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 ...
When will these idiots learn you can be both socially and fiscally and constitutionally conservative at the same time!
Conservative philosophy is unified, not divided into parts.
“Unless the Republican Party ends its self-imposed captivity to social fundamentalists, it will spend a long time in the political wilderness.”
And if it does, it will cease to exist entirely.
See tagline...
The rights of the unborn and protection of the institution of marriage are things we hold very dear, and there is no way in HELL we will relinquish them for the sake of a bunch of whiney RINOS, Christine.
I would suggest it is people like YOU who have damaged the party the most, and it is people like YOU who need to be handed their hats and shown the door.
I’d like to suggest four necessary conditions for conservatives to regain control of the GOP and eliminate the destructive RINO domination.
1. GOP registration required to vote for GOP candidates so that crossover voters do not select our candidates in primaries.
2. Move primaries up in several large conservative states so that RINO-infested northeastern states no longer chose our presidential candidate.
3. Allot delegates to the GOP convention from each state based on the number of registered GOP voters in that state. Just because a state has a big population does not get you more delegates to the GOP convention- Dark blue states should not choose our candidate.
4. Divide the delegates from a state between candidates based on primary results- No more winner-take-all primaries.
Call 'em "lukewarm" Republicans instead.
That's precisely the point of the article -- as long as the GOP stands for government busybody regulation of personal conduct, they're doomed to minority status.
GOP_IN_OFFICE = OLD_GOP_IN_OFFICE - 2
Lather, rinse, repeat....
I didn't read it that way. Here is the gist of her argument:
In seven of the nine states that switched this year from Republican to Democratic, Obama's vote total exceeded the total won by President Bush four years ago. So even if McCain had equaled the president's numbers from 2004 (and he did not), he still would have lost in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia (81 total electoral votes) -- and lost the election. McCain didn't lose those states because he failed to hold the base. He lost them because Obama broadened his base.
Nor did the Republican ticket lose because "values voters" stayed home. On the contrary, according to exit polls, such voters made up a larger proportion of the electorate this year than in 2004 -- 26 percent, up from 23 percent. Extrapolating from those data, McCain actually won more votes from self-identified white evangelical/born-again voters than Bush did four years ago -- 1.8 million more. But that was not enough to offset the loss of so many moderates.
She is saying that McCain's winning strategy, if he had one, would be to expand his support among independent voters. There aren't enough social conservatives to win a national election; even if McCain had done just as well as Bush did in 2004 (and in some ways he did better) it isn't enough if you lose the independent voters in the middle.
The thing she assumes, of course, is that McCain could have kept the social conservatives on board and still reached out more to the middle. Given his questionable bona fides with the base, he was probably damned if he did, and damned if he didn't this time around.
Morons will always be morons. The GOP should dump all the morons and retards that run it in Washington.
Oh right! "Clinging to their guns and religion" isn't demonization and division. And Bush wasn't demonized.
BS. Obama just did a better job of it. And if demonization didn't work, Obama's crew would not have worked so hard to stop the ad about his connection to Ayers.
And it isn't demonization if it is true. McCain made a major mistake by not addressing the real concerns about Obama's relations with folks like Wright and Ayers.
Now we have to live with Obama, because McCain was too polite to call a snake a snake.
Just like NJ had to live with McGreevey because Christy knew but refused to talk about his corruption (and I'm not talking about the gay part, but $$ corruption).
Were she a Democrat, she could act and say exactly as she is now doing. But she would not be allowed to do otherwise.
Obviously, she is too stupid to realize this...
Consequently, other Republicans are under no obligation to follow her "advice".
Pound sand, Christine. Abandon the GOP and join the Democrats. I couldn't care less.
If Whitman had defeated Jon Corzine instead of chickening out of the race, she might have some credibility. But she hasn’t won an election in many years.
She jumped the shark a decade ago.
Not so! And this is the problem. Huckabee had planty of support from SoCons and that guy (Huckabee) was nothing about the restraint of government power. In my opinion, the SoCons need to check their issues at the states' level first and quit making a federal case out of everything: that would be the principled thing to do.
Great post! The first one (of the previous forty-one) that I found worth a shit.
Her singular accomplishment was to eviscerate the commanding GOP majority in New Jersey that she was handed on a silver platter. She’s nothing but another Democrat agent.
She is a rodent’s rodent.
bump
Christie Whitless has a long habit of betraying her friends, including Larry Kudlow. Just another trustafarian ditz (of which there are many in this part of the country, not all of them moving to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn).
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