Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (18 page)

Despite my experience and background, I obviously had a lot to learn as a freshman legislator in Congress. And I was determined to do the work necessary to represent my district and live up to the ideals and promises I had made during the campaign.

I was also determined not to be satisfied with being in the minority. I thought about something former House Republican leader Bob Michel, the Republican from Illinois, used to say to newly elected GOP members during the Democrats’ forty-year majority reign prior to 1994. Michel was quoted as saying, “Every day I wake up and look in the mirror and say to myself, ‘Today you’re going to be a loser.’ And after you’re here awhile, you’ll start to feel the same way. But don’t let it bother you. You’ll get used to it.”

I wasn’t about to get used to being in the minority. To accomplish what I wanted to accomplish—rein in spending and put Washington back on the side of the people—we needed a majority that shared these beliefs. Building on what I had learned in the 2006 campaign, I knew it was time to go on the offensive.

In 2007, Republicans were in the minority by twenty seats in the House. We were badly outnumbered and our party brand was in shambles. We had lost our reputation both as the party of responsible spending and as the party that keeps America safe. But from my experience in the 2006 election, I knew there were candidates out there who could help us not only change our image but change the direction of the country. I had known Eric and Paul back from when I was a candidate for the 22nd District. I knew they shared my desire to change the direction of the country as well as my eagerness to find the reinforcements we needed. So we got together and began to talk about what we could do. I could tell right away that we were thinking in the same terms about how to begin to rebuild. We had to begin working from the ground up.

The first step was admitting how the party had lost its way. Under Republican leadership in the early 2000s, spending and government got out of control. And as government grew, there were scandals and political compromises. The focus became getting reelected rather than solving problems and addressing pressing issues.

We knew that if we were to start the rebuilding process that would lead to the party’s rebirth we needed to focus on both policy and political strategy. We knew that if we were going to earn back the voters’ trust we would have to do more than just oppose the policies of the Democratic
majority. We had to offer creative and effective solutions of our own. We had to get better at not only crafting solutions to the real problems the country faced but communicating those ideas to voters and proving that we could live up to our ideals.

We had to offer the right policy solutions, and we had to practice smart politics. For me, politics is about people and ideas. Politics is how our democracy works in practice. It’s individual Americans with competing ideas and competing visions. That’s why, along with all the policy briefs, memos, and reports that I take on my weekly flights from California to Washington, I also include the
Almanac of American Politics
, the political junkie’s bible. I enjoy learning about districts all over America and thinking about how we can communicate our ideas more effectively to the voters there.

One of the advantages of being the minority party to the current Democratic majority in Washington was that, since we had so little opportunity to shape legislation, we had time to take stock of what Congress was doing and how well we were serving the American people. Every three months or so, whenever we could find the time—sometimes late in the evening—I got my Republican freshman colleagues together and we shared an hour on the House floor to talk about our quarterly “report card” of Congress. We didn’t have any illusions that the whole nation was watching us, but since the new House Democratic majority had effectively shut us out of the legislative
process, we decided to devote this hour of time to hold the majority’s feet to the fire.

Accountability ought to be a bipartisan exercise. And the Democratic majority’s partisan legislation gave us plenty of ammunition to talk about the lack of accountability in Congress. This included how they junked up war-spending bills with earmarks for things like peanut storage facilities. It included letting the American people know that current members of Congress actually had the audacity to ask for taxpayer money to fund centers named after themselves—their own personal “Monuments to Me” (in one case, it was an earmark, exposed by my good friend Rep. John Campbell from California, that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) requested for a City College of New York library and conference room—named after him, of course). And it included showing how much House Democrats continued to increase deficit spending, hurting our economy and competitiveness.

The more we did these report cards, and the more I looked at the failing state of our economy, the more I was reminded of a book I frequently recommend:
Good to Great
by Jim Collins. When I read the different stories in this book, my mind always settles at the same question: Why do some leaders settle for mediocrity, while others continue to push the envelope? When I look at an unemployment rate that has meant hardship to millions of American families and a failed “stimulus” that did not create the jobs promised, and then I listen to the president and the Democratic
House leadership blame others by talking about how they inherited this economy, I see American leaders settling for mediocrity. At what point did we decide to tolerate joblessness, to tolerate mediocre results when government spends hundreds of billions of dollars it doesn’t have? We need to constantly look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether we, as representatives and public servants, have met the expectations of the American people, and then whether we could have done more.

In any case, these “report card” sessions also gave us the opportunity to discuss our conservative principles, and how they could be applied to a set of solutions to combat the Democrats’ high-spending earmark culture. Since we had never been part of the previous Republican majority, we knew better than most how badly our party needed to remake itself as the party of reform again. Republicans had been part of the problem and we were determined to remake our party as part of the solution.

Adding urgency to our effort was the beginning of the country’s descent into economic crisis in 2007. Although the economy was still growing for most of the year, home values were plummeting, robbing Americans of the value of their greatest asset. More and more families fell behind on their mortgages and began to default. And the falling housing values began to have an effect on the credit markets. Something bad was heading our way.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Young Guns
 
 

As I traveled around the country in 2007, some Republican candidates were saying to me that the party had lost so much trust with the people that they didn’t want the party leadership coming to their districts to campaign for them. They were interested, however, in having rising Republican leaders like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan come to their districts. This new generation of pro-market, small government leaders filled such a need that in October Fred Barnes of
The Weekly Standard
profiled us and christened us the “young guns.”

One evening that same month, I was meeting with my good friend John Gard, former Wisconsin assembly speaker and one of the best candidates I had met in 2006. We were talking about him running again and he mentioned he had seen the article. It would be helpful, he said, if one of us
could visit his district and campaign for him. That got me thinking, and I approached Eric and Paul about the idea of traveling together, as “Young Guns,” to visit Republican candidates interested in a new approach for the party. That way, their neighbors and communities could see that we were all working hard to reconnect our party with the American people.

As weeks and months went by, what began as an informal way to support like-minded candidates became a more formal structure. Once we had studied the candidate and given him or her our support to become a Young Gun, we wanted to make sure we provided a long-term relationship with that candidate. That meant we committed to providing financial support through our campaign committees, visiting the candidates in their districts, but also offering mentoring sessions on what the Democrats were doing in Washington. In order to protect vulnerable Democratic members from tough votes, the House Democratic leadership would often attempt to shield their votes with procedural tricks. We realized that our candidates often wondered what these House procedures meant, so we gave them the inside scoop.

We also knew that we weren’t the only current House Republicans eager to change our party, change Washington, and change the course of America. So we began approaching our colleagues with a simple pitch: are we willing to help ourselves by being proactive and going on offense to change this House? I took the fact that dozens
and dozens of our House Republican colleagues joined our Young Guns effort as one of many signs that our party had shifted. Members of Congress balance a lot of different responsibilities that eat up their schedules and energy, so when so many agreed to undertake this effort voluntarily to help mentor and financially support the next generation of would-be House Republican members, I knew that Eric, Paul, and I had found a reservoir of untapped energy. The growing frustration that the country was moving in the wrong direction had created a solidarity of purpose among House Republicans to work harder to promote and protect our vision of what America could be.

Still, by the time it was over, the 2008 election proved that the voters were not done punishing the Republican Party. On Election Day, the Democrats increased their majority in the House by twenty-one seats. In the Senate, they had gained eight seats. To top it off, Barack Obama became president to give his party firm and unified control of Washington.

Nonetheless, in that hostile political environment, the growing Young Guns organization had some significant successes. With the economy now officially in recession and Washington busy bailing out corporations while Americans
lost their jobs and their homes, our message was beginning to take hold. We weren’t just another political money machine, picking the candidates with the deepest pockets and the best name identification. We supported candidates who were focused on fiscal responsibility, limited government and accountability. We were also interested in
not
repeating the mistakes of the previous Republican majority. We concentrated on bringing new perspectives and fresh ideas to Washington.

In the end, of the five Democratic incumbents that lost their seats in 2008, four of them were beaten by Young Guns challengers, and three Young Guns candidates also won races in open seats. This obviously wasn’t enough to reverse the fortunes of the GOP, but each victory was important and gave us something to build on.

More importantly, these victories weren’t just notches on our party’s belt. Each of our successful candidates were solid, limited-government, pro-market conservatives.