GOP to Propose New Contract With America by Gregory Hilton

A new version of the Contract with America will be released this Fall. The first Contract was an importart part of the GOP victory in 1994 when they captured both the House and Senate. The best part of the Contract was the one that was hardest to pass, the cut in capital gains rates from 28 to 20 percent in 1997. Welfare reform was another essential element and President Bill Clinton made this a key part of his 1996 re-election effort. Unfortunately the Supreme Court threw out the line item veto in 1998. One part of the Contract resulted from an override of a Clinton veto, and three other bill in Contract were enacted into law.
Democrats claim the Contract With America was a failure, but if this is so why did President Clinton sign those measures into law? The GOP never had a veto proof majority. Anything Clinton vetoed could not have been overridden by a Republican Congress.
Clinton not only signed them but he campaigned on them. The signature line of his 1995 State of the Union address was “The era of big government is over,” and he moved sharply to the center after the failures of 1993 and 1994.

Republicans Have Excellent Outlook for 2010 Election by Gregory Hilton

A year has passed and Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat is gone along with the Governor’s mansions in Virginia and New Jersey. The Obama bumper stickers are coming off the cars, and their legislative agenda has stalled. Senators Evan Bayh (IN) and Jim Webb (VA) are pleading for a course correction.
The “My Obama Shop” closes in DC this week, and Jon Stewart is now making fun of the President’s addiction to TelePrompters. His State of the Union address focuses on a spending freeze he once ridiculed. Even the Obamagirl is having second thoughts, and says “the thrill is gone.”
In the generic ballot, Republicans now have a 4 point advantage. According to the Gallup Poll, “Since we began using the generic ballot in 1950 to measure House preferences, it has been rare for Republicans to have an advantage over Democrats.” The last time this happened was 1994 when the GOP also had a 14 point advantage with independent voters.
Michael Barone of the Examiner says: “I have not seen a party’s fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal. The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford’s House seat in a February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican party. Brown’s victory last week looks as if something similar has happened to the Democrats. Many people as me if the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest that they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment.”
The day after the election of Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), the New York Times said “What happened in Massachusetts on Tuesday was no ordinary special election. Scott Brown shocked and arguably humiliated the White House and the Democratic Party establishment. . . States do not come more Democratic than Massachusetts, the only one that voted for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972. . . Most ominously, independent voters seemed to have fled to Mr. Brown in Massachusetts, as they did to Republicans in races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey last November. It is hard not to view that as a repudiation of the way Mr. Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders have run things.”
The same theme was reiterated by Charles Cook of the Cook Political Report: “When a Democratic Senate candidates loses Barney Frank’s district and loses Massachusetts, I think it raises a legitimate question of what is safe for the party. . . The thing a lot of Democratic strategists are concerned about is that some of the districts they will lose are going to be gone for a generation or more. They’re not coming back. They’re ones where Democrats somehow managed to hang after the party fell out of favor. But once they slip away, I’m not sure they’re coming back. . .
“There are nine months to go so certainly things could happen, but the odds of unemployment being below 9% are minimal by the time of the election. We’re probably going to have a year of basically, more or less, 10 percent unemployment, which hasn’t happened since the Great Depression. I mean, in fact, in an even-numbered year there’s only been one month of double-digit unemployment in the post-War era. One month. And now we’re going to have probably about a year.”
Another major change about the 2010 election was noted by political consultant Dick Morris who says, “The Democratic game of electing moderates in conservative districts who then vote to keep liberals in power is over. It has become self-evident to the most gullible of voters that there is no such thing as a moderate Democrat. You are either a Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid clone or you are a Republican.
“That’s the new two-party system.” The days of moderate Democrats “are long gone. Only their memory remains. And voters have only just come to grasp this essential fact. Voters will no longer return moderate Democrats to Congress any more than they select liberal Republicans.”