Posted on 11/14/2008 6:21:09 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
Four years ago, in the week after the 2004 presidential election, we were working furiously to put the finishing touches on the book we co-authored, "It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America."
Our central thesis was simple: The Republican Party had been taken hostage by "social fundamentalists," the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. Unless the GOP freed itself from their grip, we argued, it would so alienate itself from the broad center of the American electorate that it would become increasingly marginalized and find itself out of power.
At the time, this idea was roundly attacked by many who were convinced that holding on to the "base" at all costs was the way to go. A former speechwriter for President Bush, Matthew Scully, who went on to work for the McCain campaign this year, called the book "airy blather" and said its argument fell somewhere between "insufferable snobbery" and "complete cluelessness." Gary Bauer suggested that the book sounded as if it came from a "Michael Moore radical." National Review said its warnings were, "at best, counterintuitive," and Ann Coulter said the book was "based on conventional wisdom that is now known to be false."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Hmmm ... as I recall, it was Reagan, running on a platform that appealed to social conservatives, that pulled the GOP OUT of the wilderness and made it into a majority party. Prior to Reagan, East Coast pubbies in the mold of Whitman were perfectly content for the GOP to be a perpetual minority party. This hag has her history all wrong (surprise).
Clearly the problem was that we were TOO conservative.
CTW couldn’t run suppertime at Sarah Palin’s house.
She came thru on the 30% tax cuts here but other than that she is the poster child for Northeast Liberal Republicans.
How did those “Social Conservative” initiatives do on the ballot in CA and FL. Seems to me, even in the Blue States the majority of people don’t share Whitman’s opinion.
Did hey not get that the reason McCain got anywhere near the 57,000,000 votes was because of Palin? If McCain had put someone like Lieberman or Todd-Whitman on the ticket we would have been lucky to get 30 million vote.
Are they that stupid?
I'm looking into the American Conservative Party (http://americanconservativeparty.org/)
If it comes to it, I will likely be able to say, “I did not leave the Republican party the Republican party left me.”
PING
She, along with McCain, are part of the Republican Main Street Partnership. They are running a shadow party within the party.
Prior to the 2006 elections they had 5 governors and a lot more House members. Although, it looks like they had some gains in the House in 2008 as their number was in the 30's the past two years.
If the Dems had run a candidate that was pro-life, for smaller government, supported our right to bear arms, understood our nation was founded by godly men that were Christians, and accept, we are a Christian nation, I would have voted for a Democrat.
“Blessed is the nation, whose God is the Lord,....” (Psalm 33:12)
As opposed to “fiscal fundamentalists” who have given us a national debt of $10,625,198,211,000.00, with a falling GDP and increasing unemployment!
Way to go, RINOs!
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As far as I'm concerned, she can camp with the rotting corpse of the GOP as an alternative. Either way, she's never going to get support from me. Same goes for the rest of that odious "Republican Main Street" gang - not a dime of support, not a minute of time, never a vote from me. If I knew how to put them in the unemployment line, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Yes, Whitman’s going the wrong direction.
But for my own sanity, can someone refute her numbers for me? She says McCain lost 6.4 million moderate votes. OK, but didn’t McCain also lose because conservatives didn’t vote? Anyone have a link to that analysis?
He lost, I heard. Pretty decidedly. Not embarrassingly, like Bob Dole, but a pretty resounding "flop".
Whitman and the Neocons want to go running after the Dems and the MSM crying pitifully, "Me too! Me too!"
They've accepted a liberal "ground rule": "We own the press, and so we make the rules."
That will never, ever be a winning formula. The alternative is to step up, do the right thing, and take the heat from the MSM hatemongers.
Conservatives ought to be in confab right now with Brent Bozell and his MRC, and Topic A ought to be, "How can we disarticulate the liberal media cartel?" After all, Nancy Pelosi and her commissariat are losing sleep trying study up ways to do in Rush and Hannity. Why shouldn't we examine similar possibilities for seeing to it that the Dinosaur Media accelerate their exit from the American political stage?
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At least, you may think to yourself, we are not getting any dumber. But by some measures we are. Young people by many measures know less today than young people forty years ago. And their news habits are worse. Newspaper reading went out in the sixties along with the Hula Hoop. Just 20% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 read a daily paper. And that isn’t saying much. There’s no way of knowing what part of the paper they’re reading. It is likelier to encompass the comics and a quick glance at the front page.
Young people today find the news irrelevant. Bored by politics, students shun the rituals of civic life, voting in lower numbers than other Americans (though a small up-tick in civic participation showed up in recent surveys). U.S. Census data indicate that voters aged 18 to 24 turn out in low numbers. In 1972, when 18 year olds got the vote, 52% cast a ballot. In subsequent years, far fewer voted: in 1988, 40%; in 1992, 50%; in 1996, 35%; in 2000, 36%. In 2004, despite the most intense get-out-the-vote effort ever focused on young people, just 47% took the time to cast a ballot.
Rick Shenkman
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