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Bill: Republicans are reflecting and planning for the future today.
Megyn: The GOP is already looking at what went wrong both in the race for the White House and in the battle for Congress. Who will be the new face now of the Republican party? What is the strategy for getting back into the majority? Beginning the quest for answers this morning. Congressman Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, Chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, joins us by telephone. Good morning. Obviously, it was not a good night for folks on your side of the aisle. What is the strategy? I know meetings are beginning as early as today to look forward to 2010 to figure out how you can get back into the majority or at least improve your numbers. What are your feelings?
Rep. McCotter: We have hit rock bottom which in many ways means there' s a temptation to look backwards and to look for new faces. What we really have to do is look forward and use our minds. God created us as sentient beings. The Republican party is now free, as Lincoln once said “Another time of national crisis to think anew and act anew.” We should seize this moment. The election is over. We look forward to working with the incoming Democrats where we can, but we have to reaffirm our enduring principles and our concept that America, even in the Age of Globalization, is and can and should remain the greatest nation on earth and take it from there.
Megyn: One of the biggest problems people have with Congress, and there have been incredibly low approval ratings getting down to the single digits almost, is the spending, the out-of- control spending we have seen from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Traditionally, that has been a Democratic problem, the Democrats were known as spenders; the Republicans not so much. And as John McCain said many times in this election, he said, “We came to Washington to change it, and it changed us.” Do the Republicans go back to that, back to a Reaganesque curtailment of spending?
Rep. McCotter: We have to get back to our enduring principles. One of the things that happened in the transformational time of globalization is the Republican party failed to channel constructive change across the board, not merely in materialist terms, but in terms of traditionalism, preserving tradition, and advancing liberty. When you look at spending, that is a symptom of the deeper dysfunction that we had lost the ability to discern the times in which we live and communicate a vision to the American people. We thought that spending was simply going to be able to continue a Republican majority that had lost its purpose and the American people fundamentally disagreed with that.
Megyn: Let me press you on this, Congressman. It sounds nice and you're very eloquent, but it sounds like just talking points. So the message going forward is going to be: Resume our message of liberty? We have kind of had that.
Rep. McCotter: Megyn, dude, Megyn you’ve had four fundamental transformational challenges. One of them is globalization itself. People feel chaos when Senator Obama talked about deregulation, which I disagreed with, he talked about the fact that chaos is being created because the Republican party was not helping to channel that into empowering people, and that’s one of them. The second one is the war against an evil enemy. We have the problem with the rise of Communist China. We have the problem with moral relativism which is an attack on traditional truths of the country. We have these four paradigms in which to go. These are not talking points. Reducing spending is a talking point. If you want to talk about the larger issues that are affecting people, when you look at focus groups and when you talk to people, they know something big is going on. The Republican party, when you talk about the problem with earmarks or spending, did not address the larger problems occurring in people' s lives, did not empower them to deal with them themselves, and they turned to the party of government.