Stop Crying WOLF!

Barack Obama’s presidency is twenty nine days young. Though his Administration has made quite the controversial splash in its first month, its “gaffes” highlighted by conservative media have been dramatically overstated. To some, this seems like what the loyal opposition’s mission has always been, and therefore, what we should do as the minority voice in Washington. I sharply disagree.

What has been going on even before the 44th President’s inauguration has been a tit-for-tat, micro-targeted game of superficial and uncoordinated potshots at the Obama Administration by conservative pundits. If you were to regularly tune into the major cable networks, you would hear a series of stretched, out-of-context sound bites suggesting that Barack Obama is sympathetic to terrorists, a socialist at heart, or that he is to be feared by the mainstream. These chaotic attacks have lacked coordination and appeal, and will undermine Republican efforts going into the 2010 Midterm elections.

The most recent criticism of “Porkulus”, the recently passed $800 Billion Stimulus Bill, is an example of this. Believe it or not, congressional conservatives actually proposed an intelligent alternative to dramatically increasing the size of government to remedy the current economic recession. Sadly, this proposal was lost amidst the white noise of potshots and empty criticism. With the Democrat mandate in both houses, this proposal will not receive a single reading on the floor, or make it into a single committee meeting.

While this is discouraging, much hay could be made out of this idea if we were to talk constructively. The proposal consisted of targeted long term tax cuts to businesses and consumers that many learned economists touted as a more reasonable solution than a massive federalization. Not only would this conservative alternative save our dollars the wasteful trip to and from Washington, it would remove the Federal Government from the decision making process and circumvent the need to simply print more currency to solve the problem. But instead of selling our fresh alternative, we have once again relied on our old adages of fear and division.

Somehow the conservative media care little that the politics of fear, partisanship, and division have lead conservatives to overwhelming defeats. I believe our Party’s image suffers from a perception of an overt gamesmanship by the American public. Our strategies have lost their finesse largely because our ideas have become exaggerated, gratuitously negative, and repetitive. I think the blame for this rests largely on so called “conservative” media and its repetitious cries. What conservatives need to keep in mind is that the agenda of even the most conservative media runs contrary to our own—of rebuilding a coherent Republican Party. Obviously, absent frequent controversy, these networks would suffer from low viewership. Daily controversy, while it may appeal to pundits, is not good for conservatism. While small political battles are fought each and every day, they force us to lose sight of the real issues. Worthwhile controversy is drowned in the white noise of the daily tit-for-tat of the cable media, and it dramatically distorts the bigger picture, and erodes the little rare trust conservatives have with the American people.

To be clear, I am not advocating that conservatives should give Barack Obama a free pass, or even a honeymoon period. In fact, I believe that if we could avoid being driven by the daily media’s need for constant controversy, we could better coordinate our criticisms of Obama’s liberal agenda. In addition, I think it would benefit conservatives to market positive proposals of our own as alternatives to the alarming initiatives of the far left. We need to keep in mind that the political struggle that we are engaged in will endure at least four years; each day’s battle is not necessarily always worth winning. As an effective loyal opposition, let’s pick and choose those that are actually most important and show the American public that we are deserving of winning them.