The Party’s Problem

The first thing conservatives should understand about the electoral catastrophe that just befell us — and it was a catastrophe — is that any explanation of it that centers on Mitt Romney is mistaken.

Much of the discussion of the race among conservatives has made the opposite assumption. “Romney proved to be the kind of electoral drag many of us suspected he would always be,” wrote one conservative the morning after the election. “It was a flawed candidacy from the start,” wrote two others. “Romney’s caution and ever-shifting policy positions made him seem fearful, which is to say weak. His biography hurt him. . . . And because of his own history in Massachusetts, he could never effectively go after President Obama on Obamacare, the president’s biggest political weakness.” Another called Romney “the worst candidate to win his party’s nomination since WWII.” Still another wrote, “There will be a lot of blame to go around, but, if Republicans are honest, they’ll have to concede that the Romney campaign ran a bad campaign.”

All of these writers are intelligent people (some of them friends of mine). None of them makes the mistake of assuming that this election should have been easy to win given the weak economy, the public’s dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the unpopularity of Obamacare. They know that the economy has been improving, that the Democratic base in presidential races has been expanding for decades, and that the public still blames George W. Bush and his party for an economic crisis that began during his second term. Nor are they entirely wrong in their diagnoses of Romney’s distinctive weaknesses and errors. They err mainly in attributing too much importance to them.

Romney was not a drag on the Republican party. The Republican party was a drag on him. Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Romney ran ahead of most of the Republican Senate candidates: He did better than Connie Mack in Florida, George Allen in Virginia, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, Denny Rehberg in Montana, Jeff Flake in Arizona, Pete Hoekstra in Michigan, Deb Fischer in Nebraska, Rick Berg in North Dakota, Josh Mandel in Ohio, and of course Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. In some cases Romney did a lot better. (He also did slightly better than Ted Cruz in Texas, a race Blake for some reason ignored.)

None of those candidates were as rich as Romney, and almost all of them had more consistently conservative records than he did. It didn’t help them win more votes. The only Republican Senate candidates who ran significantly ahead of Romney were people running well to his left in blue states, and they lost too.

Akin and Mourdock have received a lot of attention because they fit into the story of the Senate elections of 2010. Most observers believe that Republican-primary voters threw away three Senate seats that year by choosing unelectable extremists over candidates who could have won. This year, Akin and Mourdock each made comments about abortion and rape that doomed them. If not for these five mistakes in candidate selection, Republicans would have 50 seats. So goes the story.

It’s an accurate one as far as it goes. But it is not the story of the 2012 Senate races. Berg, Allen, Thompson, and Rehberg all lost, but they were not unelectable extremists: All of them had won statewide races before. We could try to explain these defeats in terms of each candidate’s particular weaknesses. Blake, the Post reporter, hints at such an explanation: “It’s pretty clear that lackluster candidates cost Republicans multiple Senate seats on Election Day.” No. That’s the 2010 story. The 2012 Senate races were more like the ones in 2006 and 2008: wipeouts for Republicans of every description — veterans and newcomers, conservative purists and relative moderates alike.

All these candidates lost not because of the idiosyncrasies of this or that candidate or the flaws of this or that faction of the Republican party. They lost not because of the particular vices of the Tea Party, or of social conservatives, or of the party establishment. The most logical explanation for the pattern is that something common to all Republicans brought them down, and the simplest explanation is that their party is weak — and has been for a long time. Consider the evidence: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Since the Senate reached its current size, Democrats have had more than 55 seats 13 times; Republicans, never.

Before settling on this story of party weakness, we need to examine three apparent pieces of evidence of strength. The first is that Republicans retained control of the House even as they lost the presidential and Senate races. Republicans are likely to have their second-largest House majority in 60 years. They appear, however, to have narrowly lost the popular vote for the House. One reason they won so many seats anyway is that 2010 was an unusually good Republican year, and Republicans were therefore able to draw the lines of congressional districts following that year’s census. What the House success demonstrates, in part, is that Republicans can do well when they choose the voters rather than vice versa. Another reason for the House success, as Michael Barone has observed, is that the geographic distribution of Republican voters within states tends to favor them. That’s not much help, though, in amassing a national majority from statewide races.

The second piece of evidence for Republican political strength is that they hold 30 of the 50 governorships. That strength, too, is misleading. Each of those Republican governors was elected either in a state Romney carried or in the unusually Republican years of 2009 and 2010 — or, in most cases, both.

Third is that as recently as eight years ago Republicans won the White House as well as respectable majorities in the House and Senate. Even at that height, though, they had nothing like the dominance in Congress that Democrats had in the late 1970s, or 1993–94, or 2009–10. The Republican success of 2004 partly reflects the fact that it was the first presidential election following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Even in that good Republican year, though, Republicans went down one Senate seat, net, outside the South (while gaining five in the South).

Republican weakness emerges even more clearly when we look at a longer timescale. From 1896 through 1930, Republicans were the dominant party, holding the White House and Congress most of the time and losing the presidency only when they split, as in 1912 and 1916. The Great Depression made the Democrats into the dominant party until 1968. Only one Republican won the presidency during that period, and under highly unusual circumstances: He had won World War II, the Democrats had held the presidency for five consecutive terms, and the country was beset by inflation, corruption, and an unpopular war in Korea.

The Democrats lost majority status in 1968 — they would lose five of six presidential elections from that year through 1988, and win one by a hair — but Republicans did not gain it. They never held the House and rarely held the Senate during that streak of presidential wins. Why didn’t Republicans become the dominant party then? It wasn’t because of foreign policy: That boosted them during the second half of the Cold War, when the Democrats became the relatively dovish party. That’s a big reason Republicans did better at the presidential than at the congressional level. It wasn’t because of social issues: The hippies and McGovernites helped make Republicans the party of middle-class values.

What they did not do is make the Republicans the party of middle-class economic interests. Most Americans associated the party with big business and the country club, and did not agree with its impulses on the minimum wage, entitlement programs, and other forms of government activism designed to protect ordinary people from cold markets. Americans came to be skeptical of government activism mainly when they thought it was undermining middle-class values (as they thought welfare undermined the work ethic). And even when voters thought Republicans were better managers of the economy in general, they thought the GOP looked out for the rich rather than the common man.

This pattern of voter preferences — favoring the GOP on values and foreign policy, the Democrats on middle-class economics — persisted for a long time. There were always exceptions. On some social issues — for example, stem cells during the George W. Bush presidency — the public sided with the Democrats. On some economic issues, such as taxes during the Reagan presidency, the public sided with Republicans.

The generalization nonetheless holds. Clinton won the White House because of the recession of the early 1990s, of course, but also because the end of the Cold War took foreign policy off the table, badly weakening Republicans, and because he systematically addressed Democratic liabilities on welfare, crime, and other values-laden issues. During the presidential debates of 2004, Bush did well on social-issue questions while being defensive on economic issues. In 2006, when Democrats took Congress, they racked up their biggest margin against a Senate incumbent in Pennsylvania, where they ran a candidate who opposed abortion and same-sex marriage.

For the last 50 years, voters have been alarmed by rapid expansions of government (which goes a long way toward explaining the good Republican years of 1966, 1978, 1980, 1994, and 2010) but also by the prospect of major cuts to government (which goes some way toward explaining 1996 and 2012). In other years, they have held vaguely government-skeptical sentiments while approving most proposals for gradual increases in government assistance (for families paying for college, seniors trying to get prescription drugs, and so on).

After the 2006 and 2008 Democratic blowouts, liberals started to view their victory as the new normal in American politics, the result of inexorable demographic forces. After the 2010 Republican victories, some conservatives began to think that was the new normal. Republicans, they thought, had lost in ’06 and ’08 because of the Iraq War, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s big spending, and congressional scandals. Given a straight-up choice between conservatism and liberalism, though, the people would choose the former. The 2012 results give credibility to the liberal interpretation and subtract it from the conservative one. It’s the 2010 election, not the 2008 one, that is starting to look aberrant.

The Iraq War, the financial crisis, and other issues specific to the late Bush years obviously did play a huge role in the 2006 and 2008 defeats. But it’s also true that Republicans weren’t even arguing that they had a domestic agenda that would yield any direct benefits for most voters, and that has to have hurt them. Taxes had been the most powerful economic issue for Republicans for a generation, but Republicans misunderstood why. In the ’80s and ’90s, Republicans ran five presidential campaigns promising to make or keep middle-class taxes lower than they would be under Democrats, and won four of them. In 2008 they made no such promise but did say they would lower the corporate tax rate.

In the exit polls in 2008, 60 percent of voters said that McCain was not “in touch with people like them.” McCain lost 79 percent of the voters who said that. To get a majority of the popular vote, he would have had to win 96 percent of the 39 percent of voters who were willing to say he passed the threshold test of understanding their concerns. It’s amazing he came as close as he did. (Fifty-seven percent of voters said Obama was in touch, and he had to win only 81 percent of them; he got 86 percent.)

In 2012, the exit pollsters asked a different version of the question: “Who is more in touch with people like you?” Obama beat Romney by ten points, even while losing the “better handle the economy” question by one. Romney, unlike McCain, did offer middle-class voters a tax cut, although it’s not clear that this fact made its way through the din of the campaign to register with the voters. His campaign made efforts — sporadic rather than sustained — to make the case that his agenda would deliver stronger growth and higher wages. He rarely suggested it would make health care more affordable.

On only one issue did the campaign consistently make the case that Romney would take specific actions that would yield tangible benefits for most Americans: He would allow energy exploration, which would reduce the cost of living for everyone. He devoted time to that theme in his convention speech, which did not touch on affordable health care, higher wages, or the middle class. The energy argument was sufficiently effective that Obama had to steal some of its rhetoric.

The absence of a middle-class message was the biggest failure of the Romney campaign, and it was not its failure alone. Down-ticket Republican candidates weren’t offering anything more — not the established Republicans, not the tea-partiers, not the social conservatives. Conservative activists weren’t demanding that Romney or any of these other Republicans do anything more. Some of them were complaining that Romney wasn’t “taking the fight to Obama”; few of them were urging him to outline a health-care plan that would reassure voters that replacing Obamacare wouldn’t mean taking health insurance away from millions of people.

Romney’s infamous “47 percent” gaffe — by which he characterized voters who do not pay income taxes as freeloaders and sure Democratic voters, which they aren’t — made for a week of bad media coverage and some devastatingly effective Democratic ads. It was not, however, a line of thinking unique to Romney. It was an exaggerated version of a claim that had become party orthodoxy.

A different Republican presidential nominee might not have made exactly that gaffe, or had a financial-industry background that lent itself to attacks on outsourcing. He would almost certainly have had a similar weakness on economic policy, however, and might have had additional weaknesses too. (Romney at least won independent voters, which it’s hard to imagine Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, or Rick Santorum having done.) To put it differently: The problem isn’t so much that Romney was vulnerable to a set of attacks that appear to have discouraged working-class whites from voting; it’s that he didn’t have anything positive with which to counter those attacks.

The Republican story about how societies prosper — not just the Romney story — dwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations: an important story with which most people do not identify. The ordinary person does not see himself as a great innovator. He, or she, is trying to make a living and support or maybe start a family. A conservative reform of our health-care system and tax code, among other institutions, might help with these goals. About this person, however, Republicans have had little to say.

In the days since the election, Republicans have received (and given one another) a lot of advice: Step up the ground game. Soften on immigration and abortion. Embrace same-sex marriage. Appeal more to single women, Hispanics, and young people. Run the younger, more charismatic candidates Republicans have waiting in the wings. Some of this advice is good, and some of it bad. But the weakness of the Republican party predates the emergence of same-sex marriage as an issue, the development of Democratic micro-targeting strategies, and the growth of the Hispanic vote. And wasn’t Josh Mandel, the losing Ohio Senate candidate, supposed to be one of those great young conservative hopes? However much charisma and brains the next crop of Republicans brings to their campaigns, they need a stronger party.

The perception that the Republican party serves the interests only of the rich underlies all the demographic weaknesses that get discussed in narrower terms. Hispanics do not vote for the Democrats solely because of immigration. Many of them are poor and lack health insurance, and they hear nothing from the Republicans but a lot from the Democrats about bettering their situation. Young people, too, are economically insecure, especially these days. If Republicans found a way to apply conservative principles in ways that offered tangible benefits to most voters and then talked about this agenda in those terms, they would improve their standing among all of these groups while also increasing their appeal to white working-class voters. For that matter, higher-income voters would prefer candidates who seem practical and solution-oriented. Better “communications skills,” that perennial item on the wish list of losing parties, will achieve little if the party does not have an appealing agenda to communicate.

Despair has led many Republicans to question their earlier confidence that America is a “center-right country.” It is certainly a country that has strong conservative impulses: skepticism of government, respect for religion, concern for the family. What the country does not have is a center-right party that explains how to act on these impulses to improve the national condition. Until it does, it won’t have a center-right political majority either.

— Ramesh Ponnuru is senior editor of National Review.

Here’s my opinion of the Republican Party’s problem from back in February when Karl Rove was spending a quarter of a billion slandering Newt and Rick Santorum.

The GOP is Serving Mammon (a false object of worship & devotion)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2852545/posts | Scott Ryan

Posted on Wednesday, February 29, 2012 11:35:09 AM by publius321

In his speech the night of the Michigan primary, Romney went out of his way to give –extra- thanks to John McCain. His linking to John McCain is quite telling because if nominated, the ultimate result will be the same as when McCain was given the nomination due to the conservative vote being amortized over multiple candidates.

I will give credit to Romney. He made a great speech. The problem is that it was rhetoric and does not reflect his core beliefs. His core beliefs are reflected in his record as the Governor of Massachusetts. Conservatives do not CREATE programs that give away free cars, free car repairs, free car insurance and free AAA as a WELFARE BENEFIT. This was not something he just approved, this is something he CREATED. This was his brain child.

Conservatives do not CREATE socialist healthcare programs. Conservatives do not force Christian organizations to violate the fundamental tenets of the popular religion of this nation and the faith of our forefathers.

Conservatives do not undermine our second amendment rights.

Mitt Romney will be totally discredited before the race begins if he wins the Republican nomination because he will be shown by the media and Barack Obama to be a pretender while Barack Obama coasts into a second term without any public scrutiny with exception for Fox News, which the majority of gullible Americans do not watch.

Speaking of the Mitt Romney SUPERPAC Fox News, they stooped to a new low of disrespect for one of the two conservative candidates, Rick Santorum on this election night. I was listening to Senator Santorum’s speech from Michigan with great interest. I found what he was saying to be moving and right near the middle of Santorum’s speech, Fox News actually INTERUPTED his speech to call the race for Mitt Romney.

That was another appalling slap in the face to conservative voters by Fox as they violated the good faith with which conservatives perhaps foolishly entrusted them as it never entered our minds that they would do.

I actually had to turn on MSNBC at that moment just to hear the speech uninterrupted. MSNBC had also declared Romney the winner but did so with a “lower third” graphic underneath the Senator rather than tossing to some news anchor.

I think that a basic respect for the viewers and the candidate demand that after we worked so diligently to nearly defeat Romney in his own home state we earned the right to view his concession speech unmitigated.

It is clear that the majority of Michigan citizens rejected Mitt Romney and the two conservatives earned more votes than Romney. It is like living the film Ground Hog Day as we watch -once again- our party being hijacked by the candidate most of us do not want to win our Republican nomination.

It is really a sad day for conservatives and ultimately a sad day for America that we have two conservatives in this race, therefore cannot nominate a viable candidate to represent the party platform that is routinely desecrated every presidential primary.

A faction of any political party is susceptible to the gullibility concomitant to emotional intoxication. We cannot bring them out of their enchantment no matter what we say and no matter how often we demonstrate the absurdity of expecting a leftist who campaigned and governed as a leftist his entire career in politics.

They will not let the indisputable facts of what this man did despite having once been a “businessman”. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and George Soros have been more successful at business than Romney ever came close to being.

But as three of the wealthiest men in the world and -Mitt Romney himself- after retiring from Bain in his life as a politician demonstrates - business acumen is clearly not a corollary to how a “businessman” will behave in government.

But no matter HOW much we point out Romney’s ignominious track record and the basic logic that explains it – people enchanted by their pre-determined outcome are “all-in” like the residents of Jones Town and we will not break their trance.

Hence, we have indeed met the enemy and he is us. We have the votes as a whole but we are talking about a few points needed to win those delegates. We don’t have the willingness to get behind one of the two conservative candidates. Therefore we will nominate Mitt Romney and we will lose.

America may very well be destroyed by Barack Hussein Obama. You might as well start making your plans accordingly. The question left will be which states will secede from the Union when Obamacare and effrontery against the constitution like you never imagined possible is implemented at a pace far greater than what we have seen or fathomed. You may want to consider South Carolina as a new residence.

The Republican Party has abandoned its platform and the values upon which it was founded by adopting the old Clinton mantra “it’s the economy stupid”. The party has gone on record stating that moral issues are not as important to us as our own back pockets. Like Israel, “the Apple of God’s eye” as God called them did after the death of King Solomon, we are going into apostasy. God prospered Israel up to that point because they obeyed God. Seeking the prosperity was not what made them prosperous and victorious even when overwhelmed by their enemy.

Prosperity was a byproduct of virtue and obedience. After King Solomon died Israel and its Kings turned their back on God and disobeyed God. They adopted the false gods of those they defeated and built alters on the high places in direct disobedience to the one true God.

God was patient and he warned them. They did not listen and they were sacked by their enemies and handed over to slavery for centuries because they “kindled His anger against them”. It was not that God suddenly favored their evil enemies and was on the side of the nations to which he handed over Israel into captivity. It was His righteous discipline.

God does not work on man’s timeline and through the prophets he told His people the Jews that he would deliver them when they repented. But generations of people and their posterity lived in slavery while God still kept his covenant with His people, that nation, Israel.

America was founded upon those Judeo-Christian principles. Though we are much larger geographically speaking, we were once like a “little-Israel” by adoption. It was those same principles and an extension of that same promise “I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you” that made us.America, especially under Barack Obama is not only getting closer to the day when we curse Israel and betray her, we have adopted the idols of this world.

We are a nation addicted to entertainment, pornography and all kinds of sexual immorality (possibly our leading export and among the few things we currently “manufacture”). In the past few years we have seen state after state going on record and giving legal approbation to homosexual “marriage”. That’s not just our President but also our courts, state government after state government and legislatures.

Our President has violated our military by not only allowing homosexual activity within but encouraging it. The federal government and state governments are indoctrinating –children- with homosexual propaganda. Major corporations like Home Depot, the NFL and a great many others are flagrantly funding and encouraging such sexual immorality.

The basic sense of morality is almost gone from all aspects of life and it is leading to anarchy, the vacuum from which will always be despotism as our founders consistently warned. Balance sheets, income statements, housing appraisals even audited financials of the highest “blue chip” companies can no longer be trusted because a rapidly augmenting percentage of the people of this nation and this world have no sense of morality or honor.

Courts repeatedly issue verdicts of injustice because the efficacy of oaths has been destroyed and perjury runs rampant throughout the nation as lying has lost any stigma.

In this culture glorifying violence and debauchery, children going to school and murdering other children in our public school system has become so common that the story of it barely makes the headlines through an entire day unless it is for the purpose of blaming the freedoms expatiated in our constitution.

Our President and Attorney General give assault weapons to drug lords resulting in murders of American citizens – then commit treason against the people of the United States. They not just knowingly cover it up – but rather they exploit it for the purpose of blaming it on our constitution and exploit the tragedies they caused by using it as pseudo-justification to restrict more of our rights.

Then we find ourselves giving them undue deference and ask whether such people should be impeached at a time where historical precedence and our founding documents should demand they rightfully face trial for treason. We have now murdered over 50 million babies in the woumb since Roe v. Wade.

Anyone who examines the current moral state our nation and does not conclude that we are a society that is not on the verge of becoming a footnote in history and should instead focus on the economy has lost all sense of reality.

The final question is whether we will elect the leader who used to turn around companies or the leader whose rightful conclusion is that this once Christian nation needs to do what Israel eventually did under a righteous king who feared the Lord, tore down the alters in high places and declared a national day of repentance and mourning.

As Job said “He makes the nations great, then destroys them.” America, unlike Israel does –not- have an eternal covenant with God. His children who follow him do; but his children can also be found all over the world being persecuted even onto death. What should make us so special as to warrant exception?

What I am seeing in the GOP among the liberal faction is acrimony toward the conservatives who are doing everything they can to save this party. Santorum has been ridiculed, libeled and slandered for being “too religious”. This is not a good portent for America, especially when it is from within the Republican Party.

One thing that is for certain is that Barack Obama is an evil man with treacherous plans for America. But Americans including some Republicans are incredibly arrogant to think that just because we are America, that we can violate Gods commands without compunction and go on record stating as a people that our mammon is more important than standing for the godly principles upon which we were blessed to be founded – without thinking we will be held accountable.

As Isaiah said, the pride of men will be humbled and the loftiness of men will be abased.

Freedom is the natural state of man. Tyranny is the result of sin. Prosperity will naturally occur in a righteous nation. I believe we were already handed over to our enemy in 2008 and if we do not repent and turn from the wickedness to which we are enslaved, it is going to be over.

There is something spiritual going on in America that is far beyond anything we can see. It was palpable 2008 when we witnessed the masses in a state of unprecedented public euphoria, hand over our nation to a charismatic socialist. I was as though their eyes had been blindfolded and no matter how hard we tried to show them the clear evidence, they could not see the obvious.

Those blindfolds are now on the GOP and just like with Obama followers, the more they are shown the truth, the more obstinate they become. It cannot be mere irony that after years of being under this affliction of Obama, we in the Republican Party are faced with the prospect of nomination –another- charming figure of our own - who has a track record that opposes most of the fundamental values of our platform.

Out of 300 million Americans from which to select a nominee, we are getting closer to nominating a charming man who causes the blind-folds to cover the eyes and seduce our own. After being handed over to the enemy for the past three plus years, out of the 300 million Americans, we are close to nominating one who follows one of America’s greatest false prophets, Joseph Smith.

The God of Israel and the God upon which this nation was founded made it clear who He is. He said “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the End”. He made it clear that there is only ONE God. At a time when we need to turn back to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we are about to follow a different route and choose as our presidential nominee, a man who believes not only that there are infinite gods – but that He too can become god.

There is no irony at this cross-road. It is easy to go through the motions day by day and not think about the significance of what we are doing and the choices we make.

To borrow a phrase from the American “Great Awakening” theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), “the physical universe is only the skeleton of reality”. Taking a circumspect view of the choices with which we are faced,

I conclude that there is –no way- that the monumental decision we are making is not a spiritual moment in our history that will determine whether we are on the side of the One who blesses this nation for the past centuries.

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