NH INSIDER

A New Hampshire primary race will tell a lot about whether Republican voters have forgiven GOP members of Congress who rammed through spendthrift budgets during the better part of the last decade. Charlie Bass, who served 12 years in the House, was there during the wild spending years and often supported the largesse. Now Mr. Bass, who lost his seat in 2006, is trying to get it back -- but first he must get past conservative businesswoman, mom and radio host Jennifer Horn in the Sept. 14 GOP primary.

Conservative New Hampshire voters and Tea Party activists are calling the race a "battle for the soul of the Republican party." Former Republican Congressman Chuck Douglass says: "Look, we all like Charlie, but the problem is he was there during the Bush era, supported the budgets, and didn't vote to cut them." The Bass record would be a "burden in November" on any Republican running in the current anti-big government environment, Mr. Douglass says.

Mr. Bass has also infuriated Tea Party types in other ways. When elected in 1994, he promised to serve only six terms, but tried to break the pledge when he ran again and lost in 2006. He also has supported the left's global warming agenda, causing the National Review to dub him a "cap and trade Republican."

The race promises to bring ideologically opposite ends of the Republican Party into a tug of war. Mr. Bass served as chairman of the left-leaning Main Street Partnership, which supports liberal Republicans for House and Senate. Meanwhile, conservative groups like the Family Research Council have endorsed Ms. Horn and she's hotly  pursuing the Club for Growth endorsement. In an interview, Ms. Horn says she expects to have "almost all the conservatives and Tea Party activists in my camp." Mr. Bass, she says, represents "many of the things that went wrong with Republicans in the last eight years."

The seat is open because Democrat Paul Hodes is running for the Senate. It's also a seat Republicans have to win if they are to take back the House in November. Keep an eye on this race. It's an early indicator of whether the GOP grassroots can oust party heavyweights and whether the party is ready to turn aside the Republican old guard for a new generation of conservative leaders.

-- Stephen Moore

SPEAKER SYTEK, MAYOR LOZEAU AND VESTA ROY FELLOWS TO BE HONORED

Concord, NH – March 4, 2010 – The Vesta Roy Series for Excellence in Public Service will host a reception this month honoring two New Hampshire Republican women who excel in the public service arena and several others who are making plans to follow their lead.   The event will be held on Thursday, March 18, 2010 from 5:00 pm until 6:30 pm at The Draft Restaurant, 67 South Main Street in Concord.  

Former NH Speaker of the House, Donna Sytek, is the top honoree, with a keynote address to be delivered by Nashua Mayor Donnalee Lozeau.  The event is aptly named the “March to November” and is intended as a launch for the State Representative campaigns of several current and former fellows of the Vesta Roy program. 

 “We are thrilled to host this event highlighting the success of these accomplished and well respected Republican women,” said Pam Kocher, Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Vesta Roy program.   “Our party is on the rise here in New Hampshire and we look forward to supporting all of our candidates in their campaigns this fall,” Kocher added. 

The Vesta Roy Series is a political leadership training program for Republican women who have an interest in politics and public service but have not yet held state elective office.  The program provides a series of informational and skills-building sessions to give participants tools and training to build their confidence and turn interest into activism.

Among the fellows named as “Rising Stars” and who plan a run for the House this year are Sue Polidura, Portsmouth; Anne Copp, Danbury; Regina Birdsell, Hampstead; Laura Jones, Rochester and Joanne Ward, Stratham.  

The event is sponsored by the Sykas Law Office of Dover and the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women.  Admission to the event is $10 per person and confirmation of attendance is requested by contacting Leann Moccia by email at leannmoccia@myfairpoint.net.  For additional information about the Vesta Roy Series, visit the program’s website at www.vestaroyseries.com .

Republicans Face a Choice:  If the recent events in Virginia are any idicator, it looks like the old ways of the GOP might be far from dead.

GOP Should Learn From Ron Paul's CPAC Victory:  In the days following Texas Rep. Ron Paul's decisive win over former governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll, left-leaning networks, predictably, treated the event as further proof that tea party activists are taking over the Republican Party. That was to be expected. Liberal smear tactics, particularly those which rely on outright lies, are never justified; however, their derisive reaction to the poll should be interpreted as a nerve struck. A televised view of a crowd of young, enthused conservatives is bound to disturb the opposition.

Global Warming: Having It Both Ways:  As people around the world watched the Winter Olympics this week, they were treated not only to images of the world's greatest Winter athletes performing superbly in the sports at which they excel but they were also given a behind-the-scenes window into the frustrations dealt with by the games' Canadian hosts.

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Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog   

In 1994, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, the    GO P    presented a list of reforms called the Contract with America. A signed pledge committing the party to a series of specific actions, the contract was the leading wedge of an effort to bring the party to power in Congress for the first time in 40 years. 

It was successful beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, bringing the GOP to national parity with theDemocrats for the first time in the lives of most of the Republicans on the ballot that year.

Today, the GOP is more intellectually fractured, with old guard Republicans, Gingrich-era limited government conservatives, Tea Party activists, libertarians aligned with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and others engaged in a competition to see which ideas will form the basis for what increasingly looks like a new Republican congressional majority. 

For some, the competition on the field of ideas is causing considerable heartburn. For others, like Michigan GOP Rep. Thad McCotter, a member of the House Republican leadership, this competition is an indication that the center-right coalition is healthy, vibrant and readying itself for the responsibility and challenges of governing the nation once again.

An unconventional conservative, McCotter is both classically educated--he considers himself a devotee of legendary conservative scholar Russell Kirk--and plays lead guitar in a band called "The Second Amendments," which earned him the nickname "That rock and roll dude" from former President George W. Bush. These traits, seemingly in contradiction, actually mix well together in ways that produce ideas that are as compelling as they are culturally relevant.

The idea that the party needs to coalesce completely around a single set of specific policy proposals, McCotter says, "is antithetical to conservativism." He has developed his own series of ideas, which he markets in a pamphlet called "We the People, Wide Awake" but, he admits, he is one voice among many.

"Politics is the art of the possible," McCotter says, repeating a maxim that, while not original to him, is perhaps the kind of realization that conservative activists of all stripes must come to accept as they come together in the kind of informal coalition necessary to reproduce the election victories of 1984 and 1994, when the GOP demonstrated it could win elections at all levels of government and in all parts of the country.

McCotter wants to have lots of ideas on the table. "The danger of one manifesto," he told me, "is that the movement is organic. Different people will be attracted to different things." To him, conservatives now have a much wider array of microphones with which they can communicate directly with the American electorate and, he argues, they should take full advantage of them. He himself uses social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to get his message out. He even has his own channel on You Tube, where his recent speech to CPAC already has more than 2,000 hits--which is not bad for a policy-oriented speech from a Michigan congressman who, while not quite obscure, also isn't a regular on the Sunday morning chat shows.

Atop the list of themes that define what differentiates conservatives and Republicans from liberals and Democrats, McCotter said in his CPAC speech, is the idea that "America's ultimate strength and salvation remains her free people," McCotter told CPAC. "We need to remember this now and affirm it more than ever because we stand in a crucible of liberty where we must define liberty for generations to come."

"We are experiencing what the left did under the last Republican majority," McCotter told CPAC. "The left believed under President Bush, a Republican Senate and a Republican House, that all their ideological designs for America would be thwarted. They were very anxious, they were very angry and they engaged in direct political action. Because of our own missteps we lost those majorities."

The pathway back to majority, he argues, is to build a broad coalition, organized around core themes. "If we don't know where we've been, if we don't know where we are, if we don't know where we're going, any road will take us there," he says. But that doesn't mean that the Republican Party needs to bring all the various elements of the anti-big government coalition together under one banner. "I don't know how you could corral that kind of energy," he says specifically of the Tea Party activists who, today, command so much attention, "or that you'd even want to try." 

Anne E. Tyrrell

Communications Director

Office of U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter (MI-11)

We have a round-up posted with all sorts of information on today's Health Care Summit as well as a live feed of what is going on. Be sure to check it out! Here are today's top stories on NetRight Nation and other relevant information:

Senate Judiciary Committee Should Delay DOJ Nominee Shawn Johnsen:  Americans for Limited Government (ALG) President Bill Wilson today in a letter urged members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to delay the confirmation of a controversial nomination to the Justice Department by Barack Obama until it can be confirmed whether the nominee violated the law.

Republican's Divided:  At a time when the political winds should be at their back the Republican Party may be ill-poised to make the electoral gains conventional wisdom and history dictate they should at this fall's midterm elections.

The GOP: A Time For Truth:  In his latest generic ballot question, Rasmussen Reports show Republicans holding a substantial 44 to 35 percent lead over Democrats for the 2010 Congressional elections. In fact, the poll shows that Republicans have led consistently since June 28th, 2009, just two days after the House passed its onerous legislation capping carbon emissions and taxing energy consumption.

Evan Bayh Described As Centrists Despite Health Care Stance:  When Evan Bayh announced that he would not seek another term as U.S. Senator from Indiana, The New York Times was quick to fix the centrist label on him. Although his state leans Republican, Bayh was a consistent winner, popular among constituents, well-liked across party lines and frequently eyed as a candidate for national office.

The Constitution, The Declaration, And Me:  Last Wednesday, I flew out to Washington DC to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But this trip was rendered eminently worthwhile for me well before the speeches and panel sessions began the next day.

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