Posted on 11/07/2012 9:23:01 AM PST by Melas
Tis the season of the vanity I suppose. On the off chance that this is my opus, and while I hope it is not, goodbye if it is.
We screwed the pooch. The GOP in it's current incarnation is doomed to not only play second fiddle, but play it indefinitely until it wakes up and realizes that the world has changed, America has changed, and the GOP will have to change if it hopes to remain viable.
1) The primary process on the Republican side is way too bloody and way too public. GOP candidates rip each other to shreds in the primaries, giving Democrat strategists clear pictures of the soft underbelly of each candidate. Long before the general election, each chink in the armor is fully exposed to be cataloged and used later.
2) Looking backwards is never settled. Early on in the GOP primaries the pro-life position of the GOP was extended even to contraception, and yes Virginia that hurt. Pick the issue, whether it be contraception, pornography, or even the food pyramid: It's not 1955 anymore, and it will never be 1955 again. Those looking to return to the ethos of that time are doomed in all future elections.
3) Comments from Akin, Mourdock, and Rivard (all lost) not only sank their individual campaigns, but damaged the GOP across the board. Make all the pithy comments about women voting with their vaginas all you want, but buck up and face the reality that a pro-life position so extreme that it extends to rape is NEVER going to sell in 21st century America.
4) Americans do not want a moral leader, or rather a leader of morality. Would be Ayatollahs need not apply. Whether deeply religious or convicted secularist, the average American feels qualified to take charge of his/her own moral compass without any input from politicians.
You could sum it all up by saying that the GOP is losing because it is looking backwards while the Democrats are campaigning in the now. Until the GOP cuts ties with the regressives and reinvigorates it's message of fiscal responsibility, a strong military, and smaller government, and only fiscal responsibility, a strong military and smaller government, it's never going to gain a foothold in national politics again.
Agreed...especially number 1.
I will never, never, never accept pornography, homosexual 'marriage', or anything else you think is necessary to win elections. Let this country BURN first.
Simple Solution.
Have Texas and Florida move there primaries to the week (if not the day ) after Iowa and New Hampshire. Who ever wins virtually ends the Primary process and as a bonus no more NE Rino that cant even win there home state.
As long as the GOP has "open" primaries, we'll continue to have milktoast RINOs being nominated, and we will continue to lose.
Please don’t let this be your opus. We need more of this kind of writing.
If you don’t like it, don’t read it. The rest of America doesn’t want Washington to make that call for them.
3 yrs ago, I would never have thought Obama had a chance in hell...then I saw the republican candidates.
You neglected to mention the wide field of selfish conservative candidates in the primaries. This is a huge issue. With so many candidates at one time, how can we rally behind the best?
If the conservative candidates sat down, and discussed who’s really best for the country, and supported that one through the rest of the primary, we’d have a chance at that one winning, rather than wing divided and conquered.
We saw that in my district a few years ago- a bunch of conservatives split votes, and the rino took it. Two years later, all but one backed off and slaughtered that rino incumbent in the primary.
The bipartisan political/regulator class gets its incomes from government in many ways. The same class offers two candidates for each presidential election and doesn’t care all that much as to which candidate is elected. Both candidates will keep the debt regime going a little longer for them. The bipartisan/regulator class chases true conservatives from politics with bandwagon approaches, vulgarities, insults and threats.
Thanks Melas.
The Pubbies won’t win until they start to fight dirty. Period.
The media is in the bag for the Demagogic Party.
The unions are.
The public schools are.
The kids in those schools are.
The vulnerability of the Demwits is in the primary system — the extreme left showed that when political novice Ned Lamont knocked Joe Lieberman out in 2006; he ran in the general as an independent and whipped the hell out of Lamont and whomever the Pubbie was. Oh, and good idea, to whomever thought that supporting the Pubbie was a must in that race in that year. They’re the same people who didn’t support Romney against Obama.
So, one needed strategy is to set up 527s, recruit articulate total whackjob leftists to unseat the “moderate” incumbent leftists both in Congress, and on the state level in, for example, California and New York. It’s unlikely that Lieberman’s tactic will work for very many other incumbents who get knocked out in the primary. At that point it’s a matter of the Great Middle being forced to choose between leftist moonbats and carefully vetted Pubbies.
Obviously the necessary preceding step is to reform Pubbie nominating procedures, requiring party membership, and maybe reverting to caucus in all states. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to rearrange and shorten the primary season, either, grouping the states by population might be best, so that similar sized states are voting in the same week, and the total voted on each week would be roughly similar (so, five 2-million population states one week, one 10-million population state the next, for example).
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