While it is easy to portray the loss in NY 26 as simply as a missed opportunity in a three way brawl with two well funded Democrats, there are some deeper lessons for 2012. Clearly the Democrats have a strategy that worked and they will try to repeat in any district they can of planting fake Tea Party candidates in races. The mainstream media totally ignored the fact that the “Tea Party” candidate had run three times previously as a Democrat and as late as the 2010 election cycle had made contributions to the Democrats. Only a grass roots uproar and efforts to expose the frauds by conservative groups prevented this from being totally successful. That said, there is a lesson for the Tea Party that any third candidate efforts are likely to elect Democrats in almost any race.
The Democrats also test ran their Mediscare campaign with great success where they characterized Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, and specifically its proposals to reform Medicare as an effort that would leave old folks sick on the streets. This is classic Democratic scare tactics where they make no proposals of their own how to solve the nation’s problems but run against the GOP by a well orchestrated scare campaign. They have been using it effectively since they won back the senate in 1996 on republican plans to reform social security. Twenty five years later those reforms seem modest compared to those needed now to restore solvency to the retirement plan, but nobody since has seriously faced the reality which was seen a quarter of a century ago that social security was going bankrupt. Today, the senate democrats, the majority party, are making no budget proposal of their own but rather want to force a vote on the House GOP budget which will be defeated by their majority but they hope to force senate GOP to vote for those cuts. Even faced with a financial crisis the Democrats would rather a vote they can use for politics over one that solves the nation’s problems.
Now is a time of serious problems which require serious efforts to avoid an even deeper crisis. It seems we never g take the fight back to the Democrats. Hade the 1995 GOP plan to reform social security been adopted there would be no need for the significant cuts we face today. These changes are nothing compared to what we will face in a decade if nothing is done. The spending reductions in the Ryan budget are nothing compared to the impact on the economy if we experience a full debt crisis in a decade if the Democratic budget deficit grows unchecked. While the Bush deficits were indefensible, the Obama solution has been to double them. The lesson of NY 26 is we need to take the fight to the democrats first and paint a very real picture of how scary the future will be if we do not restore fiscal responsibility. There are no easy solutions, but it is solutions which America needs.
A Conservative's Musings on All Things Political 