What happened yesterday was a good thing.  For too long, Sacramento has acted with contempt for the will of the voters, forgetting that the one-fortieth or one-eightieth of the state the Democrat legislator represents, after having been elected by less that 30% of the voters in that district (usually in the party primary) is not a mandate to expand government.  Voters hit the limit, and said so in resounding tones.

But this is no time for those of us who believe in small government to gloat.  We have not yet made our case that more government spending does not make for better government.  We do not have the money that the government unions have.  They are going to spend that money over the next six weeks to beat back any proposed cuts that are sure to come, and we dont have the resources to counter their propaganda.  The war is not over for them.  It never is.  We have won nothing yet.

I have been through election wins that were squandered when we fell asleep.  This is the time to wake up.  We have awoken the electorate.  They are ready to hear our message.  We need to double down now.  We need to step up our actions and activities.  We need to get loud.  We need to trumpet the cost of government, the waste of the government unions, the solutions to our current crisis.  We need to fight.

We will have few allies in this debate.  We dont know what the Governor is going to do yet.  The newspapers will not be with us.  The government unions will actively attack us and our positions.  The Democrats in the Legislature will ridicule us, and their hacks in the media will happily trumpet that ridicule.

But the fight is too important.  There are rare times in politics when the American people actually pay attention to what is going on.  Most of the time they are too busy living their lives to worry about their government.  This is one of the times they will listen.  Republicans need to be united behind the concepts of reducing the size of government, and actively opposing any tax or fee increases.  The leadership in Sacramento needs to go around the state and make their case in the 11 media markets throughout the state.  They need to be clear, and understandable.  No green eyeshades talk.  No budgetese (the foreign language of government budget experts).  They need to use their skill as communicators to lay out the case for small government, over and over again, to any who will listen, in a way that those who are listening will understand.

This is no time for gloating.  This is time for working.  There is a harvest to bring in, a harvest of voters who have grown disillusioned with the liberalism that has dominated this state for too long.  We need to work to bring it in.  If we do this right, we could be in 1994, all over again.  This time, we have to do it right.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.