Now What? The Post-Trial GOP
By David Shribman

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Listen up, Republicans. It's time to change the subject. Trying to drive Clinton from office ended up driving people away from the GOP. What you need now is less Cotton Mather and more Ronald Reagan. It also would be nice if the party of ideas actually had some. So we've scoured the think tanks, cloakrooms, and intellectual back alleys of the conservative movement and found some bona fide new ideas for a new Republican era. Here are a bunch, free for the taking, whether you're a presidential wannabe, a congressional candidate, or a committee chairman. We even supply the sound bites.

Give real deregulation a chance. The deregulation efforts of the past few years haven't altered the fact that many more laws are made by regulators than by lawmakers. The best way to fight this is to force Congress to vote on every regulation promulgated by the executive branch, a proposal the Cato Institute describes as "the most revolutionary change in government since the Civil War." Sound bite: Stop preaching deregulation and start practicing it.

Steal the Democrats' thunder by overhauling health care. About 43 million Americans go without health insurance. Many of them can't afford to buy insurance because their premiums can't be paid with pretax dollars, making the insurance far more expensive. The remedy is to permit the uninsured to use tax credits and vouchers to buy private health-insurance policies. Sound bite: We give you tax relief and health insurance at the same time.

Take on the next phase of welfare reform. State and federal officials are euphoric about all the people who have moved from welfare to work. But that was yesterday's achievement. A lot of folks still haven't made it, and they need more than helpful hints on how to polish their resumes. Now is the time to consider expanded tax breaks for contributions to churches and charitable organizations that operate social programs. Sound bite: Government can't deal with the hard cases. Let's help the organizations that can.

Press to overhaul telecommunications taxes. Phone lines are taxed like alcohol, tobacco, and gasoline: at the federal, state, and local levels. As a result, the effort to bring more Americans onto the information superhighway has an extremely large tollbooth: federal excise taxes, state universal-service taxes, local franchise fees. Let's dump them. Sound bite: Cut taxes to make Internet access affordable for everyone.

End all sanctions against Cuba and normalize relations with Havana. The American embargo against Cuba is as much a relic of the Cold War as the Castro regime itself. Normalizing relations with Havana is as much an opportunity for Republicans as making friends with China was in 1972 when Nixon traveled to Beijing. Nixon's initiative infuriated many Republicans, but it befuddled Democrats and, more to the point, pleased ordinary Americans. So would a GOP overture to Cuba, a notion that is actually floating around conservative circles. Sound bite: The journey to Havana begins with a smaller step than the journey to Beijing.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.