They Think You're Stupid by Herman Cain Page A

saying "If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword" is truly applicable to the reasons the Democrats have lost their tight grip of power in Washington, D.C. The liberal ideology advocated by the Democrat-controlled Congress, which believed in federal rather than state and local control of issues and policy, has failed the Democratic Party. Their arrogance and thirst for power blinded them to the fact that they could be voted out of office if they offended the electorate's common sense values and desire to place decision-making in the hands of local officials.
    The liberal political ideology, whether exercised in the former Soviet Union, the current socialistic nations of Western Europe, or in the U.S. since the 1960s, mandates that citizens deny the existence of God, or at least advocate and tolerate the separation of God from secular society, and control of all major policy decisions at the federal level. The liberal ideology is propagated by a relatively few intellectual elites who share a mistrust that the general public is able to make their own decisions.
    Liberal leaders fear most what they know in their hearts is true--that left to make their own decisions, voters in a free society will choose individual decision making at the local level, less federal government control of their lives, and let all who will listen know that God plays an important role in their lives. For most of the public, their inspiration comes from heaven, not from Washington, D.C. Voters are not as dumb as Democrats think.
    Even though Democrats have been out of power in Congress for more than ten years, they still don't understand the public. The national Democratic leadership has abandoned any notion of centrist, moderate, or even conservative social and fiscal policies and is now solidly to the left of mainstream America's ideologies and values. In a story about the future of the Democratic Party following the 2004 congressional and presidential elections, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, stated, "We need a fresh reassessment of how we communicate with people. How did a party that has been out of power in Washington, D.C., become tagged with the problems of Washington, D.C.? How did a party that is filled with people with values--and I am a person with values--get tagged as the party without values?" (Adam Nagourney, "Baffled in Loss, Democrats Seek Road Forward," New York Times , 7 November 2004).
    Though she works in Arizona, Governor Napolitano suffers from the same "inside-the-beltway" thinking as her fellow party members in the U.S. House and Senate. The U.S. electorate "tagged her party" with the problems because these are problems that face the entire nation, not just the lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol. The war on terror, the approval of President Bush's judicial nominees, the possibility for federal court rulings in favor of same-sex marriage and partial-birth abortion, and our crumbling economic foundation are issues that affect our entire nation. The electorate chose the political party they thought has the best, common sense solutions to our problems, instead of the party that advocates solutions not supported by the mainstream. Governor Napolitano, you and your fellow party members may have values, but they are not the values shared by the majority of U.S. citizens.
    Former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once famously stated that "All politics is local." In a sense, he was correct. People do not want the federal government to make their decisions for them and control their lives. Since control of the big issues now rests at the federal level, however, the electorate has decided that it supports the party that speaks to their values of individualism and personal responsibility. That party is not the Democrats.
Blacks and Conservative Democrats Have Been Taken for Granted
    Since the early 1990s, Republicans have taken their common sense, conservative message to the former strongholds of the Democratic