by Newt Gingrich
There is a real likelihood that the Republicans will win a big victory this fall.
However, defeating the Democrats because of their terrible performance will not be powerful or lasting. Republicans must defeat the Democrats because their values are wrong, and their policies simply can’t work.
Defeating the Democrats on a strictly performance-based campaign allows the next cycle of Democrats to come along and claim the ideas and policies were right, but the personalities were incompetent.
This has happened before.
Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was a failure. The next round of Democrats repudiated it, and in a few years, they nominated George McGovern, who was even further to the left.
Jimmy Carter’s failure in 1980 taught Democrats nothing. Four years later, Walter Mondale ran promising to raise taxes.
Barack Obama’s divisive, radical policies set the stage for Donald Trump’s election in reaction. Then Biden came along as Obama’s vice president and moved even further to the left – toward even more destructive and radical policies.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher taught us that “first you win the argument, and then you win the vote.”
She set out in 1975 to win the argument that socialism was immoral, impossible in the real world, and produced terrible results. She won that argument so decisively that no openly left-wing Labour leader has been elected prime minister in 40 years.
Like Thatcher, Republicans must develop a campaign that wins the argument about core values and philosophies. The Democrats’ performance failures must be linked to their policy and values failures. As President Ronald Reagan said, “the trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
On the performance front, the opportunity is going to be enormous to defeat the Democrats as incompetent (which is not the same as being wrong).
President Biden continues to decline cognitively and is more and more embarrassing. The latest presidential job approval poll was at 33 percent approval, which is a dangerous warning sign for Democrat prospects this fall.
Jill Biden’s Taco Democrats gaffe may be a sign she is joining her husband in not being able to remember what she should be saying.
Record high gasoline prices, rising food prices, and rising murder and crime rates, are affecting every American. The borders are open and insecure (with no tests for COVID-19 or criminal records). Meanwhile, people in the country illegally are being given free cell phones and flown around America for free. Schools teach seven-year-old children that they are guilty of white privilege and ask third graders to discuss sexual orientation. At the same time, the schools are failing to teach reading, writing, or arithmetic. The failures are seemingly endless – and compounding.
Then, there is potentially the greatest corruption crisis ever to envelop a White House. No reasonable person can doubt that President Biden has regularly and routinely lied about Hunter Biden’s corruption (and the President’s knowledge of it). Evidence continues to come out about just how sick Hunter’s behavior has been — and how impossible it was for President Biden to not know about it.
The recent revelation that the American Strategic Oil Reserve sent a million barrels of oil to a Chinese oil firm Hunter Biden has business ties with is just one more example of how blatantly and arrogantly corrupt the Biden administration is.
So, there will be plenty of performance failures on which to focus. But the failures must be tied to the underlying truth: The philosophy and values at the heart of Big Government Socialism simply can never work.
These terrible outcomes are not the result of randomly incompetent behavior. They are the natural – indeed the inevitable – results of unworkable values and unrealistic, destructive models.
I wrote my new book, “Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future,” because defeating the philosophy – and not just repudiating the current performance – is so important.
Sean Hannity said this is the most important book I’ve written in the more than 30 years we have known one another.
In fact, Hannity thought “Defeating Big Government Socialism” was so important, he agreed to tape an entire podcast discussing it.
We are at a crucial decision point in our nation’s history. As Americans, we can choose the destructive, failed values and policies of Big Government Socialism. Or we can choose to restore the America that works with the values and policies which made us the strongest, freest, most prosperous county on Earth.
Which path will you choose?
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For more of Newt’s commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.
