The New Republican Reformers

By Karl Rove,

Ryan, Rubio and GOP governors are promoting fresh ideas for growth and upward mobility.

These Republicans are applying conservative principles to 21st-century challenges, focused on middle-class concerns like lowering costs and improving access to college, modernizing health care and reforming the tax code. They aim to broaden prosperity’s reach through markets and merit, not government and corporate cronyism. They’re also concentrating on helping the poor by changing Washington’s dizzying assortment of antipoverty programs to emphasize work and make the safety net more effective and sustainable.

Among these figures, Rep. Paul Ryan —who led the GOP in backing vital reforms of entitlements like Medicare—is devoting the most time to studying why successful grass-roots antipoverty programs work. He’s quietly visited dozens of effective efforts around the country on a tour noted for its deliberate avoidance of press coverage.

He and other reformers, like Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, are also focused on spurring stronger economic growth. In remarks March 10 at Google’s D.C. office, Mr. Rubio sketched proposals to increase innovation by making more wireless spectrum available for businesses and consumers, step up coordination between government research and private companies to speed ideas to market, and promote trade by knocking down barriers to U.S. goods and services.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee argued in an eloquent speech at the Heritage Foundation in November that the liberal War on Poverty has undermined the very institutions—family, community and the mediating structures of civil society that stand between the government and the individual—that are most effective in helping people rise. He has proposed a package of reforms to taxes, welfare, higher education, transportation and federal comp-time regulations that hamper worker flexibility.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Republican Governor Association Chairman Chris Christie and dozens of other GOP governors are crafting answers to meet the needs of their state’s poor. Most would welcome Mr. Rubio’s suggestion in a Jan. 8 speech that antipoverty programs be combined into one fund and given to states to administer.

It is hard to overstate how much the Republican Party is hurt by the persistent belief of many voters that its candidates are out of touch and do not care about people like them. But when standard bearers like Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush erode that negative perception, the GOP takes the White House. The importance of winning and governing well should focus more Republicans on this movement’s work.

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