Dick Morris writes what I and several other commenters  here have always maintained – that economic and  tax issues are winners because they will appeal to those that left the Republican Party after the Progressive betrayals by both Bush I and II. An obsession on red meat and polarizing issues  is self-defeating . We cannot turn off Independents, suburbanites and the much derided “soccer moms”. For too many elections Republicans have written off vast swaths of the country and electoral votes, but there is no reason why the GOP cannot be competitive in many of the Blue states. We have to be a national party not a regional party and each region has its own version of Republicanism. As Morris says, opposition to Obamacare, the Porkulus,  combined with fear of rising unemployment,  will bring us the House, not opposition to Roe v. Wade.

by Dick Morris

A fundamental change is gripping the Republican grass roots as they animate the GOP surge to a major victory in the 2010 elections. No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops. Now economic and fiscal issues prevail. The Tea Party has made the Republican Party safe for libertarians.

There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation and curbing spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.

It is one of the fundamental planks in the Tea Party platform that the movement does not concern itself with social issues. At the Tea Parties, evangelical pro-lifers rub shoulders happily with gay libertarians. They are united by their anger at Obama’s economic policies, fear of his deficits and horror at his looming tax increases. Obama’s agenda has effectively removed the blocks that stopped tens of millions of social moderates from joining the GOP.

[…]

This preference for economic and fiscal questions over social issues is not a top-down decision of the Tea Party leadership. There really is no Tea Party leadership. Those who conduct its affairs are mere coordinators of local groups where the real power lies. The entire affair is a grass roots-dominated movement. I was shocked to learn that the teapartypatriots.org umbrella group, to which more than 2,800 local affiliates belong, has a total payroll of $50,000 per month, with only seven paid staff members, some of them low-level at that. This group, which embraces more than half of the self-described Tea Party groups in the U.S., leaves up to each local organization how to proceed and what to do. It is a bottom-up movement.

The determination to focus on fiscal and economic issues, to the exclusion of social questions, wells up from below as individual members vent their concerns over ObamaCare, stimulus spending and cap-and-trade legislation. It is around opposition to Obama’s agenda, not Roe v. Wade, that the movement is organized. It is a new day on the Republican right.

Read the rest here: The New Republican Right