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GOPers must respond to hate and leftist analyses with poise and savvy and pray the elections aren't stolen

Jay Ambrose

By Jay Ambrose

Published November 3, 2014

GOPers must respond to hate and leftist analyses with poise and savvy and pray the elections aren't stolen

Something big and much that is good are waiting to happen in America, and Republicans could aid the cause. Many bad things are already happening, and Republicans could maybe stop some of them or at least slow them down. We can’t be sure, but happy days could be close again if Republicans take the Senate in the midterm elections. What they have to do is respond to hate and leftist analyses with poise and savvy and pray the elections aren’t stolen.

One really big thing they could help deliver is an energy boom that could strikingly reenergize the country if the Obama administration would let it. New technologies are already leading to major domestic recoveries of natural gas and oil and thousands of jobs are being created as other industries are boosted. But the growth is a fraction of what it could be if the government would open more federal lands while reshaping tax and regulatory laws.

Here is what we could then get: more opportunities of all kinds, a reduction of social problems and increased means of addressing any number of pressing issues. All the energy production could be done safely, we would become still less dependent on Middle East oil and the increased use of natural gas would help reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course, calumny would be heaped on the Republicans for helping a market system seen by many leftists as the root of all social evil even though free exchange has actually been one of the most liberating and misery-alleviating developments in human history. The calumny would come at them in still more force as they tried to deal intelligently with over-regulation harming more than it helps and corporate tax structures that breed avoidance, reduce revenues, slow growth, and hurt consumers and wage earners.

The Republicans, instead of slapping back against name-calling that will come at them on all kinds of matters they would need to deal with, would do better to rely on balanced understanding and prudence.

A balanced understanding would get it, for instance, that stymied social and economic mobility relates far more to single-parent homes and mass immigration of the uneducated and unskilled than to not spending enough money on schools or there being some very rich people out there. Prudence would tell them to avoid such mistakes as turning a health system upside down in a hurry because of so much sure to then go wrong, especially as tens of thousands of pages of regulations were thrown on top of the confused law. One fact-finder has said all these new rules were needed for clarification, and I would hereby like to instruct him that as much as clarification was needed, clarification and inundation are opposites.

Many leftists, thinking our public debt is just not an issue any more, will crucify GOP senators if they try to restructure Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to avoid economic ruin that will almost surely happen otherwise, but there are all kinds of bipartisan experts who can help explain the truth.

Would the Republicans find ways to compromise if they win the Senate? It’s hardly a sure thing, but hope can be found in new political approaches suitable to objectives on both sides of the aisle. For example, Cass Sunstein, a professor once with the Obama administration, has come up with program ideas that could lead the poor and others to help themselves even as individuals were allowed to opt out.

Of course, to make this work, you would need President Barack Obama to try real negotiation, too, and to back up as new pressures are put on him to stop with the autocratically minded executive orders.

One last need: honest elections, especially following an academic study showing mostly pro-Democratic non-citizens have been voting in recent elections in numbers sufficient to alter outcomes. On top of that, Colorado — hosting a key Senate race — is experimenting with a mail-in ballot system that is about as sure an invitation to cheat as electoral politics has ever seen. An answer for those who want America to change course is to get out and vote in great numbers.

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Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.

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