obama. A law degree from Harvard and work as a community organizer in parts of Chicago is NOT a resume of economic and foreign policy experience. The fact that some perceieve Obama to have more experience is laughable.

I read the Slate article by Michael Kinsley and looked at the numbers. He states in his article about the numbers, "This exercise implicitly assumes that lower taxes are always good and higher government spending is always bad." Amen! If the numbers show that Democrats support the previous statement, that makes me happy. It must have been painful for Kinsley to write because he is well known to be a staunch liberal who loves "cradle to grave", nanny state policies with high taxes and ever more entitlement spending.

A few thoughts on the numbers:

• I am impressed with the time and effort it must have taken for Kenny to analyze them.
• The stats start in 1958, excluding many important years from 1900 on.
• The Democrats controlled the house of representatives the entire time from 1958 to 1995 and then again from 2005 to the present. The House is responsible for all appropriations. The president can have input and veto power, but congress has a huge amount of responsibility for spending and taxes. The Democrats have controlled both the House and the Senate for a large majority of the time between 1958 and 2008. This makes it difficult to pass more "conservative" legislation such as lowering taxes.
• From 1958 to the present, Ronald Reagan was really the only consistently conservative Republican. Nixon had many liberal economic ideas (price controls), Eisenhower continued many of the New Deal entitlement programs, and who can forget George H.W. Bush's broken promise of not raising taxes. Even Reagan had to tolerate excessive spending done by congress who did not live up to their part of the bargain to decrease spending along with the tax cuts. (Reagan wanted a balanced budget amendment and the ability to line-item veto all the pork spending that congress puts into every legislative bill).
  
• Democrats can certainly have conservative economic policies. JFK was quite conservative on some economic issues, such as believing in lower taxes. Clinton made great changes in decreasing welfare programs and expanding free trade, such as the NAFTA.
  
• Conservatives do not like many of President Bush's policies. He has been horrible on spending, as have many Republican senators and representatives.
• As you can see, I support conservative policies, whether they are supported by Democrats or Republicans. It's just that Republican politicians are more likely to have conservative governmental policy.
  

If Kenny and I can agree that we want the government to spend less, balance the budget, stop running up high deficits, and cut taxes, then we agree on a fundamental belief of government's role in our lives.