Posted on 01/14/2007 10:22:03 PM PST by FairOpinion
I bet Rush wouldn't agree with Newt. Abandoning the base to try to appeal to the mushy middle isn't the way to win elections. If anything, we need to get back to conservative principles and purge RINOS from the party.
Newt doesn't advocate "abandoning the base", he is advocating EXPANDING the base, but not allowing the Republican party to be blackmailed by the fringe unapeasables, who claim to be conservatives, but all they every did was give us 8 years of Clinton by voting for Perot, which also launched Hillary's political career, and these same people are pleased that Santorum, a real conservative got defeated. In other words they use the excuse of being "conservative" to attack Republicans and help Democrats get elected. These are NO conservatives, despite of their claims.
"If anything, we need to get back to conservative principles and purge RINOS from the party."
In other words cede permanent majority to the Democrats -- that'll help conservative principles.
"If anything, we need to get back to conservative principles and purge RINOS from the party."
In other words cede permanent majority to the Democrats -- that'll help conservative principles.
This is exactly what another Southerner with Clinton envy who happens to have a talk show accuses "moderates" of doing: moistening a finger and sticking it up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing and going in that direction.
Remember the newer days when Dubya tried to repeat his bipartisan approach that he used as governor of Texas, and had Ted Kennedy and John Breaux over to the White House for glad-handing and mutual admiration?
Then the Democrats turned around and screwed him. Daschle got the Senate away from the GOP by turning a RiNO, and he proceeded to beat Dubya like a drum.
Yeah, being friendly to partisan Democrat werewolves is the way to go. You'll get a lot done. Like getting your judge nominees approved.
I do not see anything wrong with being friendly in person and then fiercely knocking your opponent in a debate. People like David Dreier from California do that all the time.
Saving
I agree and exactly what some of us have been saying on here. The GOP was co-opted in 2006 by a small but loud group of far right conservatives of the 'my way or no way because I am staying home crowd' and it proved to be disaster. You cannot be a one issue dominated party and win which is something the far right doesn't seem to care about as long as their 'one issue' is out in front. The message seems to be more important than winning.
Reagan once said the Repub party is an open tent to anyone who also embraces conservative ideas. God we need RR now more than ever!
[Article] Mr. Gingrich blames a flawed strategy for Republicans' loss of a congressional majority that Mr. Gingrich was credited with winning in 1994. He said his party can still build a durable governing majority, but first must abandon the strategy of Karl Rove, the White House political director who has emphasized direct appeals to the party's base.
"A base-motivation party inherently, in the long run, drives away the non-base," Mr. Gingrich said. [Emphasis supplied.]
packrat35 They'll never stop blaming conservatives instead of the real culprits-wishy washy Republicans who spent money like drunken sailors on shore leave.
Concurring bump. Remember the "pigs at the trough"? That was David Stockman's 1981 (for your younger FReepers) characterization of the actions behind-the-scenes of the "Wall Street/Yacht Club/Rockefeller-Dole-Bush Wing" of the GOP, as they collaborated with industrial and commercial lobbyists in passing out goodies. Theodore White sketched them in some detail in his Making of the President series; pick up just about any of those books and you'll find them limned nicely. I happen to have The Making of the President 1964, which I picked up for 50 cents on a library remaindered cart 20 years ago because I'd always wanted to learn more about the great Barry Goldwater campaign that so illuminated the divisions and partitions of the Republican movement.
Newt's wrong about "flawed strategy": the problem was nonperformance and corruption in the Republican caucus that Denny Hastert and the other House leaders did nothing about. Hastert knew about Rep. Mark Foley, but Foley was still there when a gay Democratic activist outed him and put his shady business on the street.
Outrageous pork-barreling (like the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" -- which an Alaskan FReeper actually defended to me, knowing what his bridge cost the party!), corruption, and the rest presented the Democrats with something like a replay of the House Post Office scandal, complete with prison terms for some of the actors.
It wasn't the conservatives! That's the Yacht Club wing talking trash -- after having caused the scandals!
My own humble opinion of what Newt in this article is doing is this:
The "moderate" wing (the Dole/Bush Wing) has just about frozen out the conservatives and would now like to finish them off. They announced their play ten years ago, when Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "The Southern Captivity of the GOP" in which he bemoaned the fact that -- according to him -- the GOP was on the verge of repudiation and purdah by the all-important voters of the "battleground states" on the edge of the "Finkelstein Box" (please Google these terms, I don't have time to go into all that) because of the GOP's increasing identification (by a hostile MSM) with the unwashed, pellagra-ridden, morally ugly and culturally retrograde Southerners, or more specifically with Southern Bubbas/crackers/rednecks. ("BCR's" for short, how about?)
Well, perhaps GOP'ers were, and perhaps they were not so identified, but the high command of the GOP has continued to distance itself from conservatives. For example, at the 2000 GOP convention, the socially conservative "religious right" delegates wanted to interview George W. Bush, but they got Karl Rove instead. But where was Bush? Over across town at a political "meet the candidate" dinner put on by the Log Cabin Republicans, where he was being advanced by Mary Matalin with soothing words about the logicality of gay marriage. (Want source materials? I got 'em.) In short, Dubya was doing outreach to the gays, not to the Christian right.
Point is, he wasn't doing what Newt and others have accused Karl Rove of doing, viz., appealing "just" to the base. Dubya and Rove have been walking a tightrope for years, trying to keep the conservatives in the tent without anyone else's seeing them insofar as possible while playing "big tent GOP" with everyone else -- just what Fair Opinion and Newt are preaching.
There have been exceptions, of course; the President eventually endorsed a marriage amendment to head off the inevitable gay legal attack in the Supreme Court on the institution of marriage. But the exceptions, for the most part, prove the rule. The President has been very reluctant to come to the defense of marriage, very slow to say anything about abortion, and extremely reluctant to turn on the real cause of illegal immigration: employers who positively want and deliberately attract Latin American illegals to come work for them for market-breaking low wages.
More to the immediate point, Newt wants back "in", and he can't get back "in", and so he's got Rudy helping him out here -- but he still won't get back "in" because he's identified now with the aforementioned, untouchable "BCR's" and is untouchable himself -- a political leper in the party he once led to its only really big political sweep since Reagan's landslide, and its biggest since World War II.
The reason is that WASPs don't like BCR's any more than liberals do, for cultural reasons -- and because they remember that, once upon a time, in a clash much older than the civil rights movement, "those people", "them", once stood between them and the achievement of ultimate political power and a Gilded Age. No, WASPs don't like BCR's.
And NeoCons -- well, NeoCons are liberals who know what a defense policy is and what it's useful for. Half a century ago, many of them were Trotskyites drummed out of the Communist Party who wound up writing opinion for middlebrow magazines. And nowadays, well, they still don't like BCR's, either.
Which leads us back to the conundrum that the BCR's were welcome to join the GOP......as long as they stayed in the back of the bus and didn't expect anyone to speak to them. But the GOP never really joined them -- not even after seven presidential victories achieved with Southern electoral votes.
No, Newt won't get back "in", not even with a hand up from Rudy, not even if he swears off conservatism. No, Newt's still one of "them".
Sorry, Newt. See you at the 2008 convention. You'll be doing color commentary from the sidelines, not wheeling and dealing. Wish it were otherwise, but you're a pariah now, blackballed by the Bonesmen.
JMHO.
That's assuming they even know what their one big issue is - it's always vague and changing. Nothing is ever good enough. I think what's most important to them is that they feel catered to, just like the moonbats on the Dem side. A relatively small group of consultants and pundits have made a nice niche industry for themselves by feeding that kind of perpetual discontent.
Gingrich ping.
Rove made a bold play in 2000 and moreso in '04 to win by expanding the electorate to include hardcore conservative, non-traditional voters. This gets around the problem of weak appeal among independants. The propblem then becomes that your position is predicated on the least reliable voters who have to constantly be pandered to. You have to make increasingly intense effort to maintain a fragile base, in turn shrinking your overall market share.
Your complaints about Wasps sounds eerily similar to stuff I read in "Born Fighting", penned by James Webb.
Newt is the one the Dems least want to face in a presidential debate.
I think Gingrich is a real contender for one reason: Message. GOPAC and 1994 are both instances of "Politics 101" - identify your message, then repeat it until the votes are counted. Newt is a well disciplined campaigner and can do what is necessary to win and re-build the base. Rudy and McPain won't get enough of the conservative voters needed to win and Hunter, Tancredo and Ron Paul don't have anywhere near the national name ID one has to have to win the Presidency.
Absolutely. I held my nose in the last election voting to keep Ford out (Tennessee Senate), but I'm running out of patience. The Republican party is abandoning its conservative base, while its most vocal supporters simultaneously blame that same conservative base for election losses when members of the base choose not to vote for "liberal-lite".
The Repubs had better turn right or they'll lose a lot more. I predicted that this last election wouldn't go so well, and I'm predicting that if they don't start acting like conservatives again (and especially fiscal conservatives), the next election will be even worse.
They need to earn votes.
Did any of the data give any top reasons why the unaffiliated voted en-masse for the democrats? Your polling data fits with what I saw locally - conservatives and republicans did not stay home - yet the end result was a democrat victory.
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