Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works Read Online Free PDF

poor than their liberal neighbors.
    Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, has studied how America’s giving breaks down by political ideology and other factors, and he finds that conservatives, especially religious conservatives, are actually the most generous with their own money. Liberals are terribly generous, too—with other people’s money. To be fair, religious liberals (those who attend church once a week or more) are also quite generous, but there aren’t many of them. 6
    Compare the charitable giving of Mitt Romney, a well-to-do empty nester, to the other wealthy empty nester on the national ticket, Joe Biden. Romney gave 29 percent of his money to charity in the past few years, whereas Joe Biden gave only 0.5 percent. 7 But Romney is the uncaring, wealthy Scrooge, and Biden the common, compassionate Bob Cratchit simply because Biden wants to use the force of the government to take even more money away from high earners and give it to those he chooses. The liberal media promote this as caring, but it’s not. It is not about giving and helping, it is about power, and it doesn’t reflect the true spirit of America.
    If conservatives are so generous, why does the GOP have the reputation as the party of Scrooge? It might be becausewe spend so much time talking to and about the “job creator” and business owner. Economic growth and the role of the job creator should continue to be at the heart of our economic policy, but we need to think about, listen to, and talk about the jobholder as well. If conservatives got the vote of every job creator in the country, we’d still lose. We must earn a large portion of the votes of jobholders, because there are far more of them.
    Two incidents from the 2012 campaign illustrate this truth. When President Obama told an audience of business owners, “You didn’t build that,” he appeared to denigrate the role of entrepreneurship in the economy, and Republicans thought he had made a disastrous misstep. We even made it the theme of our national convention. The president’s statement was revealing and galling, but it didn’t matter. What percentage of Americans have built a business? The disastrous misstep of the campaign turned out to be Governor Romney’s surreptitiously recorded comment about the “47 percent” of the population that collects payments from the government. It’s basic math that you can’t insult half of the voters and expect to win.

    The Republican Party hasn’t always had this problem with those who are trying to rise in America. We have an impressive history of speaking for all Americans, and we can reach them again. From its birth, our party was on the side of the struggling, for it was formed to combat slavery. The 1856 platformpledged to abolish the barbarism of slavery. Under the leadership of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, it was. When Democrats attempted to derail the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans helped push it through with the support of over 80 percent of their members. 8
    The party that now supposedly wages a “war on women” led the fight for women’s right to vote. The first vote in Congress on women’s suffrage occurred in 1878 on a constitutional amendment offered by a Republican, A. A. Sargent. A Democratic majority defeated it. It would be over thirty years before another vote was taken, and it was not until after the Republican landslide of 1918 that the Nineteenth Amendment, sponsored by another Republican, was taken up and passed. 9
    One of the greatest champions of the working man ever to occupy the White House was the “trust buster” Theodore Roosevelt, who took on corporate monopolies and pushed for landmark reforms of working conditions.
    In recent years, Republicans have led the way on welfare reform, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and educational initiatives like charter schools and vouchers (opportunities that Democrats have fought ferociously to deny to