Republican Party is trying to change it's image from the party of "no we can't." Recently the party of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, corporate interests and the uber-rich, they now want to broaden their appeal.
From it's inception, the Republican Party has been the party of Northern Corporate Interests. Read the history.
Coming soon to a battleground state near you: a new effort to revive the image of the Republican Party and to counter President Obama's characterization of Republicans as "the party of 'no.'"
CNN has learned that the new initiative, called the National Council for a New America, will be announced Thursday.
It will involve an outreach by an interesting mix of GOP officials, ranging from 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and the younger brother of the man many Republicans blame for the party's battered brand: former President George W. Bush.
Sources familiar with the effort say it was born of conversations between Cantor and the members of the experts panel. After Bush and Romney agreed to take part, the conversations expanded and the idea won the blessing of both the House and Senate GOP leadership. Additional town halls are planned in the weeks ahead, each likely dedicated to a specific issue, with health care, the economy, energy and national security leading the issues menu the group says it hopes to discuss heading into the 2010 midterm elections, and possibly beyond.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/29/gop-set-to-launch-rebranding-effort/The original history of the Civil War reads more like an economic war between North and South with slavery initially being a spliter issue of one branch of the Republican Party.
If the South did not secede to protect slavery, why was that prominently stated as the principal reason in the secession resolutions of the various Confederate states? Adams claims that slavery was never in danger, pointing out that Lincoln pledged to enforce the fugitive slave law, declared he had no right or intention to interfere with slavery, and supported a new irrevocable constitutional amendment to protect slavery forever. The South's proclamation that slavery was in danger was a political ploy full of political cant to stir up secessionist fever. As the North American Review (Boston October 1862) put it: "Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, 'to fire the Southern Heart' and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation". An editorial in the Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election stated: "The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." And on 21 January 1861, five days before Louisiana seceded, the New Orleans Daily Crescent editorialized: "They
know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests....These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union."
When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, followed by the other Confederate states, all the powerful moneyed interests in the North were in favor of appeasing the South over slavery in order to preserve the Union. If the South were to be a sovereign nation with low tariffs, it could undermine Northern business and trade. The South believed that it did not need the North, since it could buy the goods it needed from Europe, but the North needed the South as a market for Northern goods.
Earlier, in December 1860, before any secession, the Chicago Daily Times foretold the disaster that Southern free ports would bring to Northern commerce: "In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow."
Was Karl Marx correct when he wrote in 1861: "The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pearlston1.html
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