Posted on 11/10/2012 8:58:22 PM PST by River Hawk
After its second defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, under whom unemployment has never been lower than the day George W. Bush left office, the Republican Party has at last awakened to its existential crisis.
Eighteen states have voted Democratic in six straight elections. Among the six are four of our most populous: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. And Obama has now won two of the three remaining mega-states, Ohio and Florida, twice.
Only Texas remains secure -- for now.
At the presidential level, the Republican Party is at death's door.
Yet one already sees the same physicians writing prescriptions for the same drugs that have been killing the GOP since W's dad got the smallest share of the vote by a Republican candidate since William Howard Taft in 1912.
In ascertaining the cause of the GOP's critical condition, let us use Occam's razor -- the principle that the simplest explanation is often the right one.
Would the GOP wipeout in those heavily Catholic, ethnic, socially conservative, blue-collar bastions of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept, have anything to do with the fact that the United States since 2000 has lost 6 million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories?
Where did all those jobs and factories go? We know where.
They were outsourced. And in the deindustrialization of America, the Republican Party has been a culpable co-conspirator.
Unlike family patriarch Sen. Prescott Bush, who voted with Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond against JFK's free-trade deal, Bush I and II pumped for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and opening America's borders to all goods made by our new friends in the People's Republic of China.
Swiftly, U.S. multinationals shut factories here, laid off workers, outsourced production to Asia and China, and brought their finished goods back, tax-free, to sell in the U.S.A.
Profits soared, as did the salaries of the outsourcing executives.
And their former workers? They headed for the service sector, along with their wives, to keep up on the mortgage payment, keep the kids in Catholic school and pay for the health insurance the family had lost.
Tuesday, these ex-Reagan Democrats came out to vote against some guy from Bain Capital they had been told in ads all summer was a big-time outsourcer who wrote in 2008, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt!"
Yes, the simplest explanation is often the right one.
Republicans are also falling all over one another to express a love of Hispanics, after Mitt won only 27 percent of a Hispanic vote that is now 10 percent of the national vote.
We face demographic disaster, they are wailing. We must win a larger share of the Hispanic vote or we are doomed.
And what is the proposed solution to the GOP's Hispanic problem, coming even from those supposedly on the realistic right?
Amnesty for the illegals! Stop talking about a border fence and self-deportation. Drop the employer sanctions. Make the GOP a welcoming party.
And what might be problematic about following this advice?
First, it will enrage populist conservatives who supported the GOP because they believed the party's pledges to oppose amnesty, secure the border and stop illegals from taking jobs from Americans.
And in return for double-crossing these folks and losing their votes, what would be gained by amnesty for, say, 10 million illegal aliens?
Assume in a decade all 10 million became citizens and voted like the Hispanics, black folks and Asians already here. The best the GOP could expect -- the Bush share in 2004 -- would be 40 percent, or 4 million of those votes.
But if Tuesday's percentages held, Democrats would get not just 6 million, but 7 million new votes to the GOP's less than 3 million.
Thus, if we assume the percentages of the last three elections hold, the Democratic Party would eventually gain from an amnesty a net of between 2 and 4 million new voters.
Easy to understand why Democrats are for this. But why would a Republican Party that is not suicidally inclined favor it?
Still, the GOP crisis is not so much illegal as legal immigration. Forty million legal immigrants have arrived in recent decades. Some 85 percent come from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Most arrived lacking the academic, language and labor skills to compete for high-paying jobs.
What does government do for them?
Subsidizes their housing and provides free education for their kids from Head Start through K-12, plus food stamps and school lunches, Pell Grants and student loans for college, Medicaid if they are sick, earned income tax credits if they work and 99 weeks of unemployment checks if they lose their job.
These are people who depend upon government.
Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut taxes they do not pay, but take away government benefits they do receive?
Again it needs be said. When the country looks like California demographically, it will look like California politically. Republicans are not whistling past the graveyard. They are right at the entrance.
Liberalism is parasitic. The areas where liberals prevail will slowly die.
“I maintain that Conservatives were damaged more by this election than the GOP.”
Nonsense. Romney was a moderate and he lost. McCain was a moderate and he lost. Stop nominating moderates.
“Romney was a moderate and he lost. McCain was a moderate and he lost. Stop nominating moderates.”
The GOP elite persist in trying to serve up a moderate candidate with a conservative VP.....they deliberately have forgotten that the Conservative ant the head of the ticket and the Moderate VP is the only formula that has produced electoral landslides for the Republican Party.
The Reagan/Bush ticket is the most successful Republican ticket ever.....and because the East Coast Ivy League snob was on the bottom..and the Eureka College actor at the head...they’d just as soon forget it ever existed.
parasites tend to kill their hosts actually.
And conservatives won somehow because of that? How exactly was our agenda furthered in 2008 and 2012? Is the government smaller? Are taxes lower? is spending decreased? was welfare decreased? was a single abortion prevented? Was the border secured? Was Christianity strengthened within our society? Was Islam’s influence in our culture decreased? Was homosexuality marginalized? was our military made stronger? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.
RINOs certainly are.
Wether or not the rest of the GOP follows remains to be seen.
I fear the answer is “YES”.
“There is still 2014 and 2016.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. If Obama gets 2 more supreme
court appointments he would have control of 2 1/2 of the
three branches of government. He will be able do what he
wants.
Boner, Can’tor, Priebus and McConnman are worthless and will work against any TEA party, or conservative candidate that tries to run. Besides there will be a quite a few new
amnestied illegals ready to vote for Obamaclause.
Which is why we need to stop nominating moderates who cannot win.
We need a conservative!
Than by God if we FReepers and real Americans call ourselves patriots we will have to do what our ancestors did in 1776. I’m ready. It’s that serious. We’re a nation that defeated tyrants aboard and we couldn’t do it here?
Lots of lumberheads out there drooling in cups, fail to see this.
And there are still people out here and elsewhere who claim globalism was good for America, outsourcing hundreds of thousands of American jobs to Communist China was good for us, all while the government aided and abetted and offered prizes and benefits for tens of millions of low wage illegal aliens to enter the U.S.
It was national suicide on a grand scale.
There is no political party on the right (GOP or any other new/third-party) that would be effective. I don’t care if you found a candidate that was a clone of Reagan, I have serious doubts the political right will be given an opportunity to do anything effective before it’s too late.
The *only* way the political right would be able to regain control would be to out-promise free goodies to the voters and there’s no way we could do that — even if we were that desperate — because the political left will always be more than happy to give away *far more* goodies than we ever would.
The problem, as I see it, is that half or more of the voters are addicted to govt and WILL NOT STOP voting themselves “gifts from the public treasury”. Like Rush said, “you can’t beat Santa Claus”.
I have serious doubts that any political party can fix this before the system collapses under it’s own weight. It would take a significant shift in our society away from govt handouts and back to self-reliance, self-sufficiency and rediscovering the intense shame & humiliation of accepting welfare or charity when you know you are capable of finding a job and standing on your own two feet. That societal change is not going to happen in our lifetimes. It took decades to reach this point. We won’t change it overnight.
If this country survives 0bama’s 2nd term, I will be pleasantly surprised, but my expectations are very, very low. We know we can’t afford 0bamacare and it will now become permanent. And I think it is impossible to “spend” our way out of debt, but the political left will bankrupt us trying to do so because they are controlled by their ego and must prove themselves “correct” or die trying. The Supreme Court is going to be stacked in liberal’s favor for *GENERATIONS* to come to ensure no liberal effort is defeated in court and as a safety backstop to any efforts to reverse the damage via court challenges.
I think we should all ponder the realistic, reasonable (and dire) implications of 0bama’s re-election and begin making the appropriate plans & preparations for our future as we each see fit. I believe there is a massive “reset” in the near-term and it will be very, very ugly.
Hate to be a downer, but I don’t see the glass as either half-full or half-empty; I just see a half a glass of water.
The country is going to have to hit rock bottom I’m afraid, before they see the light.
The more appropriate question in light of recent events would be, Is the USA headed for the boneyard?
The answer is yes; at least, in any variety of recognizable form.
Yes, but we lost the Presidency and a couple Senate seats we couldn’t spare. That means We’ve lost the Supreme Court for decades, along with every other new federal judgeship that comes open. The worst freaks our law schools have turned out are going to be getting life appointments. It may not matter whether the GOP continues as a functioning party. Maybe we can pick up Senate seats in 2014, but terrible damage will be done in the meantime. I doubt the House GOP has the stones to defund the courts.
I guess so. At this point, though, so much has changed that it's hard to remember those days back in the 40s and 50s when manufacturing jobs were plentiful and passed on from generation to generation.
Pat Buchanan, like Kevin Phillips, (maybe) Richard Whalen, and some of the National Review writers was a Catholic from the Northeast who thought that his people could provide a new core for the GOP -- together with Westerners and Southerners to be sure, but Catholics from the Northeast would provide the other leg of the table.
It didn't turn out that way. Part of the reason was that the GOP became the Southern and Evangelical party. Part was that Nixonian conservatism was always half-liberal, and whether or not it could have survived on its own, there wasn't much left when Nixon went. That Catholics couldn't go quite as far as Protestants could with the free market talk was another.
But the fact that that whole world was coming apart was surely another reason. The unraveling may have been due to free trade, but now it's hard to see how things could have stayed the way they were, let alone to imagine how they could (or should) be restored to the old way.
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