Dorothy Rabinowitz gets straight to the point – the Republican who can win in 2012 is someone who gets to the heart of American worries and those worries are definitely not ‘big government’, ‘gays in the military’,’ prayer in school’ ‘abortion’ or most red meat social issues. Their worries are about their job security, what is going to happen to their savings, crime, and the rising costs of fuel and food. In essence bread and butter and pocketbook issues. Sometimes the Republicans sound way too professorial in their denunciations of government and forget that most people are worried about themselves and their family’s prospects and prefer to kick the can down the road. That is why a candidate such as Newt Gingrich aside from all his personal baggage would be such a disastrous candidate, people are not interested in political and philosophical  theories of government but about how can they meet their bills on a day to day basis.  It all starts with jobs!

by Dorothy Rabinowitz

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.

From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it’s impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.

[…]

The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn’t going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don’t like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they’re stealing from the young. They’ve spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they’ll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.

The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren’t sitting around worried to death about big government—they’re worried about jobs and what they have in savings.

The candidate would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president’s view of the American nation.

[…]

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Read the rest: The Republican Who Can Win

Dr.K. thinks that there might actually be a beneficial effect from  the debt ceiling debate. He thniks Boehner’s idea that we raise the debt ceiling dollar for dollar with every dollar cut in spending is not a bad idea.

by Charles Krauthammer

As the sun rises in the east, the debt ceiling will be raised. Getting there, however, will be harrowing. Which is a good thing.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warns that failure to raise the limit would be disastrous. In that he is correct. But he is disingenuous when he suggests that we must raise the ceiling by Aug. 2 or the sky falls.

There is no drop-dead date. There is no overnight default. Debt service amounts to about 6 percent of the federal budget and only about 10 percent of federal revenue. This means that for every $1 of interest payments, there is roughly $9 of revenue the government spends elsewhere.

Move money around — and you’ve covered the debt service. Cover the debt service — and there is no default. What scares Geithner is not that we won’t be able to pay our creditors but that his Treasury won’t be able to continue spending the obscene amounts of money (about $120 billion a month) it doesn’t have and will (temporarily) be unable to borrow.

Good. The government will (temporarily) be forced to establish priorities. A salutary exercise.

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Which is why the current debt-ceiling showdown is to be welcomed. It creates leverage to force fiscal sanity.

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After all, it invites Obama to choose how much to cut. For example, $500 billion buys him a $500 billion debt-limit hike — and only a short-term extension. Not wanting to go through this process again, Obama would like a $2 trillion debt-limit hike to get him past Election Day 2012. For that, he’ll have to come up with $2 trillion in spending cuts.

It may be blackmail. But it is progress.

Read the rest: Our salutary debt-ceiling scare