Old dogs, new tricks

In the last decade, the commonly accepted notion of what it means to be a Republican has changed. The Reagan-inspired commerce warriors of the 1980s and ’90s are no more. The image of the Republican has been mixed with that of an overweight CEO ignoring the cries of dying seals.

The inner corruption of the Republican Party was necessary, however, if they stood any chance of reinventing the conservative image. The reason Republicans become so synonymous with greed is because they recognize that it takes a healthy amount of American greed to stabilize an economy of our capacity.

It’s the core values like this one that have been lost to the Republicans through the administration of former president George W. Bush. Personal financial responsibility used to be the credo of the party, but at the end of his term in 2008, Bush signed away $700 billion of taxpayer money.

Potential Republicans had nowhere to turn. With President Barack Obama getting a commanding majority of the youth vote, the only way for Republicans to create distance between themselves and their haunting image is by strengthening the virtues that helped form Republican philosophy.

It was these virtues that set former president Ronald Reagan apart from the “typical politician.”

Once the Republicans came to power and focused their energy toward business and market incentives, they lost touch with the American people and had no idea how they were being viewed. By the time the economy began to sink before the 2008 campaign, the Republican image had been so trashed that Democrats were able to disguise a necessary recession as a full-blown depression and still blame it on Bush.

For young voters who have never witnessed a recession before, there was very little choice. The Democrats had the illuminated Obama as their new face and were the only possible contenders to run under the banners of “hope” and “change.” Once the recession was blown out of proportion, any young optimist with dreams of helping the world would vote for a ticket as sincere as that.

Conservative principles have not lost their shine on all ranges of American youth. College business students are quite frequently in favor of fewer government restrictions on the economy.

When asked how business lessons helped form his political opinions, Kelley School undergraduate Umesh Kaushal said, “While I prefer Obama’s liberal social standpoints, I would still proudly call myself a fiscal conservative.”

The only way Republicans can boost their image into the next generation of politics is by creating real hope in the economy.

The values needed to hold up an economy like ours are not going to be in a stimulus package, but in the same spirit that lifted us out of all the recessions before.

Hard work and individual responsibility seem like easy things to preach, but they will never work without the faith of the American people to put them into action.