Ryan Streeter
Obama’s been using the word “compassion” lately to frame the 2012 election, according to the Post’s Chris Cillizza.
Listening to the President, “compassion” is predictable code for government spending on social welfare, perhaps with some tax hikes on the rich thrown in for good measure.
Paul Ryan wrote last week in the Washington Post that his budget is “compassionate and optimistic” because of it would spare Americans from the higher taxes and health care rationing that result from the status quo under Obama.
It's interesting that our political leaders are using a word that so many have considered discredited during the George W. Bush years.
As Mark Rodgers points out today, compassionate conservatism faltered, and its resulting unpopularity has kept conservatives from thinking creatively about the relationship between poverty and opportunity. Yet, for millions of Americans, nothing is more important than a little bit of concrete hope and opportunity right now.
The Left has become the movement of the status quo, stasis, unoriginality. Conservatives, on the other hand, have put forward a host of new ideas on health care, entitlements, spending, and education. It's time to extend this spate of originality to opportunity once again.
The Clapham Group, which Mark founded, is organizing an occasional series of posts on opportunity-based conservative solutions to poverty.
Why is this important?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Conservatives have a strong position on the first two, as recent debates over Planned Parenthood and the continuing influence of the Tea Party have demonstrated. But conservatives should also be the protectors of the third. In America happiness is opportunity, ownership, forward motion. The Left has nothing other than the status quo and unaffordable security to offer people in need. Happiness in the near term will mean incremental progress in the standard of living for struggling families. This, in turn, will come through new employment opportunity and lowering the cost burden of daily life.
The safety net needs repairing, and conservatives are the only ones with any fresh ideas on this front. Whether we realize it or not, we have entered a new phase in American public life in which we have begun to radically reconsider what a safety net is and should be. As the debate over spending has shown us, our expansive entitlement programs are eating away at all other federal spending. Traditional safety net programs are being forced to get smaller, though not necessarily better. Conservative advocacy for means-testing and slowing the growth of entitlements is also an exercise in re-thinking how the safety net in America should be structured. Democrats have no ideas on this front. They want more of the same.
The future of opportunity. Upward mobility is the key to American prosperity from one generation to the next. Yet the lower and middle classes in America face tremendous obstacles to enjoying a future that’s better than what their parents enjoyed. A big reason for this can be found in the fact that the unemployment rate for less-educated Americans is so much higher than it is for the educated. The Left has no plan on this front other than more government support to help people weather economic uncertainty. Republicans are already the party of education reform. They need to build on this and become the party of 21st century workforce preparation. This means having a higher education plan of action.
More practically at the political level, a focus on opportunity for low-income Americans will appeal to younger and non-traditional voters. The party that figures out what opportunity means for those left behind in the 21st century (which is including growing numbers of people in their 20s who have gone to college) will be strong.
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