Posted on 12/02/2012 8:32:38 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush.
William F. Buckley once noted that he was 19 when the Cold War began at the Yalta conference. The year the Berlin Wall came down, he became a senior citizen. In other words, he explained, anti-communism was a defining feature of conservatism his entire adult life.
Domestically, meanwhile, the right was largely a “leave me alone coalition”: Religious and traditional conservatives, overtaxed businessmen, Western libertarians, and others fed up with government social engineering and economic folly. The battle against tyrannical statism abroad only buttressed the domestic antagonism toward well-intentioned and occasionally democratic statism at home.
The end of the Cold War gave way to what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the “holiday from history” of the 1990s and the “war on terror” in the 2000s. People forget that Bush was elected during the former and had the latter thrust upon him. But at the end of the 1990s, he was one of many voices on the right trying to craft a political rationale to deal with a demographically changing electorate.
He campaigned on a “humble foreign policy” in 2000 and promised something very, very different than a “leave me alone” domestic policy. He called his new approach “compassionate conservatism.”
For years, I’ve criticized “compassionate conservatism” as an insult to traditional conservatism and an affront to all things libertarian.
Bush liked to say that he was a “different kind of Republican,” that he was a “compassionate conservative.” I still hate that formulation. Imagine if someone said, “I’m a different kind of Catholic (or Jew, or American, etc.): I’m a compassionate Catholic.” The insinuation was that conservatives who disagreed with him and his “strong-government conservatism” were somehow lacking in compassion.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
I like Bush the man, but as President he spent too much, never vetoed a bill and caved to the Democrats way too often. Besides his ignoring the enforcement of our borders (which he could have easily pushed for after 9/11), his biggest mistake in my opinion was not trying to pass a voter ID law after the hanging chads debacle (it would have been the perfect time to enact it, since it cost us both mentally and financially to go through all that recount nonsense). If it had passed then, you know Romney would have probably won this last election, despite his terribly-run campaign, and it would have been a Helluva lot easier for future Republican candidates to win in general thereafter (Romney won all but one state that had voter I.D. requirements).
Am I hallucinating or did you just type the above?
1) George Allen is a RINO? Really?
2) Akin lost by FIFTEEN POINTS. HE ran FOURTEEN points behind Romney. NOTHING could have saved him.
Allen lost by 6 points.
44% vs. 40% isn't nearly as bad as the collection of nitwits, from Gary Bauer to Phyllis Schafly, that have been repeating the bogus "Romney got fewer votes than McCain" nonsense.
There needs to ba a Republican *charm school* where candidates and wanna be candidates can go to smooth over their rough edges. Every Republican should know that the media will ask tough questions on abortion, creationism etc. Republicans should know how to finesse those kinds of questions.
yep, GOPsterin suggested something like this the other day.
Here's a couple of common sense rules:
1) The first commandment should be : Don't insult the voters you need to get you elected.(Ironically Romney and Angle both broke this one, and Akin too)
2) Don't be more effective at rallying voters to vote against you than you are to rally voters to vote for you.
And since in many areas there are more registered Dems than registered Rs then #1 is required to follow #2.
Here's the more popular excuses that I have read so far:
1) Voter fraud(right after this election this was #1)
2) the MSM (always the most popular)
3) The establishment stopped supporting them
(I saw this one today a bunch)
Here's one floating around here that they been hearing on talk radio (so it must be true): If only Scott Brown was a real conservative like Angle or Akin he would have won MA. What kind of hopeis there with thinkin like that?
All of the elections since 2000 show that half of the country wants big government and half do not like big government. Both sides have to somehow talk to each other, preferably without using politicians. Promoting discussions in school regarding big versus small government would be good. Maybe some interested individuals or business people or organizations could promote essay contests on what the founding fathers said about small government and what it means as opposed to big government. A prize of $50 could be a good motivator.
Buy the way, are they still teaching civics in the public schools?
The GOP screwed themselves and us under GWB. We got generations of voting age kids that either just remember GWB years, or more like Clinton then GWB years, but no positive R POTUS as an example.
I have posted many times here that if it was important to convince voters that ‘freedom’ is better than the mommy state, to vote R POTUS rather than D POTUS, then they needed a 2-term-R POTUS to show how something like that works successfully in their interests, and clearly that was not GWB.
This is the unfortunate reality.
If Obama leaves office looking like a success (say the economy looks like it is getting better) leaving office then the national R party is over as a governing option.
Rs best bet now is that taxes on the rich go up (automatically), Obama gets his big ‘victory’ without GOP votes and then the economy crashes. Then Rs can give Ds a taste of their own medicine,
Otherwise its just more of the crazy cult minority stuff.
I don’t know how any white male can vote for the dems. White males have a target on their backs.
You’re right that these people should take more care to be accurate, especially in trying to figure out what went so wrong, how it could have been different, and how to make it different going forward. In the days after the election that sort of thing can be forgiven. I guess it takes a week or longer to get the final numbers.
But I do think repeating the bogus 44% figure is a big deal because of the false narrative it is used to advance. If it really was 44%, then that means Bush was almost within 10 points with Hispanics. This is used to convince conservatives and Republicans to go the Bush route of pandering and being firmly left wing on immigration. I mean, if Bush was that close, then maybe more of the same could get us even closer.
However, the reality that Bush got no more than 40% takes it from a nearly single-digit loss to as much as a landslide 20 point loss. This shows that even a shameless panderer like Bush (who even coined, or at least made popular a new nauseating platitude in ‘family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande’), against an uninspiring opponent in Kerry, will still get his clock cleaned with Hispanics. It shows the folly and limits of Bush style pandering. It shows that even in a good year for Republicans with a good showing with Hispanics, we’ll nonetheless lose big with Hispanics.
There really is no good reason to expect a shift among immigrant groups from Democrats to Republicans. California proves that even ‘moderate’ Republicans can’t win Asians or Hispanics even though the Democrats have run the state into the ground. And so what if we do manage to get back up to Bush’s 40%? It won’t be long before the Hispanic share of the electorate grows large enough that even a 40% showing will represent an absolute loss from our dismal showing in 2012.
” Rs best bet now is that taxes on the rich go up (automatically), Obama gets his big ‘victory’ without GOP votes and then the economy crashes. Then Rs can give Ds a taste of their own medicine,”
YEP
Bush had weaker opponents and still barley beat them.
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