Geoffrey, all the change challenges you outlined would need be addressed in rehabilitating Bush’s legacy. That’s a feature of my recommendation. A focused goal is a more effective organizer than an unfocused goal. Rehabilitating Bush’s legacy is not a 1 step process. Think about the internal reforms an honest pursuit of the goal would require from those on the Right. What steps would need to be taken in the public campaign to change the public mind. What would be needed to convince the media.

Since Obama and all the Dems have positioned themselves as the anti-Bush, when Bush is transformed from the bad guy into the good guy, then does not the self-defined anti-Bush then automatically become the bad guy? By making Bush a bogeyman effigy standing in for the entire Right, the Left gift-wrapped the opportunity for the Right to discredit the whole Left and empower the whole Right by rehabilitating Bush’s legacy.

In other words, every step needed to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy empowers the entire Right and weakens the entire Left.

Of course, there’s a timeliness factor. This giftwrapped opportunity has a shelf life. Rehabilitating Bush’s legacy 20 years from now would only be an obscure academic exercise that wouldn’t help the Right anymore than a campaign today to rehabilitate Nixon’s legacy.

It has to be done now. If, in the present, the Right can achieve all the changes, including internally, needed to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy, the Right will gain the upperhand.

You’re right that 3 years isn’t a lot of time. It’s prudent to choose tactics, like rehabilitating Bush’s legacy, that will deliver more bang for the buck.

How? You do it by doing it. Get the ground game underway ASAP.

The Republicans and the collective Right who are fluttering their hands in despair at the impossibility of it all haven’t even tried. Not trying guarantees the impossible.

Start by bringing in genuine activists like Horowitz, sit down together and map out a soup-to-nuts comprehensive strategy for the ground game, fill in the details, and then give the plan what it needs to come to life. Adjust enroute when reality hits. And keep going when you hit obstacles. Don’t stop. Go through them, change them, or go around them. As Sun Tzu said, opportunities multiply as they are seized, and it’s true, they do. But they don’t if you don’t act in the first place.

Better get a move on because the hour is late, the clock’s ticking, and the competent opposition isn’t still. But if you wait until the next POTUS election cycle to start the ground grame, then it *will be* too late.

Again, it can be done. I refer again to the inspiration of the recent victory by Ivy League ROTC advocates, especially the ROTC advocacy at Columbia University. In 2005, the Columbia University Senate – as most everyone expected, including the advocates – voted a lopsided 53-10 against ROTC.

In 2011, largely the same CU senate voted 51-17 *for* ROTC reinstatement at Columbia.

(Note: Those of you familiar with the “Spirit of ’68” may recall that the student and faculty controlled CU senate was created in order to protect against ‘reactionary’ changes to the University, such as the return of ROTC, that might be imposed via fiat by the trustees and university officials, which indeed happened at Harvard. It was an article of faith that ROTC return would never be passed by the CU senate gatekeepers. Yet it and they did.)

When the CU ROTC advocates started their campaign, they were told their goal was quixotic. But the movement included student activists (kids! amirite?) who believed they were the chosen ones to defeat the status quo and 30+ years of living history, and remake Columbia. They decided they would play the same activist game that got ROTC booted, except they would play the game to get ROTC back. And they did.

The Republicans and the Right need the same activist attitude and persistence as pro-military Columbia students. They need dedicated activists who’ll play to win the same ground game that’s been defeating them.

I understand commenters on this blog focus on principles and ideology with only occasional passing mention of the ground game. But the center of gravity in the political arena right now is with action, not with ideas. The ideas are fine.

The best way for ideological libertarians and conservatives to grab the initiative is *not* to complain about the presidential candidates fielded by the GOP. Their way to gain power and influence and guide the direction of the GOP and American political landscape is at grassroots. The Tea Party started there and showed good early promise, but then stopped. They need to go back to their original promise, go populist, go beyond their comfort zone, go into the cities, and actively grow and spread. Confront and knock down the Left’s shibboleths. Again and again. Repetition matters. Keep growing and gather momentum. Don’t stop.

As far as minorities, the Right is psyching itself out, just like for 30+ years, CU ROTC supporters psyched themselves out before the winning group of pro-military Columbia student activists arrived on campus and busted the myth.

That said, it’s a process and I understand how that daunting the process looks right now. That’s why I recommend beginning with the first step of reaching for the low hanging fruit of the Asian vote. Asians are called upon to stand in solidarity but are otherwise marginalized in minority advocacy. Their economic status, concerns, values, and recent history of voting Republican tell me that flipping the Asian vote should be a reasonable goal. I expect the rest will be harder, but Asians are the foot in the door. The 1st tangible flip will put everyone on notice that the times, they are a-changing.

He won because a very large segment of America fits into one of three categories: 1) The Brainwashed, 2) The Privileged Victims and their Bureaucratic Minders (every public employee everywhere), 3) Legacy Dems who are too egotistical to admit that they are damaging the country almost to extinction.

They are the enemy. We will never defeat that enemy unless we engage and fight. Never.

Brainwashing is now standard fare. We have one full generation of the brainwashed (from K-University in schools, via leftist control of the media, and such seemingly innocuous things as PSAs on the radio.) Until we call these mindless robots what they are, and truly expose education for the absolute failure that it is, we will not win this battle. We do not even engage. When is the last time you heard conservatives fighting about getting Plato and Western Civ back into the curriculum and all the completely ludicrous smarm that is now in there, like women’s and race studies?

The Leftists (they are Marxists) have thrown out a heritage built over two millenia in lest than 50 years. We are now, collectively, stupid.

So-called “public employees” are our new “priestly class” in the old Medieval Pyramid (see Victor Hanson’s column in PJ Media for explanation). The actual Medievalists at least built an ontologically dense culture. This lot gives us regulations, soda bans, and birth control pills for free. These people are not public servants. They are public tyrants. We should show them no respect at all, ever. Rather we should seek to undermine them at every possible turn – all the time, in every way, with almost zero exceptions until they are put back in their proper place and function.

The Legacy Dems, full of pride, and afraid to admit the truth that is right in front of them are perhaps the ones we can convince, and cajole, and even coerce into coming to their senses. If we could get more of these suckers to take their own side in a fight, we might stand a chance.

In all three cases, conservatives need to grow up and cultivate the virtue of courage above all else. Aristotle said somewhere that it was the one indispensable virtue – such that without it none of the other virtues could truly develop or be effective.

We are fat, lazy, cowards. We care about what rotten despicable people – of the sort noted above – think and say. We should not care one iota what they think and say. We should tell them all the time they are either brainwashed, or ignorant, or malicious. There is no 3rd option for that lot. It is one of those three things.

Never should we as conservatives tell that one essential lie that allows the self-styled Progressives (who are truly regressive and reactive and as ancient as Ball and Moloch) to escape guilt – that, well, “both sides do it”.

I think I hate that lie – told almost exclusively by conservatives – more than even the liberal lies. It’s not true. We love freedom and liberty and prosperity. They hate those things. The “both sides do it” lie is the equivalent of saying that “both sides” were fighting World War II. Yes, one side was Hitler and the other side was the Band of Brothers and their leaders who liberated a half a continent from Statist Dictators of the exact same soul as resides in every liberal there is practically.

The Marxist-Dems do fight. So did Hitler, and Stalin. So do all the bad guys today.

Our choice is whether we defeat evil liberalism the way we defeated evil Naziism (they are cut from the same philosophical cloth) or they defeat us.

There is not a third choice. If we don’t fight these bastards they will have us completely in chains in ten years max.

For charges of extremism I refer you to the Goldwater quote as my defense. he was right.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/beautifully-medieval-california/

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/rand-pauls-filibuster-is-it-grandstanding-or-something-worse.php

Can you believe that headline: Grandstanding or something worse? Like what’s worse? His own agenda?

Isn’t that what Rove and Powerline maybe protecting?

Now for all the people who consider themselves “true conservatives” (whatever that means) I’d say you have every right to try to convince more people to accept your point of view, but don’t get upset if you have to make compromises. We’ve created a system where we’re supposed to make compromises.

The Republican establishment kneecaps Tea Party conservatives whenever they can. Then they insist that we must vote for the RINOs no matter what or else we’re supporting the D’s.

That song-and-dance is getting pretty old.

The left is moving America toward insolvency, through all the machinations we have discussed many times. The left is using today’s barbarians, the covertly militant Muslim, who are even now infiltrating through the gates. And we are being acclimated to the use of drones in the sky, should they be needed by the left at some future date.