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The Three 'L's of Politics.

Herman Cain has a great piece on Leaders, Liberals, and Laggards with regard to Social Security:

Leaders make things happen. Liberals stop things from happening, and laggards wait to act until someone else acts first. Leaders, liberals, and laggards are all present in our nation’s Capital, where our elected officials are supposed to work on fixing our big issues. Unfortunately, the leaders are way out-numbered.

Building an Ownership Society looks to be more of a long-term project than many would have guessed following the decisive spankings the Democrats have received in recent elections.

It'll essentially take 60 "leaders" in the Senate, 218 in the House, and one in the White House, before we'll see meaningful, substantive reforms of untenable programs like Social Security. That is, unless some dynamic in the debate changes. The midterm elections of 2006 could serve as the wake-up call that the establishment media's polls are garbage, that America is trending powerfully toward the GOP, that people really disdain obstruction and do-nothingism. But 2002 should have sounded that alarm. Ditto on 2004. 2006, though, could be the third snooze alarm that finally gets people out of bed. If Republicans manage to pick up 2 or 3 Senate seats, in addition to maybe one or two House seats, the inertia for leadership rather than laggardliness may receive an important infusion.

Right now, Republicans control 55 seats in the Senate, but only about 45 are real leaders. In the House, the GOP holds 232 seats, but only 200 or so are true leaders. Democrats, meanwhile, are almost unanimously worthless in the leadership department.

Sixty conservatives in the Senate is a daunting task. With Republicans such as Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe, who even needs an opposition party? The GOP may need upwards of 65 or more seats in the Senate just to get a serious pro-growth reform agenda passed.

Let's get to work on that, shall we? A goal of 65 Republicans may seem absurd, but, by 2015, if the GOP can chip away just two seats per election, that's that. If Republicans can win both Senate seats of every state that Bush won in 2004 by 2015, that's 62 Senate seats. Add in one here or there from Oregon or Washington, from New Hampshire or Pennsylvania or Maryland or the Midwest, and there you go.

Difficult, yeah. Impossible, no. In the meantime, we must win the battles on the issues. Our ideas beat theirs, every time. As members of the majority party, we shouldn't get laggardly in our ability to articulate our ideas.

As Herman Cain would say, we need leaders in Washington, not laggards. For now, we bloggers must be the leaders on Social Security.

Posted by Will Franklin · 16 June 2005 12:16 AM

Comments

Posted by: Zsa Zsa at June 16, 2005 10:36 AM

Posted by: Cindy T. at June 16, 2005 04:49 PM