On the issues: Josh Harder and Tom Patti on abortion, the economy, homelessness and more
There was a time when it was hard to find a conservative voice willing and able to address the issues that most concern conservatives. And the people with whom I grew closest during that time were conservatives who didn’t have the same resources I did.
So in 2010, when I lost my job at MSNBC, I thought I should try to reach out to other conservatives to see if we could figure out a way to work together in the face of the economic nightmare that we all share.
I’ve been part of a number of successful partnerships in the past, including at the National Review with Bob Leman, Bill Kristol and Michael Barone; the National Journal with Charlie Savage; the Christian Broadcasting Network with David Barton; and the Wall Street Journal with Michael Barone. But at the time I didn’t have a network to call on with the resources to bring conservatives together around our critical issues.
That’s when I found Josh Harder, a former co-host on Fox News, and the co-author of the best-seller “The End of America: The Dispatches from the Front Lines of the End of the World as We Know It,” on which I also served as an executive producer. We decided to write a book together and put the two of us in touch with Tom Patti, a contributing editor at the National Journal and former economics editor for the Wall Street Journal.
From there, we’ve had a lot of discussions about the issues that face conservatives. What, specifically, do conservatives care about? What are these issues? And how can we start bringing together all the voices that we have to help us articulate what these problems are so they can become a rallying cry for conservative action.
Patti: What we’re focused on is three things. One, I’m a conservative. One, I’m a journalist. And two, I’m a liberal.
The second thing we focused on is on the
