I have a piece in November’s Commentary on U.K. lessons for American conservatives. This week in The Spectator, I offer a companion essay: What the Conservatives can learn from Republicans. Here’s lesson 4:
Don’t disdain small ball.
Small ball is a strategy in baseball. Instead of attempting the big home run, a small ball coach encourages his players to hit singles and move methodically around the bases. President Bush famously preferred Babe Ruth’s style of play: ‘I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big.’
Again and again the president swung big: amnesty for illegal aliens, privatisation of Social Security accounts, Medicare reform, a sweeping energy plan, and of course the war in Iraq. Sometimes he hit big: tax cuts, education reform. But more often he struck out. At the end of it all — what enduring conservative accomplishments did the president bequeath? Especially after his tax cuts expire in 2010?
Compare that record to one small technical change forced by conservatives in Congress in 1980: requiring every new federal regulation to pass a cost-benefit analysis test. That one small boring technical change, still in force three decades later, has probably killed more misguided initiatives than all presidential vetoes combined.
Gordon Brown and Tony Blair understood this trick well. Their most left-wing actions were always buried in the fine print. Learn from your opponents’ best moves as well as from your friends’ mistakes!
8 responses so far
1 tdawg11870 // Nov 19, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Your first mistake is explaining anything to the British with a baseball analogy. If they understood baseball, they wouldn’t play for days on end with weird bats, football-like batting helmets and one-hop pitches.
No wonder they lost an empire.
2 Ploughman // Nov 19, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Our opponents’ best moves? The genius of the liberals over the last 75 years has been in creating and cultivating constituencies for the kind of government they wanted. Where is the constituency for the kind of “winning conservatism” advocated here in the Frum Forum? Is there one? I’m all in favor of the smaller, decentralized type of government advocated here, but if there isn’t a large group of voters who will loyally turn out to vote for federalism and small government, they will remain nothing but pipe-dreams. Chase the unwashed populists and vulgar social conservatives out of the Republican party and it will remain a small-ball playing permanent opposition party forever. Country club Republicanism may be able to win the odd election by itself, but working real changes in our system will require a bigger coalition.
3 jruss89 // Nov 19, 2009 at 8:23 pm
I think David is completely right–make small changes. Burke would be proud.
4 AmericanMuser // Nov 19, 2009 at 9:18 pm
David:
Maybe Republicans can learn something from Middle America, which seems to be regularly ignored by the Right and Left. For instance, yesterday Republicans shamelessly thwarted efforts by Democrat Senator Chris Dodd to help Middle America by freezing credit card interest rates on existing balances. At a time when people in this country are literally going hungry and without work, Republicans had the chutzpah to throw Middle America under the bus and instead line the pockets of credit card companies. Oy gevalt . . .
I understand the great plight suffered by credit card companies. The gravy train with biscuit wheels that they’ve been riding for years will soon be coming to an end.
As you may recall, especially if you’re an insomniac and have needed something on the nightstand to help you sleep, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act enacted in May, prevents arbitrary interest rate, fee and finance charge increases on a consumer’s existing balance.
In response, credit card companies have been hiking credit card interest rates to 30% in a last ditch effort to take advantage of consumers before all of the CARD Act’s provisions take effect.
To stem the hiking of fees on Middle America, Dodd’s bill would have sped up some of the provisions in the CARD Act, which don’t take effect until February or August of 2010. But yesterday Senator Thad Cochran (R., Miss.) objected to the measure, and it only takes one senator to block a unanimous consent request in the Senate.
This missive has nothing to do with the fact that consumers have a responsibility to spend within their means and to pay what they owe, and everything to do with the fact that the credit card industry has a responsibility to deal with consumers honestly. There is nothing honest about what credit card companies are doing to consumers with these rate increases and fees, which are simply usury and legalized extortion.
Middle America is already frustrated with the political Left and Right for not providing relief on pocketbook issues, and this gets the peasants one step closer to grabbing their pitchforks. If you’re keeping score, let the record reflect that in keeping with its tradition of whoring for big business, Republicans have once again chosen big business over Middle America.
A. Muser
http://americanmuser.wordpress.com
5 Alessandro Machi // Nov 20, 2009 at 9:02 am
A republican politician never met a banker they did not like, and yet, Jamie Dimon is Barack Obama’s favorite Wall Street Banker.
Ironically, the credit card reform bill has arrived DOA. Since credit card companies can arbitrarily cancel any card at any time, not only do the bypass the 45 day notification rule, they pretty much can reset their rates so if the consumer tries to get another card, it will be with inferior terms to what they had.
http://www.thecatwhoatechasebank.com
6 About republicans, credit card companies, freeze rates, freeze credit card rates, credit card rate freeze | Find me About // Nov 21, 2009 at 8:12 pm
[...] I have a piece in November’s Commentary on UK lessons for American conservatives. This week in The Spectator, I offer a companion essay: What the Conservatives can learn from Republicans. Here’s lesson 4: Small ball is a strategy in baseball. …Read Original Story: What the Republicans Can Teach – FrumForum [...]
7 Carney // Nov 23, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Note also how the need for Environmental Impact Statements and the right of outside green groups to sue has strangled development. A simple road in Maryland, the Inter-County Connector, has been delayed for decades by such inanity. Traffic in the DC area is at a standstill in rush hour (and yes there is an outstanding and already overcrowded transit system). Drilling in the Arctic, expanding nuclear power plants to free up natural gas and coal to make methanol fuel as a gasoline alternative, etc., is all out of the question because the burden is now on the person who wants to accomplish something rather than on the obstructer.
8 handworn // Nov 24, 2009 at 2:33 pm
“Chase the unwashed populists and vulgar social conservatives out of the Republican party and it will remain a small-ball playing permanent opposition party forever.”
You have it backwards. Catering to those for whom voting is mainly an emotional affair is what will make whichever is the more organized party remain a permanent opposition party. This is because emotion, while always relevant, is not something which can be transmitted, only evoked. If the center doesn’t feel the emotion, there is nothing to evoke.
The emotions of extremists are always a ripe field for moral hazard, in that the more you cater to them the farther they can go (if you give a mouse a cookie…) and the more alien they get from those of moderates. The more unified the party that does this, the more they drive the “ideologically impure” out of it. It becomes a race to the bottom, with each party’s extremists reliant on the extremists of the other for new extremisms of their own, for all they need is to try to appear slightly less ugly than their opponents.
The scary thing is that extremists never see how their extremism feeds on itself. The louder and more offensively they scream at those different from them, the more ideologically and intellectually inbred they become because they drive those people away. The more inbred their minds become, the more justified in their own minds they become from a lack of opposition and the louder and more offensively they scream. This is a symmetrical effect. It occurs equally on both left and right.
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