Posted on 04/26/2009 5:32:10 AM PDT by kellynla
A quick tour through the week’s headlines suggests the Republican Party is beginning to come to terms with the last election and that consensus is emerging among GOP elites that the party needs to move away from discordant social issues.
There was Sen. John McCain's daughter and his campaign manager who last week demanded that their fellow Republicans embrace same-sex marriage. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman – the most devoted modernizer among the party's 2012 hopefuls – won approving words from New York Times columnist Frank Rich for his call to downplay divisive values issues. The party’s top elected leaders in Congress, meanwhile, spooked by being attacked as the “party of no,” were recasting themselves as a constructive, respectful opposition to a popular president.
But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.
There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.
"There is a sense of rebellion brewing," said Katon Dawson, the outgoing South Carolina Republican Party chairman, who cited unexpectedly high attendance at anti-tax “tea parties” last week.
(Excerpt) Read more at dyn.politico.com ...
McDumbass and the rest of the GOP moderates are idiots. Social ssues like gay marriage, abortion, are just that: social isues that ARE NOT THE PERVIEW OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. They are states-rights, hot-button issues that political parties use to win votes.
The federal government, and likewise any presidential candidate, should be concerned with the defense of the country, border control, international trade and relations, Constitutional issues, and the like... policies that affect the entire country. For a candidate to keep addressing a social issue, let alone use it as a major campaign point, is a sellout move from day one which underlines the utter idiocy of the entire “compassionate conservatism” crowd.
Well, that certainly explains how John McCain became the candidate in 2008. I wonder if Frank Rich approves of this analysis.
The fact is, we are going to have a third party if these turds insist on keeping their jobs.
Unexpectedly high???? Maybe the party's finally getting the message that conservatives are PO'ed.
The problem with the Republican party stems from trying to “change” the core values of the conservative constituency.
What part of “core values” don’t they understand?
Juan McCain failed miserably because he was chosen by the MSM and did not and does not represent those core values.
If they keep trying to appease instead of standing up and fighting for what’s right, they will lose more of their base.
I can say without remorse they have lost me. I will not abide them trying to sell out my values for my vote.
Patriot, conservative.......Republican, thanks I’ll pass
Haven't conservatives already NOT done enough and just let them??? In 10 short years we went from a possible gutting of gov't with conservatives firmly in control to an almost reversal of this because conservatives don't understand the political fight and just do not have the will.
It looks as though this may be changing. It's a huge price, but McCain wouldn't have sparked any change and in fact it would have effectively apathized any conservative momentum.
Problem is...the politicians we keep sponsoring for leadership are RHINOs. Case in point, McCain and I’ve always found his turnaround suspect, when there were other conservative options.
Then, when push comes to shove...even the true conservatives will vote for the RHINO and whoever is pushing these RHINOs to the forefront, know it.
Have to disagree with you there. Anything “can” happen, but very doubtful it “will” happen in the Northeast. Been there and conservatism does not play well. You may be able to pick up New Hampshire, but that is the extent of it.
There is a reason why they immediately call every Notheastern state for the Dem after the polls close.
You have that right! If the Republicans don’t embrace full strength Conservatism there will be a THIRD PARTY, and the Republican might find themselves in the trash bin of history.
As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.
The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie. The Soul-searching must be conducted by conservatives without the earnest ministrations from liberals like those of Politico. This article, of course, has nothing whatever to do with explaining why Republicans lost 2008 election across the board, it has everything to do with first efforts by the left to sabotage the rebuilding process on the right which must be done exclusively by the right.
We have not lost the 2008 election because we were excessively partisan while Obama was enlightened and transcendental. We actually lost the election because George Bush and Karl Rove betrayed the soul of conservatism. A party without its soul is like an army which does not believe in itself, it cannot win the next contest. A party which had abandoned its principles and so lost the last two elections and frittered away both its power as the ruling coalition and its status as the majority philosophy of the nation, cannot expect to swell its ranks by recruiting to a lost cause. The party must first know what the cause is and only then can it recruit. To again borrow the military analogy, a party like an army disintegrates without a mission. Armies are assigned missions but a political party finds its mission only through soul-searching.
As this process occurs we will be told by the left that only a big tent party can win and that to become a big tent one must move to co-opt the center. That is not how it works. That is the reverse of the way it works. The center is not peopled by voters with fixed notions about the exercise of power who wait for one of the great political parties to surrender their values and embrace the tempered and resolute opinions of the middle. That happens with splinter parties but not with the mushy middle. When an unaffiliated voter bestirs himself to enter the polling booth he is confronted with one of two options: right or left. He does not consider who has moved the farthest geographically from right to the left or left to right any more than he commits because of his own long held political beliefs. He votes for the fella who best tickles his fancy at the moment. Put more charitably, he votes for the candidate who persuades that he is the best, and has the best to offer.
If we as conservatives do not believe that we have the best to offer we should get out of the business. A candidate, like a party, who is centered on his philosophy has integrity and is persuasive. And that philosophy must first have a vertical spiritual component which finds expression and out working in a horizontal governing philosophy.
Because of his race, Obama was asked only to demonstrate that he could walk and talk like a president. Obama has won the middle, not because he pandered to them, which he did, but because he had the wind at his back.
As John McCain reverts from titular head of the Republican Party to United States Senator, it falls to the rest of us to contrive a governing philosophy which he, unfortunately, did not own and therefore could not bequeath to us. We had such a legacy from Ronald Reagan but we squandered it. We must construct our own. We must do it in the wilderness. We must do it unaided by intermeddling liberals. Their's is the serpent's way, the easy way, a pander to the superficially popular, the accommodation to the middle. The bed of birth has always been a bed of pain. The pain must be embraced if we are to receive a new life.
Exactly. I reject it.
The OP’s(formerly the GOP) day has come and gone for Conservatives.
But “conservatives” reserve the right to change the definition of who is conservative and who is not at a moments notice. George Bush never hid his true feelings on immigration. I cannot understand the disdain and shock from folks who were actively supporting him in 04, when he actually started to go forward with the initiative.
Meanwhile, the hottest new conservative outfit is the National Republican Trust PAC [hereafter "NRT PAC"], which raised a stunning $6 million in the waning days of the 2008 contest from millions of small donors who helped fund a slashing television advertisement attacking Obama for his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It’s taken a similar approach to recent congressional races.
The NRT PAC is a great outfit, one to which I've contributed about $500. It was the main outfit that showed how McCain could have defeated Obama, had McCain really wanted to beat Obama, instead of being an Obama shill.
Then there's this great quote about Republican opposition to McCain and Specter:
The grass-roots fervor is pushing the party to the right in another concrete way: Two of the most prominent GOP Senate moderates face serious primary challenges in 2010. In Pennsylvania, former Congressman Pat Toomey, a down-the-line economic and social conservative, is running against Sen. Arlen Specter, attacking his “liberal agenda on social, labor, immigration and national security policies.”
In Arizona, Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Project, a group that mounted armed opposition to illegal immigration at the border, announced this week that he’s running against McCain.
“We’ve had it with the elitist establishment in Washington and John McCain is one of those,” Simcox said.
We really need to support the Toomey and Simcox candidacies, especially to keep pressure on McCain and Specer to oppose socialized medicine.
GO away RINOs.
"In one sense, Republican leaders face the same challenge their Democratic counterparts did during the Bush years: how to effectively channel the deep emotion of the base while tamping down its excesses."
When being in favor of legal immigration and opposite-sex marriages are seen as excesses, America is in more trouble than I thought.
Note that the article begins with a “tour” of the headlines. It then discusses the two McCains and Frank Rich of the NYTimes. In other words, it is a paid political advertisement for the Democrat Party. This is the Politico reporting, for God’s sake. Take the reporting for what it is worth — nothing.
“Haven’t the moderates already done enough to destroy the party???”
If the Republican left wants to help this country, they would change parties and be issues driven politicians.
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