Posted on 11/27/2013 6:10:40 AM PST by Moseley
As long as you mentioning gaffes, how about Obama's, like visiting all 57 states (This could be interpreted as a Freudian slip, as he was thinking of the 57 Islamic states who have an alliance at the United Nations.) or even yesterday's like claiming he could tell from viewing faces which people he saw were not native born Americans. Yet Obama hasn't been harmed in his political career, just like Biden.
The key is that there is an obvious double standard; one for Democrat lefties, the other for Republicans, as to what you can say and when. The Democrat's gaffe will be ignored by the lefty MSM, while the Republican's no matter how minor in the general scheme of things, will be made into a MSM feeding frenzy.
If the GOP were 1% as effective as the Democrats, they would have pounced on that opening and defended their own candidate on the grounds that Akin was only repeating what doctors had told him.
There are a number of Republican doctors in Congress and were at that time as well. They (or at least a subset of them) could have gotten together with Akin - also a House member at the time - and did a press conference with him to clarify his remarks and show support for him. But I guess they thought they would be getting into too much heat, especially if they themselves were running for re-election at the time.
That's no gaffe at all; it's pretty darn close to the truth. The problem was a lack of security at that fund-raising event, which allowed a 'Rat spy to enter the room and record it. The MSM did the rest.
You have got to be kidding. Plus I get so sick and tired of people putting the blame on others. That is so liberal. The candidate is always to blame. She was pathetic and would not have won with millions of help. Once that stupid witch video came out that she stupidly made, the election was over.
bump
I do not expect perfect, but I think we expect BETTER
The GOPe leaders will find a way to lose in 2014 if they can, you know they want to
17 posted on 11/27/2013 8:50:17 AM by ScottinVA: “Then the GOP needs to avoid nominating gaffe-prone buffoons like Todd Akin, Christine O'Donnell, Richard Mourdock and Sharron Angle.”
I live in Missouri. I voted for Akin in both the primary and the general election. I followed the Akin-McCaskill campaign, and Akin’s collapse, with a lot of horror.
I understand Impy’s wish that Akin would have stepped aside for another candidate, but we need to deal with the reality that senior Republican officials would have named the replacement candidate, and it is far from certain the replacement would have been a solid conservative.
Akin made a really, really stupid comment. He knows that. He's admitted it. And he also knows that Democrats defend their own when they make stupid comments, but Republicans eat their own.
But it is not fair to say he is a “gaffe-prone buffoon.”
Unfortunately, one **REALLY** stupid comment on a hot-button issue like abortion, because it is a centerpiece of the social conservative agenda on which Akin campaigned, caused major problems. Obama is getting similar problems today because there is simply no excuse for the Obamacare website malfunctions — when you make something a centerpiece of your political agenda, you need to get it right. PERIOD.
Akin knew a question about abortion in cases of rape was coming. Any conservative Christian in politics knows that. Not to have a medically-vetted answer in advance was foolish and frankly, I don't know how it possibly happened.
(The proper answer, in my opinion, is something like this: “We don't have the death penalty in America for the guilty rapist, even in horrible cases of multiple rapes with forcible violence. So why should we have a death penalty for babies? Adoption may be the answer in some cases of rape, and also supporting the mothers who want to keep their babies, but not killing innocent victims.”)
We have medically verifiable proof that babies can and often do happen as a result of rape. Akin, with his military background, the military background of his family, his service on the House Armed Services Committee, and his personal interest in military history, certainly should know of the large number of babies conceived as a result of invading armies raping conquered women. What the Russians did as they invaded Eastern Europe and Germany during World War II was horrific, and it showed with crystal clear evidence the difference between how Americans soldiers treated conquered enemies in Western Europe and West Germany and how the Russian Communists acted in their theaters of operation.
What's the lesson from this?
Certainly we ought not to be nominating gaffe-prone candidates. People sometimes get away with things at the state and local level due to lack of media scrutiny that they cannot and will not get away with once they hit the national media buzzsaw of a US Senate race or a major race for a state governorship or for a major race for the US House.
But Akin was a serving House member with years of prior service in the legislature and in Congress. That wasn't the issue. Being gaffe-prone was not the problem.
The problem was that he knew the question was coming and didn't have a well-thought-out answer in advance.
I simply do not know how that could have happened, but it did.
And it destroyed him.
I think I agree with your main point, but Akin had many years of experience in the state legislature and in Congress before he ran for the Senate.
Experience counts. We would not hire someone without experience for a position with lots of responsibility. Conservatives who think “time in the chair” doesn't count are making a major mistake.
There's a lot of truth in that statement.
You are absolutely spot-on when you say that campaigns are a footrace in which every individual step counts, not a ballistic missile in which the trajectory established at launch is virtually the only thing that counts.
You also are absolutely right that conservatives, while good at the “big picture” of getting our conservative views right, too often are not very good at the fundamentals of strategy and campaign planning.
As conservatives, we know in our business lives that time in the chair counts. We know little decisions have big consequences. We know long-term planning is important, because we usually are in a marathon, not a sprint. We know short-term pain is needed for long-term gain.
So why do we have such a terrible time applying those principles of business life to politics?
I don't have a good answer, but we'd better get an answer or we're going to lose, and lose badly, in upcoming elections.
“Democrats are developing GOTV systems fit for the 22nd Century. Republicans and the tea party are using systems fit for the 1700’s.”
I’ve been saying this for years - we can’t be so reliant on low-turnout elections. So long as we keep on this insane course of trying to make voting harder instead of campaigning to as many people as possible, we will continue to be losers.
I don’t fear a large turnout. We have the better solutions, ones which will win elections if we bother to do the hard work of getting the message to the entire electorate. We just have to stop talking to ourselves.
It isn't the actual comment that is the problem, because it is neither controversial nor untrue nor especially upsetting.
It was how the comment was treated in the public discussion that was damaging -- NOT the comment itself
Speaking of independents, they were, according to exit polls, went for Romney by somewhere around 8 to 10 points. If accurate, that number is pretty much inconsistent with Romney losing the national popular vote by 3 to 4 points. (There wasn't all that much of an excess of 'Rats over Republicans to compensate for the strong Romney showing among indies.) This constitutes one of quite a number of statistical anomalies in the national popular vote totals, which, taken together, indicate a very good chance that there were various types of fraud afoot both in the actual voting and in the vote counting.
As to Romney's comment, recall what I said earlier: there was a breach of security at the fund raising event where he delivered those remarks. Attendance should have been limited to people friendly to the candidate, and media should have been kept out. Certainly no leftist reporter for Mother Jones should have been able to get into the event. If not for the faulty security, this 43% remark would have gone completely unnoticed by the enemy and we would not even be talking about it now.
Really? Any turnout artificially swelled by such illegal tactics as - for example - ineligible people (including aliens) voting and paid hacks voting multiple times (aided and abetted by polls open for days and even weeks, so-called "early voting") spells disaster for the GOP, for conservatives in the GOP, and for the country as a whole.
There is urgency here, more so than many appreciate. Republicans have to act in any way possible to reduce 'Rat fraud and cheating in the election procedure, or else 'Rats will rule perpetually in a one party totalitarian state.
We need our own paid hacks, perhaps? But what if two paid hacks both vote on behalf of the same dead person? What would Solomon do?
The evidence is slim to none that what you suggest is actually taking place in any meaningful fashion. I know that’s not the PC thing to say, but it’s the truth.
Instead of refining our message for the people who need it, we return again and again to this farcical boogeyman. It is a convenient excuse to avoid the real issue, which is that we have failed to make our case (and, worse yet, continue to fail to make our case) to a sizeable percentage of the American public.
But so long as we have built-in excuses, we’ll never have to change. That’s bad for us, and it’s bad for the country. Far better that we admit uncomfortable truths, and start laying the ground to winning elections again, than pretend we’ve secretly won them all along.
Vote out the RINOs in 2014!!!
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