On Thursday’s broadcast of Hugh Hewitt’s radio, conservative commentator Mark Steyn proposed his advice to Republican Party leaders, who convened a spring meeting in Los Angeles on Friday.
Steyn, author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” told Hewitt that the Republican Party should take a page out of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s playbook to bolster itself in the eyes of the American people.
“Yeah, I have had the chance to read it, and again, just because I’ve been thinking about Mrs. Thatcher the last few days, I would urge people to look at the 1979 Conservative Party manifesto,” Steyn said. “The big idea in there, it addressed the dire economic straits that Britain was in, but it was also angled very much at the ordinary British citizen. The big idea in there was selling, there were two big ideas. One was privatizing nationalized industries, and the other was selling off council houses, which effectively is nationalized housing stock, to the tenants. And so it was a fantastic combination of addressing the big picture, but also relating it directly to how people, the man in the street lives.”
“And that’s absolutely what the Republicans need right now,” he continued. “They need two big Thatcher-sized ideas to go to the people with. And it’s not a question of getting a better turnout operation. It’s not a question of devoting, you know, having a few more consultants advise you to buy a bit more advertising in this particular Ohio county. That’s a strategy for losers. This kind of stuff, tinkering with the operation, is not enough. I believe that the Republican Party lost in November because it did not articulate fresh ideas related to how the American family lives in the 21st century.”