Mike Shields interview: Why the Republicans deserve victory The Anglophilia is not skin deep. Mr Shields is a diehard Ipswitch Town fan who completed his secondary education during at a North Yorkshire comprehensive in the 1980s - a formative experience, to put it mildly, that still informs his search for renewal in the GOP. At the time the Cold War was at its height, with the anti-nuclear Greenham Common protests spawning 'peace" camps outside several RAF bases, including the Menwith Hill early listening station where his father then worked as a defence contractor. That was when Mr Shields realised what it meant to be an American, even though he was then living in a Wimpy home and supporting Ipswitch Town - a passion explained by the fact that his mother, a Brit, was born above a shop in Felixstowe. While the other British kids at the King James School in Knaresborough were wearing CND badges, he showed up with a Nato badge the lapel of his blazer, with the motto "Peace Through Strength" - Reagan's reprise of Roosevelt's maxim to "Speak softly and carry a big stick." "Suddenly I was not fitting into the crowd at school any more, but I was identifying myself as an American," Mr Shields recalls wistfully, adding that he was angered by the fact that the school teachers allowed the CND badges, even though badges were strictly against school rules. I went home to my Dad and said 'why are they allowed to do this? And so began the conversation. He said the teachers are obviously sympathetic, and it upset me, it brought out an interest in me in politics and debate and seeking the truth. He learned another harsh truth about 1980s Britain that Mrs Thatcher was seeking to change after it got round that his family had two cars and the young Shields was duffed up by a bunch of local lads for being 'rich" and having the temerity to take an English girl to the school disco. "In the US people aspire to be successful; it's frowned upon to denigrate someone for being successful, but in Britain the fact of the matter was, it was different then," he recalled. Times have changed, admits Mr Shields, but that Manichean world of East v West, Communism v Capitalism, free enterprise v the state-run variety gave birth to a core philosophy that remains relevant today. And it is a philosophy that the GOP needs to get back to selling. "Reagan and Thatcher managed to win conservative arguments on moral grounds, people understood what their motive was," he says with sudden passion. Theirs were not accountant charts and graphs arguments, they were effectively making the case to the public that conservative ideas will make your life better, and your family's life better - we've gotten away from that, and we have to get better at it. The question facing Republicans is 'how"? In the 1980s the economics of Reagan and Thatcher offered a clear antidote to the morass of the 1970s, but today in the midst of another global economic slump, neither Democrat or Republican parties have enunciated a compelling new vision. Mr Shields and the Republican party acknowledges some image problems - the party's own 2012 debrief document candidly admitted "scary," "narrow-minded," and run by "stuffy old men" - but say their core belief that people - not government - should spend money and fix problems endures. The principles of the party - what we stand for and believe in - are sound. What we are not doing is talking to enough people," he adds. We have narrow-cast our message to a certain part of the electorate and the other side has taken their message to a larger portion of the electorate. This is not to be mistaken for a repudiation of the Republican base, the demographically dwindling core of mainly white, God-fearing blue-collar Americans. Even though some 80 per cent of non-White Americans voted Democrat - regardless of their social or economic status - Mr Shields will never agree that the Tea Party and the Republican grassroots, disparaged by Mr Obama for their faith in God and guns, are part of the 'scary" problem. The Tea Party is not a "vocal fringe," he says, but a group of "fiscally conservative activists that helped Republicans win back the House in 2010," and whose energy and vision are a core part of the new antidote to the "miserable failure of Obama's trickle-down bureaucracy." Essentially, therefore, the fixes the GOP says it needs are broadly cosmetic - "a question of changing tone, not values" that can be overcome by an extensive outreach program to minority communities, better data-mining and more efficient party management. Is that pie-in-the-sky nostalgia for a time when two conservative visionaries really were reshaping the world, or the principled staying of a conservative course that Mr Shields embarked upon growing up in Knaresborough all those years ago? Time will tell, but do not rush to judgment, is Mr Shields's advice. The challenges facing the GOP that seemed so clear-cut after last year's general election are already starting to seem less certain now. In 2012 the hugely unpopular presidency was only four years old, the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, was horribly weak and the Republican stars that had emerged in the 2010 elections, including many leading state governors, were not bench-ready for a presidential campaign. But now, just six months after defeat, already the Republican troops are rallying, Mr Shields contends. The Obama second term White House is mired in scandals, it faces stiff resistance over implementing healthcare reforms and - as Mr Obama's power inevitably wanes - will soon face party in-fighting as the race begins in earnest for 2016. Against that background, the GOP still believes it can get back to basics, if that is not an ominous phrase, and "deserve victory" among ordinary, hard-pressed Americans. "We will win every debate on who will make your life better," concludes Mr Shields, "based on the policies and principles that we have."