Q: Is there a crisis in the conservative movement?

By Ramesh Ponnuru | February 2, 2012 | +

Brooks Kraft / Corbis for TIME

At the opening of the Obama Administration, many observers — some of them in TIME magazine — were willing to give the last rites to conservatism. The patient has made a speedy recovery. It is entirely possible that within a year, control of the White House, Senate and House will belong to people who call themselves conservative and were elected by conservatives.

Republicans have not had to move left to return to health. Over the past two years, all of the Republican presidential candidates and almost all of the party’s members of the House and Senate have gone on record in favor of slowing the growth of entitlements. Like the public at large, Republicans have moved rightward on abortion; organized opposition to the pro-life movement inside the party is now practically nonexistent. If the presidential primary is nastily personal, it is mostly because the major candidates disagree on so little of substance.

At the same time conservatism has been enjoying some political success, it has been reconnecting to its roots. What American conservatives, at our best, aim to conserve is our political inheritance from the Founders. The past few years have seen a heartening revival of popular interest in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as documents that should guide our political life generally and not just the deliberations of judges.

But the conservative defense of the country’s founding principles is incomplete so long as it fails to apply them to the pressing challenges of our day: to show, rather than just say, that those principles amount to timeless wisdom. Conservatives have barely begun to outline a plausible alternative to Obamacare. Our economic ideas too often seem like well-developed answers to the problems of 1981. We have failed, and in some ways have hardly tried, to persuade black, Hispanic and Asian citizens that our philosophy promotes the interests of the whole nation. And none of us is quite sure what to do about the intolerable fact that in our society, familial stability seems increasingly to be becoming a luxury good.

Conservatives may be able to defeat Obama without meeting these challenges, but we will not be able to achieve the more profound objectives to which that defeat is only a means.

Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review and a columnist for Bloomberg View. The views expressed are solely his own.

(MORE: The Conservative Identity Crisis)

Related Topics: conservative, elections, politics

Q: What are the three most important action items for the next President?

By Ken Blackwell | February 2, 2012 | +

Tom Williams / Roll Call / Getty Images

The first thing the next President must do is return America to sustainable economic prosperity. This begins with four actions: two to balance revenue with spending and two to unleash America’s potential. He should initiate a national campaign for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, capping federal spending at 18% of GDP. Second, he should call for fundamental tax reform via a flat tax with generous exemptions for adults and children in the home and only two to three deductions. Third, on his first day, he should sign dozens of Executive Orders repealing unhelpful regulations imposed during the past four years, from carbon emissions to health care to finance. And fourth, he should launch a policy for national energy independence, beginning on his first day by approving the Keystone pipeline and opening certain federal lands to responsible oil and gas development and proposing legislation for an “all of the above” approach, with clean coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewable energy.

The second thing the President must do is tackle the greatest short-term threat to national security by addressing the Middle East. He must begin a comprehensive review of the multilayered, interrelated issues that make the Middle East a Gordian knot. The three essential elements of any strategy must be:

1) that a nuclear-armed Iran will not be allowed under any circumstances;

2) that America resolutely stands by and for a fully defensible Israel;

3) the development of a proactive and coherent policy regarding the Arab Spring.

The third thing the President must do is nominate the right people to the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. On his first day, he must start vetting candidates for every current vacancy on the 13 federal appellate courts and immediately begin developing a short list of potential nominees to the Supreme Court. The President must make unmistakably clear that seeing these nominees confirmed is a nonnegotiable priority and that the growing obstructionism of the past quarter-century — and especially the past decade — must end. The courts concern all areas of national policy, beyond being of paramount importance for the social issues of abortion, marriage, religious liberty and gun rights. The courts play an increasingly central role in economic and security issues. He must declare originalism to be the official approach to interpreting the Constitution in accordance with the original meaning of its text and nominate judges who will faithful apply originalism on the bench.

Blackwell is a visiting professor at the Liberty University School of Law and a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. The views expressed are solely his own.

(MORE: The Conservative Identity Crisis)

Related Topics: conservative, elections, politics