Who is the national leader of the Republican Party today?
There is not a leader of the Republican Party. There is not an obvious candidate for 2012. I don’t want one yet. Everybody should be focused on winning elections in 2010. How many House and Senate and governor people do they help elect? My question is what will you do for everybody else, and 2010 is this incredible testing ground. What is the essence of the Republican Party as defined by Ronald Reagan, which you call the “leave us alone” coalition? There are two kinds of issues. There are vote-moving issues, and there’s everything else. Think of people around a table. Everybody’s there for different reasons, but they’re all there because on their key issue, what they want from the government is to be left alone. We don’t all hang out together. We don’t all live in the same neighborhoods. We don’t necessarily like each other. But we all look at the candidate in the middle of the room, and he says, “I’m going to leave your guns alone and your kids alone and your faith alone and your mon
