Conservative in the People’s Republic

Chuck Holdeman said he came to IU after leaving the Navy in 1963, got married and settled down in Bloomington. He was at the Tax Day Tea Party protest at Showers Plaza this year.

Standing in front of City Hall and clutching the second issue of the Indiana Standard, a conservative newspaper put together by IU students, Holdeman said he didn’t usually attend political events.

He said he thought most of the other Tea Party protestors are just good, down-to-earth Americans.

“A lot of these people are just fed up with everything,” Holdeman said.

What everything includes depends on whom you ask.

Shelby Sego lives in Bloomington and goes to Ivy Tech Community College. She was talking with another Bloomington resident, Danny McConnell, who rested the pole of a large American flag in his pocket.

Both said they were worried about health care.

The rally started with a few speeches on the City Hall steps, including one by IU junior Sam Spaiser, the president of Young Americans for Liberty at IU.

“It’s time we bring the era of big government to an end,” Spaiser said.

People cheered, but they also cheered when he talked about abolishing the Federal Reserve and, surprisingly, when he talked about bringing the troops home.

Many liberals complain the movement is based on ignorance or bigotry. This is unfair.

Most of the protesters were friendly and affable. Last year’s Tax Day Tea Party featured a woman in a pig suit who claimed President Barack Obama thought America was a Muslim nation. But it also included a gay woman who said she was inspired to get the government out of her life by the movie “Milk.”

Most Tea Party protestors claim to be nonpartisan, but the movement will send many more votes to Republicans than Democrats.

That is one reason the Republican Party is likely to do well in 2010. But, again, many liberal fears of disaster are exaggerated. The GOP’s good fortunes are being driven by many moderate voters. In power, they will often have to be pragmatic.

But it is less clear how much the Republican Party deserves a victory. The forces trying to pull the party in a more conservative direction have, so far, offered too few solutions to the major issues on which Democrats are at least trying to act.

The next campaign
Todd Young is a Bloomington attorney running to be the Republican candidate for Indiana’s 9th Congressional District, which includes Bloomington and most of Southern Indiana.

Justin Kingsolver, president of the IU College Republicans, said he was driving Young between campaign stops one night last spring and looked away from the road for a second.He said when he looked up there was a deer in the middle of the road, and he had to quickly swerve around it.

“‘You know, Justin, I was in the Marine Corps, and I never saw a maneuver like that,’” Kingsolver said he recalls Young saying.

Such stories are common from students who pour hundreds of hours into political campaigns. Kingsolver said his group has tried to conduct two to three phone banks a week. Young’s campaign office is downtown, not far from where the Obama campaign office was.

The IU College Republicans’ call-out meeting for this semester was held less than a week after Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts for the GOP. Senate and House candidates and plenty of curious students were packed into Kelley School of Business 100, where the group holds most of its meetings. There was also a lot of pizza.  

“I see a lot of new faces, and that’s awesome,” Kingsolver said. “I don’t know if that’s because you are all excited that 2010 is going to be the next Republican Revolution; I think it will be.”  

Young was at the meeting and had a few bad things to say about the fiscal responsibility of the last GOP-controlled Congress, an obvious jab at his opponent for the Republican-nomination, former Rep. Mike Sodrel.

Sodrel grew up in New Albany, Ind., and is known for his success with a family trucking company. If he wins the Republican primary, this will be his fifth run for this seat.

He was also at the call-out meeting, and Young challenged him to a series of weekly debates. Kingsolver saw them debate in North Vernon, Ind., a few weeks ago. He said Sodrel showed his experience, while Young was mostly negative.

Both complain about the stimulus, cap-and-trade and health care reform. At the call-out meeting, Sodrel said cutting payroll taxes was the best way to stimulate the economy, and Young said Democrats should focus more on tort reform and letting people buy health insurance across state lines.

These are not bad ideas, but they aren’t sufficient. And when it comes to attacking cap-and-trade, neither has outlined an alternative that would meaningfully fight global warming.

The primary is May 4, and either will have to make a stronger case before November.

Taking the heat
“IU College Republicans obviously gets a lot of heat because we are the only Republicans in the People’s Republic of Bloomington,” Kingsolver said at the call-out meeting.

Talking about it later, he said he doesn’t really think most people here are socialists, but he did say he thinks the odds are stacked high against conservatives. It’s not a hard case to make — Obama won 66 percent of the vote in Monroe County.

But in the same election, Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, who was deservedly reelected, trailed his Democratic challenger by less than two thousand votes here. People can be convinced.

This semester saw the fruition of a major effort by IU conservatives to get their ideas out.

Danny Orthwein, a senior at IU, likes to joke that the Indiana Standard is internationally read because the web site has gotten hits from India and a few other countries. In all seriousness, he says he figures they are just random searches or bots.

The first issue of the Indiana Standard, which runs with the banner “Yes, there are conservatives in Bloomington...,” came out this January. Its headlines included “‘End the Fed’ Campaign Gains Momentum” and “A Study in Government-Run Health Care.”

Before that issue could be published, Orthwein said students had to get the paper incorporated and find private donors. Orthwein said he was an original member of the board that controls the Standard, which includes three students and two community members. The editorial staff, he said, is all students.

According to Orthwein, the paper is printed by a company in northern Illinois, and the first issue was mailed to him in six boxes. He said most of the first two issues have been distributed through the paper’s members.The first hard-copy of the Indiana Standard ended up in his hands about a year after he said serious discussions to create the paper started.

“It’s like winning an election, that thrill of success,” Orthwein said.

The Indiana Standard isn’t affiliated with the IU College Republicans or Young Americans for Liberty at IU, though many of its writers associate with these organizations. Orthwein, who attends many IU College Republicans meetings, said he just considers himself a freedom-loving individual.

The diversity of views among those at IU who consider themselves conservative is pretty wide, despite some of the stereotypes that do exist on this campus.

The libertarian group, Young Americans for Liberty at IU, really is liberal about social issues. At a gathering last Wednesday, they watched “Brothers” as an anti-war event.

Former president of IU College Republicans Chelsea Kane said gay couples should have the same rights as straight couples and that she didn’t care what anyone called it. Kingsolver said he wished economic issues received more focus than social ones.

He said within his group, far from having lock-step opinions, there is a great deal of disagreement over immigration and the validity of global warming.

This doesn’t mean a more socially tolerant, pro-immigration and willing to compromise on cap-and-trade GOP is just around the corner.

But it does mean students on this campus should be more open-minded about what the Republican Party could be and about their own roles in seeing it change.

This time, no revolution
Kingsolver said he remembers his girlfriend holding the phone against a TV so he could hear Sen. John McCain’s concession speech. He admits that, after all the chalking, rallying, tabling and debating, he cried when he heard his candidate lost.

2010 will probably be a better a year. In Indiana, Republicans have a chance to pick up a Senate seat and a couple of House seats.

But that doesn’t mean 2010 will be a Republican revolution. FiveThirtyEight.com, a nonpartisan polling aggregation web site, ranks the Senate seats most likely to change parties and found that, of the 10 most likely to flip, eight of those would flip in favor of Republicans. But Republicans will need to pick up 10 seats for a majority in the upper chamber.

The House will be easier to take, but as new Republicans come from places like the Northeast, they will have to be more moderate to please their constituents.

There is no strong leader like Newt Gingrich to craft Republican impulses into a coherent agenda. Many libertarians and members of the Tea Party will be disappointed either way.

Most members of the IU College Republicans will probably just do whatever they can to give Republicans a chance of taking this congressional district and to keep their conservative ideas alive on campus.

Kingsolver often ends each meeting with a quote, usually from figures like Margaret Thatcher, Teddy Roosevelt or Winston Churchill.

A few weeks ago, Kingsolver concluded a meeting simply with this advice: “Go out and be conservative.


E-mail: nrdixon@indiana.edu