I HAVE BEEN out of public life for three years. I’m used to standing at the end of the line at the airport, my Blackberry is now my office, and I’m rarely asked for my opinion on much of anything. But when I saw the recent cover of Time magazine with the caption “Endangered Species?’’ above the Republican Party elephant logo, I wondered how we ever got ourselves into this situation.
Why has the Republican Party let the Democrats cast us as the party that caters to the rich and the elite? Wasn’t it a Republican president who freed millions of Americans from the bondage of slavery?
Why has the Republican Party let the Democrats cast us as the party that opposes a clean environment? Wasn’t it a Republican president who created the first national park in America, the National Park Service, and the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire? Wasn’t it a Republican president who created the Environmental Protection Agency, authored the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Hazardous Waste Act?
Why has the Republican Party let the Democrats cast us as the party of big oil, gas, and coal? Wasn’t it a Republican president who broke up the huge oil trusts in America? Wasn’t it a Republican president who first called for energy independence through the development of alternative energy resources?
Why has the Republican Party allowed Democrats to portray us as the party of war? Have we forgotten that Republican presidents ended the Vietnam War, broke the back of communism without firing a single shot, and successfully liberated Kuwait from Iraq in only 19 days?
And why has the Republican Party become the defender of a healthcare system no one likes? Why can’t we be the party that responds to the Democrats’ determination to federalize healthcare by offering our own proposals that make healthcare more competitive, more affordable, and more efficient?
We are the party that brightened the future of blue-collar America in the early 1980s by lowering taxes for workers and giving them a chance to save for retirement and move up in society. We should be the party that continues to promote tax relief while seriously attacking out-of-control spending. We should be the party that puts people back to work not by creating temporary taxpayer-subsidized jobs but by letting all working Americans keep more of their own hard-earned dollars to invest in new business or buy products and thereby pull us out of this recession.
We should be the party that has the courage to take on out-of-control entitlement spending by establishing a bipartisan commission that is charged with making big, difficult decisions on curbing the growth of entitlements, and then force Congress to vote its plan into law.
We should be the party that supports meaningful climate-change legislation so that we lead rather than follow the rest of the world in capping carbon emissions because we care deeply about the world that we will leave for our children and their children.
We should be the party that vigorously supports alternative-energy development, putting this nascent industry on a par with oil, gas, and coal - all of which have received huge government subsidies for generations. Republicans should be promoting alternative-energy development as a way to make the environment cleaner, make America safer and more secure, while creating a whole new economy and the jobs and prosperity associated with it. And we should be the party that supports expanding access to quality, affordable healthcare by making premiums universally deductible, allowing businesses to form their own healthcare pools, implementing meaningful tort law reform, allowing a healthcare plan that is available in any one state to be sold in other states, and by implementing 21st-century technology to computerize health records so that the system works more efficiently and more safely.
No party should allow the extreme views of political talk-show commentators, who are paid to be outrageous, to become the primary architects of its public image.
The Republican Party should be the party of freedom, liberty, and opportunity. We should allow our people, churches, and families - not the government - to establish, protect, and nurture our moral values.
We should be the party of entrepreneurship, hard work, and common-sense pragmatic solutions to the challenges facing America today. And perhaps most important, we should be the party that listens to and feels the pulse of America, not just our closest friends and allies. If we do all of this, we will return to our rightful place as the party that has earned the trust, admiration, and faith of the American people.
Charles F. Bass is a former US representative from New Hampshire. 
