JJ's advice to the Dems

John Jazwiec, the RedPrairie corporate executive and California transplant who's been trash-talking Wisconsin, offered his ideas last year on how the Democratic Party could prosper. Basically, his advice is for Dems to be more conservative than the Repubs:

I was raised a Democrat, and my early inclinations were socially liberal, much like my political hero, Ronald Reagan. Even though it is fashionable to believe that Reagan's legacy is the ending of the Cold War, in reality it was the rebirth of the Republican Party by continuing to espouse his lifelong ideal of fiscal prudence and lower taxes.

The real "evil empire" for this great president was not so much the Soviet Union but more the entrenched establishment in Washington and the breakdown of our nation's founding concept of states' and individual rights.

Failure in present leadership is the mother of future political opportunity.

The Democratic Party now needs to become a true opposition party. Instead of using outdated political platforms, the party needs to be modeled along the core beliefs of the so-called Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.

This "new" opposition party will need to rise under the banner of trimming the spending and power of the federal government and enhancing the power of state government.

One only has to look at the block of red Southern states to understand the importance of this shift. For a century, this Southern block propelled Democratic victories. But Bush won these states over by espousing smaller government and family values while quietly creating the largest expansion in the federal government since World War II and cutting programs for education and urban development.

That might explain why, in a check of the data base of contributions to state candidates, JJ doesn't show up as ever giving a dollar to anyone in either party.