Kramer: Time to return to GOP values

 25 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

BY DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star

OMAHA — On the eve of the Republican national convention, David Kramer created a stir.

“As a purely partisan Republican, I believe our party would be better off losing this presidential election than winning it,” Kramer said.

When his fellow Nebraska delegates read that newspaper story online at their Minneapolis headquarters hotel the next morning, Kramer heard some grumbling.

[+]Enlarge

David Kramer

David Kramer

Ignored in some of the reaction was Kramer’s accompanying statement that, partisan considerations aside, election of Barack Obama and an increasingly Democratic Congress would be “disastrous for us as a nation.”

OK, it happened.

His party lost.

Now what?

Learn the lesson imposed by voters with their “repudiation of Republican governance over the last eight years,” Kramer says.

Restore the GOP to its conservative fiscal moorings, he says.

Embrace social and fiscal conservatism again and the party will be back to its winning formula.

Kramer, who served as Republican state chairman from 2001 to 2005 and sought his party’s 2006 Senate nomination, is sitting in a comfortable conference room at his Baird Holm law office on the 15th floor of the Woodmen Tower.  Out the bank of windows, rain splatters across downtown Omaha.

“I don’t believe this was a repudiation of conservatism,” Kramer says. That wasn’t the issue.

President George W. Bush “presided over one of the largest expansions of government in our history,” he says, and that’s what voters repudiated last week.

Although losing its way fiscally, the GOP remained true to its social conservatism, Kramer says. The addition of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court, he says, is the best evidence of that.

But government ballooned with enactment of No Child Left Behind educational reforms filled with federal mandates and approval of costly, unfunded prescription drug Medicare benefits, Kramer says.

“The size of the federal government expanded,” he says. “Its cost rose from 17 to 18 percent of the gross domestic product to 22 percent.”

That’s “the Achilles heel that lost us the election,” Kramer says.

Republicans, he says, simply lost their way.

To those who say the GOP must rid itself of social conservatism to build its future, Kramer has a blunt response: “I say baloney.

“The road map to achieve victory continues to be the marriage of social and fiscal conservatism,” he says. Along with a return to the Republican message of optimism.

But that message needs to be wed to the right messengers, he says.

Kramer looks first to Republican governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

And, yes, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the 2008 vice presidential nominee.

Add to that list former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Kramer was enthusiastic about the selection of Palin two months ago, and says he remains so even after she became a polarizing and oft-maligned figure during the campaign.

“I think there was a double standard applied to her,” he says. “It wasn’t gender. It was inside baseball versus outside baseball. She was an outsider.

“She said far fewer foolish things during the campaign than Joe Biden did.”

But Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, was a Washington insider who was treated quite differently by the media, Kramer says.

Republicans need to pay more attention to the dynamic change in America’s demography, Kramer says.

“The face of America is changing,” he says, and the GOP needs to come to grips with the fact that an estimated 95 percent of blacks and two-thirds of Hispanics voted for Obama last week.

Combine that with projections that America will become “a majority minority country” in 2040. That’s when a majority of the U.S. population no longer will be white.

“We have to find a way to make inroads with those voters,” he says.

Despite his Republican allegiance, Kramer says there is reason to salute Obama’s election.

“We ought to stop for a minute and celebrate the nature of the moment,” he says.

“When he said ‘only in America,’ I agree with him.”

Like the president-elect, Kramer comes from mixed parentage. His mother was born in Panama.

“It will be really easy to be critical of what the Democrats are going to do now,” Kramer says.

“The hard part will be to offer insightful and thought-provoking alternatives.

“Being in the opposition is relatively easy. Governing, as we discovered, is really hard.”

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.