David Skelton is Deputy Director of Policy Exchange. You can follow him on Twitter @djskelton.
Newt Gingrich’s annihilation of Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary served to highlight the Republican front runner’s biggest weakness – he finds it difficult to empathise with blue collar voters. His campaign was found out in a state where unemployment is a major issue and where the blue collar vote is crucial.
Mitt Romney’s problem isn’t dissimilar to the bind faced by Conservatives in the UK. Despite having almost perfect electoral conditions at the last election, the Tories remained handicapped by their “party of the rich” label and failed to make a sufficient breakthrough amongst the skilled working class, who hold the key to British elections.
In an electoral environment dominated by job insecurity and a rising cost of living, politicians such as Romney and Cameron have to be able to empathise with blue collar voters if they’re to achieve electoral success.
US Republicans are having a tough time considering who their candidate should be for the 2012 Presidential election.
Mitt Romney is the current front-runner, but has a ceiling of support at around 35-40% of the vote. He is fatally hamstrung, however, by the healthcare law he passed when he was Governor of Massachusetts, which many Republicans compare to the federal healthcare law ("Obamacare") which they fiercely oppose and are desperate to repeal. He is also a Mormon, which largely makes him unable to connect with the evangelical Christians who make up a sizeable chunk of the Republican Party.
Michele Bachmann, who entered the race to become the party's nominee relatively recently, has created a lot of excitement, and started coming second in polls. Despite her lack of a record to point to (she has been representing Minnesota's 6th Congressional district for four years) and lack of executive experience, the excitement around her is understandable. She's the first candidate really to start vocally challenging President Obama, she's a Tea Partier, and she gets media coverage.
"He is one of the four major Presidents in the history of the Republican Party: Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan. He brought the Cold War to an end — the last great global victory for the United States. He left his country the only superpower in the world, at least until the rise of China. He restarted the US economy, which was in miserable condition when he took power in 1982. But, above all, he made the world a safer place, in terms of the rivalry of the great powers, but also in terms of nuclear weapons."
"In the first year of his presidency, U.S. air traffic controllers broke federal law by going on strike. Reagan responded by giving the strikers 48 hours to return to work or face the consequences, sacking the 11,000 who refused to comply. He also tackled the U.S. economic malaise, reversing years of rising inflation and unemployment. While many favoured a financial stimulus to increase the money supply, Reagan cut taxes, reduced regulation, and abandoned Nixon's wage and price controls. The result was a sustained period of economic expansion during which the U.S. economy grew by more than a third. Every income group became wealthier, and consumer confidence soared."
Davis concludes his piece with an assessment of how Reagan would handle today's choppy economic times:
"In response to the financial crisis, Reagan would have emphasized that the roots of economic recovery lie not in financial stimulus packages, but in a return to the principles of free enterprise, lower taxation and deregulation. Above all, Reagan would have used his communication skills to convince people that these values and principles are strengths, not weaknesses to be given away."
For me he'll also always be the Great Communicator. His positivity shines through in this YouTube clip:
Subscribe to this blog's feed