RYAN'S OUR HOPE

Senate hopeful gets bad rap (THOMAS ROESER, June 28, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

A misleading rumor has circulated that Republican Jack Ryan, candidate for the U.S. Senate, is a Rockefeller Republican. Not so. [...]

Ryan is a conservative--at least as conservative as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and in some ways more.

On the social issues Ryan is pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother (same as Bush and Reagan). On gay marriage or registry, if legislation were to create ''any special rights, I'm against it. . . . I'm against any special rights attached to someone's sexual orientation.'' On stem cell research he has the same position as Bush: favoring research on existing lines of stem cells, but creating life for experimentation is the wrong thing to do.

He favors the Bush tax cuts and Iraqi war, but what intrigues me is where he takes a rightward departure from the president. He says the
administration spends too much and cites $80 billion in corporate subsidies that can be cut. He points to a Cato study that criticizes the Advanced Technology program, where government does poorly what private business should do for itself. Next is a so-called Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicles, a Commerce Department project that spends public dollars on automotive research, and another Commerce Department effort that attempts to advertise U.S. products. He says that if elected, he would hope to serve on the Appropriations Committee, where such boondoggles can be cut. Education Department expenditures could be pared, too, if school choice were implemented.

Ryan wants to reduce the capital gains tax to zero, abolish the Commerce Department's minority business development arm and focus resources instead to the education of minority youth on how to gain access to capital.

On foreign-defense policy, he believes our stake in Europe should be drastically reduced. The European countries spend about 1.5 percent of their gross national product on defense, he says. We spend 3 percent of our GNP on arms in part because ''we are subsidizing their defense.'' NATO countries' GNP is very close to our own.

Karl Rove and the President need to get into IL and strongarm the Party into backing this guy, the way they did for folks like Norm Coleman and John Thune last cycle. Then the 2004 campaign should focus on IL, CA, WA, NV, NY, etc. (even HI), places where the Democratic candidate for president will have to play defense and a win by the President could synergistically carry in a GOP Senator or vice versa. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 28, 2003 2:57 PM