FreedomTalks

Here is the link to the interview.

Excerpts:

Do the midterms show that Republicans have lost the political middle ground?

For now. The good news is they can very quickly get the middle of the spectrum back. Most of the big issues that face the American people require a substantial change in policy that the Democratic Party is incapable of making. Retirement security is probably first. It is the single biggest public-policy problem and opportunity of our lifetime. It’s an issue plagued by Democrats who don’t care and Republicans who don’t dare.

But many believe the GOP owes its success to “wedge” issues. And based on the success of gay-marriage bans, conservatives are responding.

These are important issues. They are also issues people want to see dealt with on a serious basis. If you put an issue on a referendum, and I get to vote, there’s no fooling around. But what they did in Congress last session was raise a constitutional amendment [to ban gay marriage] on the floor as a political exercise. A fundamental tenet of conservatism is an aversion to publicly funded elections. When pocketbook conservatives see people using Congress to score points for the next election, they know they’re watching a publicly funded campaign. They don’t see it as serious work by serious people.

Have evangelicals hijacked the GOP?

Part of the reason they lost the majority was they were overly responsive to people like [Focus on the Family founder] James Dobson.

You’ve accused him of being obsessed with power.

A lot of people in Washington become obsessively interested in their power, and Dobson is one of them. In this instance, he’s a person so determined to be heard and obeyed that when talking to a fairly insecure group of legislators, he could compel them to engage in behavior that was destructive to themselves. A prime example is Terri Schiavo. You basically had the federal government mandating judicial activism on a state in total disrespect for the concept of separation of powers. Somebody had convinced our guys in office that it is acceptable to expand the power of the state in order to impose righteous conduct. We are now prepared to act as if government righteousness is more important than freedom. That is simply not acceptable behavior for conservatives. But it scored points with evangelicals.

How do fiscal conservatives join evangelicals to win in 2008?

Evangelicals have always said you can’t win without us. But history has shown more Republicans have lost elections for the absence of pocketbook conservatives. Evangelicals should continue to advocate the things they believe in. But maybe they should [remember], “Thou shall render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto the Lord what is the Lord’s.” If we exemplify a righteous life, we have done the appropriate thing. If we try to legislate a righteous life, we have done the wrong thing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Elections, Social Security, Taxes, Trade, U.S. Budget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.