OK, you've captured the nomination as the Republican candidate for president, for all practical purposes. For surprisingly many people including Republicans, you didn't appear to be the first choice. Either those who sat out the race, like Christie, Daniels, Huckabee, Rubio; or those who ran and fell by the way , like Pawlenty, Perry, Bachmann, didn't survive. And now it's you.
Time to get to work, Mitt. You cannot blow this. This is too important an election. As O says, there will be a clear choice: more government, more free stuff, stagnant growth, wealth transfers, whistling past the graveyard on serious financial issues, or: a slowing of government growth, a gradual return of decision-making that affects our daily lives to elected officials, and not to unaccountable bureaucrats who promulgate the real rules of Obamacare, and economic growth spawned by freeing entrepreneurs to create, motivated at least partly by their unquenchable desire to make lots of money.
Bring an end to class warfare, to the divisiveness that O now sows on a daily basis. He has become a divider, not a uniter, and he will tear this country apart to get re-elected. There's nothing wrong with wealth.
Return responsibility for social welfare issues to the states. Local solutions for local problems. Someone has to be sensitive to the ebb and flow of revenue and cost, of limits. Impose serious penalties for failing to act responsibly as elected legislators, like not passing a budget in over 1,000 days. Promote responsible competition in education. Limit collective bargaining by public employee unions.
Unlike private enterprises that are unionized, like the one I admittedly and gratefully benefited from for three decades, and continue to benefit from, there is no competition in government to act as a check to the raison d'etre of a union: to improve benefits for its members. Absent the auto bailouts, an issue with which I still struggle, the price for not being competitive on cost and quality is decline and perhaps extinction. Everybody associated with the private enterprise gets the message: clean up your act, rewrite those labor contracts, control your costs.
But that dynamic is missing in public enterprises like schools and governments. A relationship operates between public employees, unions and politicians wherein everyone wins except taxpayers. We have begun to see the limits of this habit, and, sadly, the taxpayers' willingness to pay more seems to have reached a limit.
Mitt, get to work on how you wrest the political initiative from the commander-in-chief. He is a smart man, surrounded by smart people. But he and they are wrong, and especially wrong for our country. Spend two hours each day with your staff preparing for the day's salvo, and use generous dollops of pointed humor. Go on the attack early and often. Newt Gingrich might not be electable, but his eloquence and his commitment help to provide broad direction on the correct strategy to defeat Obama in November.
O cannot run on his record. Don't fall for the distractions that will be thrown into your path each day by O's team. Understand just how clever, unprincipled and ambitious campaign adviser David Axelrod is.
Pound O on national security, his shameful record on lack of U.S. support for Israel, his obeisance to dictators, his appointments during congressional recesses in clear violation of the law. Obama's real agenda for a second term can only be imagined, but given another four-year opportunity for him to make sweeping and possibly irreversible changes that will create an America of which his wife Michelle can at last be proud, it will bankrupt us, will divide us as a nation, and will threaten our very security as a freedom-loving beacon to the rest of the world.
America is exceptional, and it should continue that way, not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the world. Yes, we've got problems; we'll work them out, in a context of discussion, disagreement and occasionally bitter rancor, but we will work them out as Americans, not as supplicants of an increasingly imperial federal government.
Time to get to work, Mitt. Godspeed.
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