“I believe Republicans can win in the mid-terms without a grand 1994 Gingrich-style Contract With America, but they will need a clearly stated agenda come 2016.”
That was my answer to my own question posed in my Oct. 3, 2014 post, “Does the GOP need to say what its for?” It was in response to the flood of columnists and commentators,who said the GOP couldn’t win by attacking Obama and his policies.
Even Peggy Noonan, who I usually agree with, said, “It’s good to win, but winning without a declared governing purpose is a ticket to nowhere.”
Word leaked out of Washington this week that soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner have been meeting for the past several months to map out their “if we win” strategy. It’s what I imagined, and hoped, was happening.
Boehner and McConnell, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, outlined their priorities for the 114th Congress, but I don’t expect it will satisfy the skeptics. “We will honor the voters’ trust by focusing first on jobs and the economy,” they wrote, and to my delight, they plan a “renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills passed by the Republican House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought to a vote by the Democratic Senate majority.”
Meanwhile, our out-of-touch president continues to press for immigration reform, pre-school education, infrastructure investment and climate control legislation.
It won’t be easy, but the GOP has an opportunity now to put forth its case for 2016.
