Posted on 11/06/2008 6:35:31 AM PST by reaganaut1
The in-between battleground has been the affluent suburbs where urban and rural cultures intersect. These are areas increasingly dominated by upper-middle-class professionals with college degrees. In the 1960s and 1970s they usually voted Republican. Urban couples moving to the suburbs would forsake their urban machines and ethnic identities and switch their registration to Republican. Places such as Westchester County, New York, and Orange County, California, were [once] bastions of Republican strength. Suburban states such as New Jersey that used to be up for grabs are almost completely lost to the GOP.
...
In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks satirized these people as "bourgeois bohemians," lampooning "latte towns" where these upper-educated newcomers sip at Starbucks while listening to National Public Radio. But it doesn't do any good to satirize these people anymore. They are becoming a majority -- or at least enough of a constituency to play the crucial swing vote between urban Democrats and rural Republicans. Educated people cannot be moved by appealing to lower-middle-class resentments. They must be confronted in an intelligent way.
What this means is that the Sarah Palin strategy isn't going to work very long. Rural folk who shop at Wal-Mart and send their sons off to the military may be the "real America," but they are no longer enough to carry an election. Dropping "g's" and talking about high school sports may coral a solid 40 percent of the electorate but after that it's a dead end. Palin may be smart enough to broaden her appeal and run on her intelligence, but it will be a mid-course correction.
The reason John McCain lost and Barack Obama won is not that McCain was too old or Obama was making an emotional appeal for racial harmony. The reason Obama won is that he appeared the smarter candidate.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
“There are lots of reasons Obama won, but Republicans do need to be smarter. “
A little more principled would help.
Let’s not over-think this - just do what B Hussein Obama did: spend 650 million dollars (let’s adjust for 2012 and make it an even one billion) and have a sycophantic mass media. Piece of cake!
Republicans not only need to be smarter, they also need to be more aggressive, they need to be in-your-face with strong comebacks to the reporters and pundits who ask those ridiculous questions, they need to get on the offense rather than always play defense, and they need to get back to CONSERVATISM.
I think the Democrats need to be called on every promise they made, just like the Republicans were. “Where’s bin Ladin?”. “I thought you were going to go get Osama!! We want him NOW. You’re no better than BUSH”. “Where’s my free health care?”. “The ecomomy still sucks.. how come?”. This is exactly what the Democrats did for the last 8 years. Miserable people make those around them miserable. Enough miserable people vote out the incumbent.
Republicans need to raise more money than they did this last time, they need to master the internet and web 2.0 and they need to learn to message. Any candidate needs to be able to speak properly and communicate their ideas.
It’s not just those voters. It’s also the GOP giving up on Blacks and Hispanics. We should have been cancvassing the inner cities, making BOH work for every damn one of those many votes. We should have been speaking to Hispanic - in person not over the airwaves. Ditto for blue collars. Nary a shot was fired.
I totally agree. BHO’s campaign was emailed all the young voters for donations. They were all over the internet, etc.
It would be a mistake to think that the Republicans aren't 'smart' enough to win an election. They know quite well how to win. They didn't want to win.
The only goal of the Republican Party is to be an ineffective alternative to the Democrat Party.
We need a leader to rally around.
Yes, we have to stop being door mats. One of the reasons McCain did not win is because he was not aggressive on BO’s bad points, Marxist for one.
Thank GOD for Rush as I am sure he will be playing many Democrat promised sound bites.
“spend 650 million dollars “
Do you think Republicans could raise this much from inside the U.S.? I don’t think the Arabs or Hugo Chavez would help us out.
What about 2010??????????
what a bogus elitist POS anti conservative RINO article.
we need to be more CONSERVATIVE!! period.
correction 2010.
Obama(taxes) will need to be defined before then.
Thanks to GWBush the transition clearances are happening ALREADY.
The Obama(taxes) team will be operating LOOONG before inaguration day.
The GOP made the mistake of focusing too much on capturing the South and the Evangelicals at the expense of the rest of the country.
If we look at the traditional conservatism, it was based in the Mountain West, Farmlands and the NorthEast. It was pretty effective during the elections. Minimal Government, distrust of everything and a general indifference to social issues. (Think about it, a Republican Ex-General coined the Phrase Military-Industrial Complex). The heart of Conservatism was a pragmatic sensibility, they don’t want to spend money, but they will.
But we then made the fatal mistake of trying to take over the South and the Evangelicals. And instead of trying to take over on economic issues, we made the victory based on Social Issues. The Social Issues the South (and evangelicals) care about are repulsive to the rest of the traditional Republican base. And Southerns are the least pragmatic people in the US.
And in this election, when the conservative noise machine started focusing on ACORN, Socialist, Marxist, Wright, Ayers, the “Whitey Tape” it just turned off traditional conservatives because no serious person cares about this nonsense. Rolling taxes back to Clinton year levels in the face of increasing government expenses isn’t Marxism, it’s a tough choice makes if they don’t want to cut spending - Reagan raised taxes 6 out of 8 years. Socialism is the state taking control of the means of production, it’s not raising taxes. ACORN, Wright, Ayers, could never do as much damage to America what Wall Street did in the last 6 years.
The Republicans hurt themselves by running a primary process allowing the candidate to be decided too early, having good candidates drop out too early, having the early primaries weighted with liberal voters, and ultimately, choosing the moderate McCain.
McCain is what he is. He’s a moderate Republican who believes in reaching across the aisle. It’s not his fault that conservatives lost in this election — it’s the Republican party’s fault they didn’t pick a winning conservative.
Here is a proposal:
1. Conduct the primaries such that the candidate is not chosen until the convention.
2. Conduct the primaries such that several (more than four, less than ten) candidates are funded and promoted and given the opportunity speak and debate in all the usual primary campaign stops.
3. Set the candidates up in debates.
4. Set the candidates up in individual speaking opps.
5. Allow the primary state voters to vote, as the primary campaign progresses, but weigh this early vote to be only a portion (perhaps half) of the final vote at convention.
6. At the convention, the convention delegates would in effect be making a second vote for the candidates. One vote would have been made as the candidates toured the primary states. The second vote would be made at the convention.
7. Exploit the idea that these candidates represent what the new President’s cabinet would look like. Instill in voters the notion that when electing a Republican president, you get an entire team of conservative, fiscally responsible, security aware leaders.
8. Recognize the things learned in open state balloting, and party-only state balloting. (This is what got McCain nominated, btw.)
9. If the incumbent is a Republican, then....
Thoughts?
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