Book Excerpts

Excerpts

Most people believe there is more common ground than division in the attitudes of Americans across this vast expanse. News programs and newspaper articles, however, often include both sides of an issue, leading us to assume there are just as many people on one side of an issue as on another. But that representation of an equal and opposite point of view doesn’t make sense to us, not to those of us getting up every day and building our lives in America. Certainly we have disagreements on issues, even within the red states, but the range of views on issues is much narrower nationwide than the overwhelmingly liberal, controversy-loving media would have us believe. In the end, America is a centerright country—historically, ideologically, and practically.

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When campaigning among themselves for votes, Democrats go to the left on issues and Republicans go to the right on issues. In the general election, however, politicians must return to the center to pick up the all-important undecided voter. In the 2004 presidential election, the distance John Kerry had to travel to get to that coveted middle was much farther than the distance George Bush had to go…. It’s what Karl Rove…Ken Mehlman…were banking on in the 2004 presidential election. They understood what the political pundits refuse to believe—that most Americans hold political views right-ofcenter.

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Over time, even the meanings of the American founding principles, obvious to the signers of the Declaration of Independence, have slowly eroded. Our nation’s founding principles have over time lost any authoritative meaning to the American people. Today those principles are portrayed by the liberal media and Democratic leaders as nothing more than glittering prose from a bygone era, as ideals impossible to live by.

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The faith and belief that middle America is the true mainstream lead me to write Indivisible. It is the grown-up protesters longing for the “good ol’ days” of the 1960s who are out of the mainstream.

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One of the major mistakes of the Republican Revolution of 1994 was that conservatives, social and otherwise, thought that the country rejected liberalism and embraced conservatism. Rush Limbaugh has made this point repeatedly since then. The truth is that Americans were unhappy with the very liberal leaning of the first years of the Clinton administration and wanted to move the country back to the Right. While the country is center-right, many Americans still have to be convinced that conservatism is the right way to go. The hardliners on both ends of the spectrum will say these folks don’t stand for anything. I would disagree; these voters are the non-party-line voters who will be influenced by policy stances and personality.