How Mike Lee Is Changing The Republican Party

Former-President Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has a fine op-ed in today's Washington Post, heaping praise on Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Gerson writes:

For those who expect and fear an irrepressible conflict between the tea party and the Republican establishment, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is a hopeful anomaly. Should this anomaly become a trend, the GOP’s future would be considerably brighter.

Few have done more to burn ideological bridges within the GOP. Yet no one from the tea party side is now doing more to construct them....

Lee has been proselytizing for a “comprehensive anti-poverty, upward-mobility agenda” — making him one of the few Republican politicians talking in any sustained way about stalled economic mobility, stagnant middle-class wages and economic inequality. To this, Lee has added a dollop of populist “anti- cronyism,” proposing to simplify the tax code and rein in the big banks. Setting aside the policy details, Lee makes strikingly sane observations about the Republican future....

The subtext here is not a challenge to establishment Republicanism, which would offer no ideological objection to the role of government that Lee described. The real contrast is with libertarianism, particularly of the Rand Paul variety. And Lee has come close to making his criticism explicit. “Freedom means ‘we’re all in this together,’?” he said. “The conservative vision for America is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie: a nation of ‘plain, ordinary kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too.’?”

This is a good, general prescription for Republican recovery: More Frank Capra. Less Ayn Rand.

Via: Townhall
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