The GOP strategy for next year

My reflexes are a bit slow on this one.

On Monday night, Michael Medved spent a portion of his radio program talking about ways the GOP might improve its election prospects. He mentioned things like encouraging marriage because married folks tended to vote for McCain (52 percent, if I remember correctly).

I hope he's kidding, since Medved usually provides excellent arguments.

There's pretty much one way to win elections. Convince people that your party will do the sorts of things they want done in office. Now, that might appear to feed into Medved's argument, since the GOP has a somewhat friendlier view of traditional marriage (the type that dominates the married demographic), but support from that demographic is fluid. Suppose, for example, that three percent of the U.S. population is homosexual, homosexual marriages are legally recognized and all three percent get married. Abracadabra, the demographic shifts.

It isn't marriage per se that results in an electoral edge for the GOP among marrieds. It is the ideology more likely associated with marriage, at least for now.

So, the GOP strategy is simple to identify and challenging to implement: Identify the (conservative) actions that our center-right nation is after and then communicate that to the electorate. Hand in hand with that, educate people as to why voting themselves into the pockets of the rich is ultimately a bad idea. The latter is a traditional key appeal of the Democratic Party, and the work of educating people will be difficult. Our educational system and our entertainment industry tend to reinforce socialistic thinking. Both are huge influences.