Posted on 11/06/2012 10:42:38 PM PST by nathanbedford
The loss of this presidential election under these economic circumstances is so appalling that it raises existential questions about the Republican Party and the future of conservatism in America. With unemployment through the roof, with housing through the floor, with nearly 50,000,000 people on food stamps, with the government hemorrhaging money and the debt soaring, the Republican Party must ask itself, if we cannot win today can we ever win?
It is important to identify the reasons for this epic fail so that the conservative movement can go on. The first item of business is to distinguish between failure which can be blamed on the quality of the candidate or the mechanics of the campaign and a failure which represents a fatal disconnect with the people of America.
We are now in for a season of second-guessing Romney and the strategy of the campaign. This is inevitable and necessary but it is important that we do it constructively, it is important that it be done right.
We will hear many assertions: the acrimonious primary season inflicted wounds on ourselves which gave Obama a head start; Romney tactically left the field open to Obama after he clinched the nomination and Obama simply painted Romney negatively by carpet bombing him with television ads; Romney funneled his campaign strategy too narrowly, both geographically and philosophically-that is, Romney was too late going to Wisconsin, too late going to Pennsylvania, and Romney narrowed the focus of his campaign to economic issues only, thus conceding all other issues to Obama; Obama was thus able, with the support of a complicit media, to raise strawmen issues which were in many respects preposterous yet they forced Romney on the defensive and blunted his message on the economy; Romney picked the wrong vice presidential candidate, he should have picked Marco Rubio and he would have made inroads into the Hispanic vote and the failure to do so cost him the election; the selection of Paul Ryan was the physical embodiment of an abandonment of a campaign addressing the demographic realities of America to concentrate on a campaign of economic issues; the Romney campaign worked at cross purposes in the selection of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin when it coupled that choice with a failure heavily to campaign in Wisconsin-if the decision was to campaign almost exclusively on economic issues with Paul Ryan, that implied an all out campaign in Wisconsin which was never really undertaken until too late; the campaign ignored vulnerabilities and failed to exploit opportunities to wit: it lost the women's vote along with the Hispanic vote over bogus issues of abortion and birth control by failing to fight back and failing to present a credible female spokesperson and it failed to exploit Benghazi; the campaign made these errors of omission because of its fundamental mistake to concentrate on economic issues; Romney performed brilliantly in the first debate, even contriving to offset the advantage Obama had derived from his negative air war, but fatally decided to play it safe in the second and third debates and surrendered the momentum to Obama-and the failure to exploit Benghazi is the principle example of this failure of conception a shift nd execution; hurricane Sandy entered dues ex machine and, coupled with the treachery of Christie, gave the momentum back to Obama who have been cruising toward a loss.
Other second-guessers, probably featuring Rush Limbaugh prominently among them, will focus on the biography of Romney and maintain that the key failure was to nominate a Rino who cannot win but conservatives can win. The difficulty with this analysis is that the Republican Party clearly coalesced behind Romney after the first debate.
Others will avert to Romney's original assessment of the political landscape, that 47% of the population is lost to the Republican cause and the Republican candidate must concentrate on the remaining 53%. This is another way of casting the age-old tension between conservatives and Rinos because the Rinos solution, which was Romney's solution, is to focus exclusively on economic issues and run a white bread campaign. This means that Romney presented himself to be reassuring to independents, to women, as especially single women. The conservative rejoinder, of course, is that a passive stance in which one achieves a neutral nonaggressive posture, nonthreatening to women, is not a winning stance which must come from a more aggressive issue oriented campaign driving home conservatives truths. But wait! We run such a campaign and the Democrats counter with race. The truth which we must face is that we have not found the solution to this demagoguery.
Others will point to the media and say that it is almost impossible for a Republican to win nationally against the Democrat especially when the media will do everything short of committing murder to support a black president. There is a lot of truth in this but to acknowledge the reality is not to provide the solution. Conservatives want an aggressive campaign such as that conducted by Newt Gingrich in the primaries against the media as well as an aggressive campaign against the Democrats. Romney decided to simply absorb much of the media bias and ignore the issue to death, much as he attempted to deal with the gender gap. I observed at the time that as a conservative I want a crusade against Obama and Romney was running a campaign. In the event, we got neither.
Mechanics, or "architects" if you prefer, such as Karl Rove will tell us whether we failed on the ground or in the air. When Karl Rove ran the ground campaign in Ohio he prevailed. We were assured this time that our ground game in Ohio was far superior to 2004. We had evidence that our ground game in Wisconsin was superior to what the Democrats could muster in three previous statewide elections. Yet we failed. My problem is that I credit Karl Rove with the ability accurately to diagnose the problem but I am wary of his politics. I am satisfied with Rush Limbaugh's politics, but I am dubious of his ability to understand the nuts and bolts of the mechanical apparatus. This is important because ultimately we must accept that this election is so devastating under these circumstances that we must submit to an agonizing reappraisal of our basic politics and not seek rationalizations in the mechanics. Was this election a perfect storm of minor mistakes, bad weather, poor ground game, and media bias that caused America to cruise toward its own destruction or is there simply no denying the obvious, the Republican Party is not succeeding as a messenger for conservatism and conservatism has not crafted a message which works with the public?
Consider how we were handcuffed in this election. We are in a political world in which Obama could blatantly play the race card without any negative consequences. We can review the entire administration of Attorney General Eric holder or we can simply look at Obama's transparent grab for Hispanic votes with amnesty to see how cynically he has governed and campaigned. Normally every political decision, like YING and Yang, has an upside and a downside but there seems to have been no downside to Obama in playing the race card. Where was the blowback among white voters? How can Elizabeth Warren, for example, be exposed for fraudulently advancing herself by claiming American Indian heritage at the expense of honest white job applicants, and suffer no identifiable loss at the polls? Are we as a society destined to be Balkanized by the Democrat party playing sex against sex and race against race to its selfish electoral advantage but to the destruction of the country? Why were we so ineffective in making the world see the world the way we see it? We see the world hurtling toward a fiscal cliff and the destruction of our prosperity. Obama wins the election not by addressing the massive deficit which is turning America into Greece but by handing out birth control pills like Halloween candy. How did it happen that Obama ran the campaign on his terms and not on reality-at least reality as we see it? Why did small ball win?
Is it that we fail to see the world as it really is? Are we wrong and the people who vote their gender, their color, their tribe, their purse, right? No! Our conservative worldview is the right worldview and the leftist worldview is wrong. That is not up for discussion among conservatives. But it is the way of political folly to blame the electorate for one's failure at the polls no matter how easy the temptation. It is easy to say that women who are voting their vaginas are condemning their children to penury but they did not hear us say so or, if they did, they did not heed us. We spent $1 billion and still could not convince them of our view of the world. We are in a game of politics to gain political power and govern according to our world view. When we fail to win, we fail utterly. The real question is why could we not win against a demonstrably failed president with failed policies who ran a racist campaign, a sexist campaign, and played small ball on every issue when we had $1 billion, a squeaky clean candidate, the House of Representatives, the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the best economic statistics since Franklin Roosevelt?
Before we take refuge in blaming the electorate we should look in the mirror. Before we look for easy answers by blaming Romney, by blaming the media, by blaming tactical decisions such as the selection of Paul Ryan with which we agreed at the time, we should look long and hard into the mirror.
Perhaps we went wrong last cycle in blaming the loss on John McCain. Perhaps there is a dimension to the electorate that we simply do not understand. I posted long and hard at the time that John McCain would lose the election unless he morally destroyed Barack Obama and depicted him to be the Marxist that he was. Many of us in the beginning of this election season questioned whether Romney was correct in attacking Obama is "incompetent" rather than as a radical leftist. When the campaign appeared to be prevailing, I withdrew the criticism. I think we have to thoroughly examine the issue whether we can ever beat a Democrat candidate without personally destroying him. This is not cynical, this is only to bring a gun to a gunfight. So far, in the last two election cycles our campaigns have failed to take Obama on for his radicalism, probably because of fear of his race.We all know a demographic tsunami is about to engulf conservatism. We must decide how to cope with the threat. Do we cope by destroying our opponent the way attempted to destroy Romney or do we cope by pandering to African-Americans, or do we find a Marco Rubio to ingratiate us with Hispanics? Can we run successfully as conservatives by ignoring race as Romney attempted to do?
Before we take refuge in disdain for the electorate and find sour grapes satisfaction by saying they deserve to suffer in the implosion which we believe will come, we should figure out how to compete and win. Remember, it is human nature to rationalize failure by blaming others. Remember also that it is human nature to try to cure failed socialism with more socialism. That is the real reason why Obama was reelected. The electorate does not associate the great recession with government action, rather it associates salvation from the recession with government intervention. The electorate does not believe that government insistence on granting mortgages to risky homebuyers helped precipitate the great recession. They have come to believe that the government should step in to protect mortgagors who are underwater. The electorate wants more socialism to fix failed socialism. We lost the argument.
Unless we fix what is wrong we will lose it again and again until there is nothing left in America to save.
We are running out of time, we are running out of money, and we are running out of white people. This election forces conservatism into a race against the forces of Obamaism to fix itself in time to win the next election before we are bankrupted or engulfed. Either way we lose not just our prosperity but our liberty.
I applaud and admire your optimism, but must aver.
This was it. The last chance to peaceably work to restore liberty and the Republic. The ballot box, and the soap box have been exhausted. The political options are done. It’s over.
All who love liberty have to face the hard facts: we are down to the third box. The only question before us now is how to honorably do our duty to future generations.
Hope remains, but it is dim indeed.
I applaud and admire your optimism, but must aver.
This was it. The last chance to peaceably work to restore liberty and the Republic. The ballot box, and the soap box have been exhausted. The political options are done. It’s over.
All who love liberty have to face the hard facts: we are down to the third box. The only question before us now is how to honorably do our duty to future generations.
Hope remains, but it is dim indeed.
>>>>Is it that we fail to see the world as it really is?
I don’t think it’s a matter of “right” or “wrong.” People vote based on their morality (regardless of how they might rationalize their vote). The morality of most people in the U.S. today is (in a nutshell): “I need; I want; I deserve; therefore, everyone else owes me.” I wish I could say that this breaks down according to class or race, but it does not. It cuts across all classes and and all races.
There’s a character in the novel “Atlas Shrugged”; I don’t remember his name, but he was an older executive of a competing company to “Taggart Transcontinental” whom the heroine, Dagny, was trying to exhort to join her in some challenge. He understood the significance of what she was asking of him, but he deeply believed that his own morality was “selfish and wrong” and that the opposing view of the majority was right. Dagny could see that he was defeated before he even began.
One of the networks asked voters, after the fact, why they voted for Obama. The answer was that “he’s the most likely to identify with who we are.” So if we claim that Obama was playing on the mindset of “revenge” and “class warfare,” it means that the typical Obama voter — the majority of the country, it appears — feels the need to take “revenge” on a certain class, most likely “the rich.”
I’ve pointed out the ugly scapegoating aspect of this to some liberals and it doesn’t seem to bother them. “They deserve it”; “they’re getting rich off of our backs”; etc. A number of them believe that “those Republicans are blocking Obama from doing everything he wants to do!” When I hear that, it tells me that they don’t want a republic, they don’t want a constitution, they don’t even really want democracy (except when their majority wins). They want a “strong leader” to take care of them . . . they want a dictator (except they want him to “look cool” and “talk like them”).
This is clearly a very dangerous situation, especially for anyone who values liberty, individualism, economic progress, etc., and the legal/institutional underpinnings of those things: private property, rule of law, objective constitutional constraints on central power.
We know from 20th century history what can happen when the majority of people feel that it’s all right to scapegoat one particular group, and that their troubles will disappear if only they give unlimited freedom to a political leader.
Personally, I don’t believe the U.S. will survive as a European-style welfare state. It simply goes completely “against the grain” in so many ways. I think the U.S. will either balkanize and fracture (geographical and politically, not just culturally), or it will very quickly go the way of Greece and collapse altogether (which, of course, might also lead to balkanization).
Sorry, but I don’t see any silver lining in this.
Republicans read Dr. Suess and Judy Blume.
So, okay, I’m seriously asking ... what now? Not fooled again means what — what is the plan now? Really, I’m trying to figure my way forward on this.
What middle? Obama campaigned to the left the entire year and still won. Mitt tried to wrap up the center and lost. The center of gravity is clearly left now.
I’m afraid that’s the conclusion I’ve come to, as well. Sure, on the surface work hard to pressure the House to do the right thing ... sure. But it’s time for stronger measures.
I guess it’s time for the radical conservative version of the weather underground — sons of liberty? — to form up and get busy. Not bombs, but certainly making the ‘system’ feel the pressure.
This election determined the nature of the reset that will occur. There is no way out of the economic box we are in without a deflationary crash or hyperinflation followed by a crash. The reset would have occurred sooner but gentler (gentle only by comparison) under Romney. Republicans would have been blamed for it. Now it will take longer to come and be much more difficult to endure. At that point, it is not clear that assessing blame will be meaningful. Acquiring power and then using it wisely will be meaningful.
Best case, I think strategizing needs to be around the notion of how to recover from the reset with a decent society. This is not dissimilar to the period when Churchill was a voice in the Wilderness before WWII. He was a consistent, derided voice. When the reset came, it was fast and dramatic. I don’t think we can expect such a good result here—I think things have to get much worse than England before WWII before the public is ready to listen to the argument that the modern progressive state IS the problem and we are living through its endgame.
Late night thoughts. They will probably look incoherent tomorrow.
This country has been split since 1993.
I’m past sixtie. So I’ll just try to wait it out until I die. Or, I may move to South America. Find me a socialist country that likes Gringos and has good medical care. Basically move to a socialist nation that’s already worked all the kinks out.
And I will not vote for or donate to another republican. I voted for mccain and feel like I wasted my vote. I voted for Romney and feel like I wasted my vote. I marched for W in 2000 during the recount and we see how that worked out.
I agree. I think the problem you’re describing is primarily a moral one. Until the people who care more about weed and free contraception than debt and dependency are elevated morally they will always vote Democrat-Left. No amount of electoral ground game or poll reading or debating ability will elevate these people. It has to from gut up, grass roots, a real culturo-civic rebooting of our voting public.
The most logical group to focus on are Hispanics because they already have the basic structure in them due to their historical religion, family and work cultural “settings”. Another generation or to and they will be hopelessly corrupted by the Lib mentality.
They block us from taking them over. We must start afresh and create our own institutions, including schools, news organizations, daily papers, and entertainment and markets of all sorts. I have been saying this for years. It is too bad that Conservatives have been so slow on the draw. We have behaved like dogs hoping for crumbs from their tables.
We could also play dirty and find out the dirt on these people and use it against them. I am sure that they blackmail many of ours because they haven't been perfect, while many of them have lived lives of incredible sin and crime. We also need to let our people off if they are repentant when something is revealed about their pasts, as long as they haven't been too bad. Ours usually get destroyed over things that are merely human faults, that most people have at one time or another. We have got to stop dancing to their tunes and create our own.
Of course, above and beyond everything else we HAVE GOT TO GET BACK TO GOD, trusting and learning what it means to have faith in Him and do His bidding. Then WE CANNOT LOSE. That is the greatest, by far, lesson that we have to learn. That is what it is ALL ABOUT. Faith has so dried up in this Country that it is unbelievable. We are reaping what we are sowing. Without God first, everything else has to fall apart.
Yes, yes, yes.
Sadly, I think Greece has an advantage over us. They run sort of a two-tiered country. Sure they have a massive entitlement/socialist culture on one level. That's what we see falling. But, they also have a robust individual entrepreneurship thing going on that we don't see ... an underground economy. They do a lot of bartering and there are a lot of small businesses. I don't think there are many families that are completely removed from this underground economy. I think that will support the people in some fashion if the gov’t completely fails them. It's as if they have an emergency economic backup system in place.
We’ve tried creating our our institutions. They get labeled “right wing” or “fringe.” We need to destroy from within.
It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick but we need to start on it.
No, not bombs. Rifles.
I’m past sixtie. So I’ll just try to wait it out until I die. Or, I may move to South America. Find me a socialist country that likes Gringos and has good medical care. Basically move to a socialist nation that’s already worked all the kinks out.
And I will not vote for or donate to another republican. I voted for mccain and feel like I wasted my vote. I voted for Romney and feel like I wasted my vote. I marched for W in 2000 during the recount and we see how that worked out.
—”Moderate to liberal GOP candidates for President don’t win.
Romney, with his horrible record as Governor and his support for Abortion and the Gay Agenda and with no clear, consistent limited government message was bound to lose.”
No, you’re tragically out of step with American culture if you think that’s why Romney lost.
American culture is sufficiently far to left that anyone an inch to the RIGHT of Romney does NOT have a chance at all. Wake up.
As the article pointed out if you had read it: Romney made some strategic missteps. As much as I liked Paul Ryan, the author is right that Marco Rubio would have probably won the nomination for Romney.
I agree.
But I think it would be easier to flip existing institutions like academia, which was originally more conservative but then was methodically infiltrated and changed. The weak points, the soft spots are there to be exploited we just have to get better at finding them and then more CREATIVE in the ways we manipulate these leverage points.
The media is an area where we are probably better off creating new institutions from scratch. There are already a lot of conservative new media outlets out there. These just have to be grow their reach and diversify their content beyond political news type stuff. Their has to be an appealing alternative in the pop culture for people to coalesce around. God I wish Breitbart was still alive.
In addtion we shouldn’t use the mechanics of the election as the primary vehicle to win an election. I think if you put yourself in a position where you have to perfect mechanics to even just squeak by you’ve already lost the game.
Conservatives have to stop defending the fort and start INVADING the culture on all levels. Combine this with the basic core conservative philosophy that we all know is better for humaninty as a whole, and we would win the big fight hands down 75% of the time. Which is all we need to sustain in order for the finer elements of civilization to survive indefinitely.
“Are we wrong and the people who vote their gender, their color, their tribe, their purse, right?” We’re right, but they are stronger, “they loved the darkness rather than the light” and they are now, sadly, the majority in our country.
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