Before Twittering, engage mind

They have their share of off days, too, but The Next Right is the best blog we've found where Republicans are willing to thrash out their differences- and failings- in public.

A case in point:

Cato's Chris Edwards is correct. Republicans are playing small-ball. They have no real vision, so they've ended up with policy paralysis. - Jon Henke

As I note in a recent New York Post op-ed Republicans are fond of implying that President Obama is a big-spending socialist. But the House GOP recently offered a spending cut plan that was able to find savings worth less than one percent of Obama’s budget.

As Tad DeHaven and Brian Riedl have also pointed out, the GOP spending reform effort is rather pathetic. It proposed specific annual budget cuts of about $14 billion per year.

Consider that the center-left budget wonks at the Brookings Institution put their heads together a few years ago and came up with a “smaller government plan” that proposed about $342 billion in annual spending cuts (by 2014). The Brookings authors note:

These cuts are achieved by reducing government subsidies to commercial activities ($138 billion); by returning responsibility for education, housing, training, environmental, and law enforcement programs to the states ($123 billion) . . . by cutting entitlements such as Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare ($74 billion); and by eliminating some wasteful spending in these entitlement programs ($7 billion).

Thus, the Brookings scholars found cuts more than twenty times larger than the House GOP leadership cuts, and Brookings proposed its plan back when the deficit was about one-fifth of the size it is today. (Note that both the Brookings and GOP plans would also put a cap on overall nondefense discretionary spending, in addition to these specific cuts).

My point in the New York Post piece is that the GOP needs to challenge Obama’s big spending agenda at a more fundamental level. They need to do some careful research, pick out some big spending targets, and go on the offense. Why not propose to eliminate the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development? Why not sell off federal assets, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, in order to help pay down the federal debt? Why not open up the U.S. Postal Service to competition?

Obama won’t agree to these reforms at this point, but they would hopefully open a serious national debate about reforming our massive and sprawling federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the congressional Republicans in 1994 didn’t win by splitting hairs with the Democrats over 1% of spending. They offered a more fundamental critique.

At least, GOP leaders need to offer up spending reforms as bold as those of the Brookings Institution.

Chris Edwards is the director of tax policy studies at The Cato Institute

By contrast, South Carolina's Lawn Jockey Caucus seems to think the way you harness technology and social networks to attract younger voters is to use Twitter and Facebook to joke about the President of the United States' wife being descended from a gorilla in the Columbia zoo, and announcing that the President intends to levy a tax on aspirin because it's white and it works.

Lame attempts to argue it was a joke that people misunderstood, with no malign intent behind it, or that the First Lady brought it on herself because, well, she doesn't believe in creationism, are just complete and utter codswallop.

It's racism- or as Newt Gingrich loves to call it, in the Buckleyan, 19th century, manner, "racialism"- plain and simple.

And it underscores a one-sided debate Wesley Donehue has refused to join in his role as chief technology evangelist for the state GOP. He wants to talk about the harnessing of technology to spread the Republican message, but not to talk about just what the Republican message is.

It's really odd: no one across the aisle wants to talk about the Republican message any deeper than bromides like freedom and personal choice and keeping your money in your pocket. At that level Twitter and Facebook sound fabulous.

But in practice, the democratization of expression such media offers- the unshackling of message from control at the top- is the issue Republicans desperately need to address. And the two racist outbursts of the past week are Exhibits A and B.

They, and other posts and tweets like them, past and future, mean the image of the party is being crafted, minute by minute, by its actual adherents. The future lies not in forcing a message down the throats of the party, a la George W. Bush and Karl Rove. It lies in corralling and rationalizing the collective id of the party and its members- and leaders- express themselves on the spur of the moment, if such is possible.

In other words, the GOP's worst nightmare is being realized by its call for Republicans to use the new technologies to reach out to voters: we are all getting to read what Republicans actually believe in their lower brain stem.

Fears and queers at home, perpetual war abroad. Anything else, just say no.