Via Fired Up, an interview with Sarah Steelman at SEMOTimes.com definitely worth reading, if only for a chuckle.

I really would like to know what Steelman means here:

Can you give us your thoughts on the current state of the Republican Party?

“I think we need to take stock of where we are and look at how we got here. I think we need to be more principally

conservative, and reflect on just how we lost the House and Senate. The people do not trust us to be conservatives

because we were anything but conservative when we were in the majority. Jack Kemp knew how to do this, and we should learn from his example.”

I don’t think voters queueing up at the polls in November 2006 and again in November 2008 to vote Democrats in and Republicans out were checking their conservative checklist and found the incumbent Republicans wanting. They looked at an economy that was not working for them and a foreign policy that was not making them safer. They had eight years of tax cuts for the wealthy as the principal domestic policy instrument, and macho posturing and an Iraq misadventure abroad. Bonus points too for Steelman citing Jack Kemp as someone who knew how to be conservative in the majority. He was only part of the worst performing Republican ticket since Goldwater in 1964.

I’m curious. What specific policies would Steelman have changed if she were in the GOP majority from 1994-2006?

Also this:

Since you’ve been teaching a political science course at Missouri State University, we are going to

ask you to put on your political analyst cap and answer the question that several local Republicans have asked us, if two years ago a well-known and relatively well- liked Democrat faced off against a poor fund-raising, poor communicating, old white guy in a suit from Washington and get trounced by 20 points, why would this race be any different?

“I am not sure that it will be, but I do think that the economy has changed since the last election. In two years, people may begin to see that President Obama’s left wing policies are not the solutions America needs. A lot of what happens

in 2010 depends upon the economy.

Um, I don’t know if the economy has changed wholesale since Obama took office so much as the economic crisis deepened in the months before Obama took office. He didn’t cause the housing crisis, nor the willingness of banks to lend to anyone willing to take out a loan and sell the debt to investors who swarmed to make the silly bet that housing prices could never go down, nor could he do all that much to stop it as a lone senator.