Gingrich: Boehner needs to claim split mandate

Tuesday’s election results produced two very different mandates and a very troubling question for Republicans — including me.

President Obama won a mandate despite 7.9 percent unemployment — the weakest economy since the Great Depression — high priced gasoline, huge questions about his response to Benghazi, and growing proof of government incompetence in the response to Hurricane Sandy.

Mitt Romney fought a hard and with a well-organized campaign. We should be grateful for their tremendous effort.

President Obama can and will claim to have a mandate, although a smaller, narrower one than four years ago.

After two years of opposing tax increases, fighting to control spending and investigating waste, corruption and incompetence, House Republicans were rewarded with re-election. That is a real achievement.

President Obama won a mandate . . . . .

Let me stop you there, Newt. Obama did not win a mandate, he alledgedly won an election. The whole "mandate" thing has been overused to give anyone winning an election by 4 votes a "mandate". BS!

Boehner can claim what he wants; he's weak, ineffective and is at his best when he is weeping over something trivial.The long and short of it is this - our government, our political system and our system of laws and justice are broken beyond repair. I've been saying for quite some time that we are at a point where the ills of America can no longer be fixed at the ballot box.

We have only two choices - give in completely and become the slaves of the radical socialists, or fight back. And, we fight back by getting the red states to divorce the blue and become our own independent, sovereign nation. A nation built on the Constitution, the rule of law and upon Judeo-Christian principles; just as the Founding Fathers envisioned it.

It is we conservatives who pay for the excesses of the left and, should we conservatives take our entreprenuership, our industriousness and our money to our own country, the radical socialists of the left will be left shell-shocked and fighting for survival.

My friends, enough is enough.

I think we are missing a larger point. We cannot cede the entire Northeast and Pacific West and remain viable. We were not defeated on economics, we were defeated on the social issues. And, as much as I hate to say it, Obama remains a powerful figure to the weak-mined among us. We have to eschew some positions to (read: opposition to gay marriage) in order to be viable. We can oppose abortion, but we must promise not to affect that liberty. We can’t be moral absolutists, Christian only, or we will remain a minority party. I say all this with a heavy heart. We must embrace freedom fully and leave moralizing to the pulpit. Let the people decide on their own morality.

I don’t think that was it. I think, if anything, we didn’t offer enough of a vision with enough confidence.

Romney said virtually nothing about either gay marriage or abortion, both of which he actually supported when he was governor, so it doesn’t sound to me as if the liberals could have held that against him. Your thinking was precisely the thinking of the GOP when they selected him: get somebody not known for strong “social positions,” somebody who is not a Christian, and somebody who won’t criticize the cultural status quo or Obama personally. The election was supposed to be about the economy, and Romney was supposed to come across as somebody who was morally neutral and pragmatic and knew how to make money.

And even though, theoretically, the economy was the concern of Americans, Romney did well only on those few occasions when he showed a flash of difference and indicated that he did indeed have values and care about something outside of getting elected. But in general Romney offered no alternative vision and he gave people no rallying point. He rarely opposed Obama and came across as so bland that he never galvanized the base, yet while he himself never said anything that could give the Dems ammunition, they still managed to portray him as somebody who was a bumbling, prissy, woman-hating, white racist meanie.

This, by the way, is not blaming Romney for the loss: the blame goes to the strategy, which was a product of his Massachusetts campaign managers, who obviously decided that the Scott Brown approach was the best, that is, portray him as somebody who was value-free and identical to his Dem opponent, except a little better about finances.

I agree that a preachy type (Santorum) wouldn’t have done well, but maybe it should actually have been someone such as Gingrich himself, who has values that do not come from the all-knowing state (the only kind of “values” one will be allowed in the future) and has the intellectual fire-power and passion to defend them and even project them positively. But the GOP-e was scared of him, and I think until the GOP realizes that the only way they will win will be by offering an entirely different vision of life in the US, through a confident, positive, intelligent spokesman, we’re going to continue to play catch up and we’re going to continue to lose.

Newt is owning up to his failure to figure out the election...and he isn’t engaging in “Blame Romney” crap. I respect that very much. Let’s regroup.

Agreed.

I was pretty bummed out about the election all day, but recovering a bit now. I think it is my wife really. She's a more spiritual person, ultimately, than I. :-)

However, the House Republicans' ability to "do ok" as opposed to the disaster that was the Senate, brings up a question. It is true that in a few races, Missouri in particular, our candidate shot themselves, well, maybe not in the foot. The groin would be a more appropriate metaphor. But there were several other Senate races where we had strong candidates running seemingly pretty good campaigns, and we still got klonked. The question is, why did we do ok in the House, and not elsewhere. Vote fraud theories aside, please.

Boner needs to sit down with obama and Reid and say this:

“We’ll work with you on the debt ceiling. We’ll agree to allow the taxcuts on what you call the ‘WEALTHY’ to expire. And there’s only one thing we ask from you.”

Then he turns to Reid and says “You resign from the senate. If not, we do not negotiate. In fact, we do nothing and sequestration kicks in and everyone gets a tax increase. We’ll all go off the cliff together. Take it or leave it. I’ll be in my office.”

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