Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas? - NYT
Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas? Wednesday July 2 nd , 2014 at 9:44 AM 1 Share In May, a handful of prominent legislators gathered at a Beltway think tank, along with some writers and policy experts, to discuss, as the event’s organizers somberly put it, “conservative policy options to further the prosperous society President Lyndon Johnson described in his ‘Great Society’ address 50 years ago.” If this seemed strange, the venue and cast were even stranger: the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of right-leaning ideology, filled with Republicans, speaking in a language most unlike the one we’ve heard in recent years. There was Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, fresh from his easy primary win in Kentucky, who said in his keynote remarks that the time had come for the G.O.P. to stop being the handmaiden to Wall Street and instead attend to the anxieties of the middle class. “Our average voter is not John Galt,” McConnell sa