State Representative and Fourth-District Congressional candidate Cory Gardner yesterday posted the policy prescription he calls his “2010 Plan” online. He had been touting the plan on the stump and on the Twitter. “Go to my website for further details,” he kept saying, but there was no 2010 Plan at his website. Then two months after he first started talking about it, he posted the plan. As the Colorado Independent pointed out, however, the 2010 Plan was an anemic mess. Gardner took it offline, reworked and reposted it. The new version is even more anemic but at least it’s been proofread.
In the latest 2010 Plan nuclear power has lost its prominence in Gardner’s vision of how to “create jobs and power the future.” Perhaps that talking point will also now disappear from his speeches. It won’t be missed. On the stump, he failed utterly to match his nuclear vision with his otherwise small-government free-market positions. In the 2010 Plan, he managed to make an even worse case for what has always been the biggest of Big Government energy sources.
Unfortunately, there remain no links to resources in the 2010 Plan, which in its leaner form is even more notable for the great bulk of what it does not include. There is nothing about topics of great interest to his likely voters. Not a word, for example, on immigration, abortion, tax cuts, bank bailouts.
Instead, we get this kind of thing:
I believe as our great President Ronald Reagan believed, “Peace through Strength.” Our country’s most important Constitutional duty is to protect and preserve the United States by providing for its common defense. We must be vigilant, steadfast, and must win the War on Terror by eliminating the terrorist threat wherever it may be.
1. Appeasement is not an option.
2. Increase military budget, while eliminating wasteful spending within the Defense Department.
Apart from the confusion of saying it’s the country’s constitutional duty to protect the country, there’s really nothing any of his opponents will find to disagree with here.
But does it count as a “plan” to say we must “eliminate wasteful spending within the Defense Department”? How does he actually “plan” to do that? Hasn’t that been sort of the plan for the past 60 years?
In any case, voters now know that Gardner intends in Washington to battle would-be appeasers and apparently express his anti-appeasement message in a new way that will translate into strong legislation. Details to come in the next version of the 2010 Plan.
