'Young Guns' offer GOP blueprint

The GOP’s “Young Guns” are long on platitudes and personality but short on policy details in a new book scheduled for publication just weeks before a mid-term election that could propel them into power.

Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, who fancy themselves the vanguard of a modern Republican Party dedicated to renewing the ideals of the Grand Old Party, deliver a reader-friendly paean to limited government and an attack on liberalism.

It’s an easy read, and that’s no doubt how it’s intended. But for anyone seeking a fresh idea for the next Republican Party platform, skip it.

In stark contrast to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” the one-page manifesto that accompanied the 1994 Republican takeover of the House, “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders” is a 224-page marketing tool for the men who hope to run the House. It critiques the problems of the White House and Congressional Democratic governance, while offering limited prescriptions for change.

POLITICO obtained an advance copy of the book, which is slated to be released Sept. 14 by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster. It is meant to promote the way a new generation of Republicans see their nation, drawing sharp contrasts both with Republicans of yesteryear and today’s Democrats.

They lambaste both parties, discrediting the GOP’s leadership — of which Cantor has been a member for nearly all of his career — and wild spending ways. They expose private conversations they had with President Barack Obama, accusing him of dismissing Republican ideas writ large because of large majorities in Congress.

Cantor accuses Democrats of focusing on America’s “flaws rather than its greatness” and consistently craving “the approval of … international elites.”

They mention House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) just three times – Cantor noted that they were at a White House meeting together; McCarthy recalls that Boehner appointed him to chair the Republican Platform Committee and run the agenda project.

House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a favorite of some conservatives, is shut out of the book.

The next presidential election, 2012, is mentioned just once – by Ryan, who many think could have his eye on the White House.

There’s a healthy dose of expectation control. Cantor says Republicans need to “reconnect and inspire people” and make clear what it is they will do, but they caution it won’t be a one- or two-year process.

The book is split into thirds, with each man writing three chapters of about 50 pages.

Although the three describe the roots of their political comradeship, they have moved to different roles among House Republicans: Cantor is the party leader, McCarthy is the strategist, and Ryan is the policy wonk. But those different roles can create different perspectives, especially as they move toward the House majority.

The forward, written by Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard’s executive editor, postulates that Cantor will become speaker or majority leader the next time Republicans take Congress.

THE LEADER

Cantor, of Richmond, Va., touches on everything from the stimulus to his Jewish heritage. He notes that when he prays on Saturday – the Jewish Sabbath – he does so with a Southern accent.

The Republican Party, Cantor writes, is the “party of Lincoln and Reagan; it’s the party of Rubio, Jindal, and Daniels,” clearly leaving out Boehner, RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Republicans, Cantor bemoans, “fell short of our principles in the past.”

“The fact is, we had our chance, and we blew it,” Cantor says. They’ll gain back the country’s trust by “listening to the American people.”

He says he lost faith in his party in 2005, when Parade magazine wrote a story about the much-maligned Bridge to Nowhere, a project championed by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) to connect two lightly inhabited areas in his state.

Cantor is particularly biting in talking about Obama. He accuses the president of saying “elections have consequences…and Eric, I won” when discussing tax policy. Cantor also says Obama once told Republican leaders to “stop listening to Rush Limbaugh…and do what’s right for the people.”

In discussing the current congressional leadership, Cantor bemoans their length of service – singling out California’s Henry Waxman and New York’s Charles Rangel.

“The people who are making the nation’s energy and tax policy for America’s small business haven’t been in the private sector for over three decades. Even if they were inclined to take the private sector’s perspective, they wouldn’t be able to remember what it is.”

The Obama administration, Cantor says, sent America’s relationship with Israel “to a new low,” but he does not lay out what his policy preference is for Middle East peace.

THE STRATEGIST

As the political strategist in the group, McCarthy walks a thin line between his apolitical upbringing in a working-class Democratic family in Bakersfield, Calif., and his extended political apprenticeship.

He worked 15 years with Rep. Bill Thomas — who eventually became House Ways and Means Committee chairman — and then served as Minority Leader in the California State Assembly before he was easily elected to fill Thomas’ open seat in 2006.

In Sacramento, he said, “I learned the importance of engaging and working across the aisle whenever possible while still fighting for the principles I believe in.” But that’s probably not a lesson that Thomas taught him.

Even before he was elected to the House, McCarthy showed signs of leadership within his tiny class of 13 freshman Republicans. He reached out to them and to other colleagues — and then to GOP wannabees — to learn about them and about the nation.

“I have found that when you travel to someone’s district, you understand them better; understand their issues and why they fight for what they fight for. There is no substitute for getting to know the people and issues firsthand,” McCarthy wrote.

As the chief candidate recruiter for House Republicans during the current campaign cycle, McCarthy has sought contenders with conservative principles who also knew that “our party needed to remake itself as the party of reform again.”

In an amusing anecdote, he cited an unnamed prospective candidate who asked McCarthy, “Do you need me to run? … Do you want me to run?” McCarthy then told him not to run, “This can’t be about you. This is about changing America.”

McCarthy lists several of his favorite candidates, including Martha Roby of Alabama, Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Sean Duffy of Wisconsin.

At the top of his list is Stephen Fincher, of Frog Jump, Tenn. As McCarthy wrote, “Like many Americans, just a few months ago, he was watching his country change in ways he never dreamed, and he told us: ‘How am I going to answer my children in the future when they ask me, “What did you do when the country changed? Did you stand up and fight?”’”

THE WONK

Ryan tackles policy.

There aren’t many surprises here for longtime fans — or critics — of the trendy cult hero of the modern GOP.

But in this version of Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future, the policy is a bit puffed for mass consumption. It’s given context, a raison d’etre that begins with Democrats rigging the policy process.

He explains the way they have used his policy ideas to pummel him and fellow Republicans — even though President Barack Obama once praised him for putting forward a “serious proposal” and called him a “pretty sincere guy.”

He then accuses Democrats of perverting the lawmaking process, contorting it so that a child familiar with the old “Schoolhouse Rock” song wouldn’t recognize it. It is, he says, the “new Washington Way” under Democratic control.

“This new Washington Way isn’t open debate broadcast on C-SPAN; it’s closed-door, backroom deals. The Washington Way doesn’t seek input from both sides of the issue; it muscles through bills on strict one-party votes. And the Washington Way isn’t interested in honest up-or-down votes on transformational programs,” he writes. “It rigs the process to produce the outcome it desires through any means necessary. The ends justify the means. Bend the Constitution to keep up with the change.”

Democrats will no doubt suggest that Ryan had his hallmark iPod turned up a bit too loudly to hear Republican arms being broken when Tom DeLay was House majority whip and later majority leader.

Ryan writes that in shutting out Republicans, Democrats locked the American public out of the debate and ended up writing a law that will “redefine the relationship between Americans and their government.”

Rather than just attack the Democrats’ law, though, he offers his alternative, which is focused largely on providing tax credits to Americans to buy private insurance by getting rid of the expensive tax break individuals get when they buy insurance through their employers. Critics say his plan would undermine the long-standing employer-based health care system and fail to provide enough money for families to buy adequate insurance.

Over three chapters sprinkled with redundant jabs at liberal Americans and Europeans, Ryan articulates a view of the world that has become familiar to many admirers inside the Beltway.

He argues, as the nation’s top political economists do, that the country is on an unsustainable path. He cites the Tax Foundation for a statistic showing that most Americans receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes — a situation that he says threatens the nation’s future.

Using numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, Ryan presents the unpalatable choice among cutting entitlements, raising taxes to pay for them, or borrowing untold trillions to finance them.

“Our day of reckoning was always coming. President Obama and Democratic leaders in Washington are just seeing that it comes much sooner. In fact, they welcome this day of reckoning because they believe that from it will emerge a very different country from the one we’ve known,” he writes.

He tries, preemptively, to counteract the inevitable Democratic claim that he wants to eliminate Medicare and Social Security.

“Our social insurance strategies of the 20th century are a critical component of our nation’s social safety net — but they must be reformed if they are to exist for those in need for the 21st century. As currently structured, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are set to implode in the face of the massive demographic shift under way. This represents both a critical moment for needed action — and an opportunity to chart a new course for renewed growth and restored promise for this century,” Ryan writes.

Ironically, it is the chapter entitled “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” that contains the least discussion of policy. Instead, it is an attack on Ryan’s perception of “Progressivism” — a movement that had its strongest roots in his home state of Wisconsin — that ends in a Cliff’s Notes version of his actual “Roadmap” policy document.

BLUE LINES

There are a few edits the lawmakers may want to make before publication.

For example, Rep. Dave Obey, a Wisconsin colleague of Ryan’s, is misidentified in Cantor’s section as representing a Michigan district.

And there’s this doozy from Ryan: “Americans aren’t any particular nationality.”

Click here to read the full story.