Agonizing Reappraisal-Done Right!

The loss of this presidential election under these economic circumstances is so appalling that it raises existential questions about the Republican Party and the future of conservatism in America. With unemployment through the roof, with housing through the floor, with nearly 50,000,000 people on food stamps, with the government hemorrhaging money and the debt soaring, the Republican Party must ask itself, if we cannot win today can we ever win?

It is important to identify the reasons for this epic fail so that the conservative movement can go on. The first item of business is to distinguish between failure which can be blamed on the quality of the candidate or the mechanics of the campaign and a failure which represents a fatal disconnect with the people of America.

We are now in for a season of second-guessing Romney and the strategy of the campaign. This is inevitable and necessary but it is important that we do it constructively, it is important that it be done right.

We will hear many assertions: the acrimonious primary season inflicted wounds on ourselves which gave Obama a head start; Romney tactically left the field open to Obama after he clinched the nomination and Obama simply painted Romney negatively by carpet bombing him with television ads; Romney funneled his campaign strategy too narrowly, both geographically and philosophically-that is, Romney was too late going to Wisconsin, too late going to Pennsylvania, and Romney narrowed the focus of his campaign to economic issues only, thus conceding all other issues to Obama; Obama was thus able, with the support of a complicit media, to raise strawmen issues which were in many respects preposterous yet they forced Romney on the defensive and blunted his message on the economy; Romney picked the wrong vice presidential candidate, he should have picked Marco Rubio and he would have made inroads into the Hispanic vote and the failure to do so cost him the election; the selection of Paul Ryan was the physical embodiment of an abandonment of a campaign addressing the demographic realities of America to concentrate on a campaign of economic issues; the Romney campaign worked at cross purposes in the selection of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin when it coupled that choice with a failure heavily to campaign in Wisconsin-if the decision was to campaign almost exclusively on economic issues with Paul Ryan, that implied an all out campaign in Wisconsin which was never really undertaken until too late; the campaign ignored vulnerabilities and failed to exploit opportunities to wit: it lost the women's vote along with the Hispanic vote over bogus issues of abortion and birth control by failing to fight back and failing to present a credible female spokesperson and it failed to exploit Benghazi; the campaign made these errors of omission because of its fundamental mistake to concentrate on economic issues; Romney performed brilliantly in the first debate, even contriving to offset the advantage Obama had derived from his negative air war, but fatally decided to play it safe in the second and third debates and surrendered the momentum to Obama-and the failure to exploit Benghazi is the principle example of this failure of conception a shift nd execution; hurricane Sandy entered dues ex machine and, coupled with the treachery of Christie, gave the momentum back to Obama who have been cruising toward a loss.

Other second-guessers, probably featuring Rush Limbaugh prominently among them, will focus on the biography of Romney and maintain that the key failure was to nominate a Rino who cannot win but conservatives can win. The difficulty with this analysis is that the Republican Party clearly coalesced behind Romney after the first debate.

Others will avert to Romney's original assessment of the political landscape, that 47% of the population is lost to the Republican cause and the Republican candidate must concentrate on the remaining 53%. This is another way of casting the age-old tension between conservatives and Rinos because the Rinos solution, which was Romney's solution, is to focus exclusively on economic issues and run a white bread campaign. This means that Romney presented himself to be reassuring to independents, to women, as especially single women. The conservative rejoinder, of course, is that a passive stance in which one achieves a neutral nonaggressive posture, nonthreatening to women, is not a winning stance which must come from a more aggressive issue oriented campaign driving home conservatives truths. But wait! We run such a campaign and the Democrats counter with race. The truth which we must face is that we have not found the solution to this demagoguery.

Others will point to the media and say that it is almost impossible for a Republican to win nationally against the Democrat especially when the media will do everything short of committing murder to support a black president. There is a lot of truth in this but to acknowledge the reality is not to provide the solution. Conservatives want an aggressive campaign such as that conducted by Newt Gingrich in the primaries against the media as well as an aggressive campaign against the Democrats. Romney decided to simply absorb much of the media bias and ignore the issue to death, much as he attempted to deal with the gender gap. I observed at the time that as a conservative I want a crusade against Obama and Romney was running a campaign. In the event, we got neither.

Mechanics, or "architects" if you prefer, such as Karl Rove will tell us whether we failed on the ground or in the air. When Karl Rove ran the ground campaign in Ohio he prevailed. We were assured this time that our ground game in Ohio was far superior to 2004. We had evidence that our ground game in Wisconsin was superior to what the Democrats could muster in three previous statewide elections. Yet we failed. My problem is that I credit Karl Rove with the ability accurately to diagnose the problem but I am wary of his politics. I am satisfied with Rush Limbaugh's politics, but I am dubious of his ability to understand the nuts and bolts of the mechanical apparatus. This is important because ultimately we must accept that this election is so devastating under these circumstances that we must submit to an agonizing reappraisal of our basic politics and not seek rationalizations in the mechanics. Was this election a perfect storm of minor mistakes, bad weather, poor ground game, and media bias that caused America to cruise toward its own destruction or is there simply no denying the obvious, the Republican Party is not succeeding as a messenger for conservatism and conservatism has not crafted a message which works with the public?

Consider how we were handcuffed in this election. We are in a political world in which Obama could blatantly play the race card without any negative consequences. We can review the entire administration of Attorney General Eric holder or we can simply look at Obama's transparent grab for Hispanic votes with amnesty to see how cynically he has governed and campaigned. Normally every political decision, like YING and Yang, has an upside and a downside but there seems to have been no downside to Obama in playing the race card. Where was the blowback among white voters? How can Elizabeth Warren, for example, be exposed for fraudulently advancing herself by claiming American Indian heritage at the expense of honest white job applicants, and suffer no identifiable loss at the polls? Are we as a society destined to be Balkanized by the Democrat party playing sex against sex and race against race to its selfish electoral advantage but to the destruction of the country? Why were we so ineffective in making the world see the world the way we see it? We see the world hurtling toward a fiscal cliff and the destruction of our prosperity. Obama wins the election not by addressing the massive deficit which is turning America into Greece but by handing out birth control pills like Halloween candy. How did it happen that Obama ran the campaign on his terms and not on reality-at least reality as we see it? Why did small ball win?

Is it that we fail to see the world as it really is? Are we wrong and the people who vote their gender, their color, their tribe, their purse, right? No! Our conservative worldview is the right worldview and the leftist worldview is wrong. That is not up for discussion among conservatives. But it is the way of political folly to blame the electorate for one's failure at the polls no matter how easy the temptation. It is easy to say that women who are voting their vaginas are condemning their children to penury but they did not hear us say so or, if they did, they did not heed us. We spent $1 billion and still could not convince them of our view of the world. We are in a game of politics to gain political power and govern according to our world view. When we fail to win, we fail utterly. The real question is why could we not win against a demonstrably failed president with failed policies who ran a racist campaign, a sexist campaign, and played small ball on every issue when we had $1 billion, a squeaky clean candidate, the House of Representatives, the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the best economic statistics since Franklin Roosevelt?

Before we take refuge in blaming the electorate we should look in the mirror. Before we look for easy answers by blaming Romney, by blaming the media, by blaming tactical decisions such as the selection of Paul Ryan with which we agreed at the time, we should look long and hard into the mirror.

Perhaps we went wrong last cycle in blaming the loss on John McCain. Perhaps there is a dimension to the electorate that we simply do not understand. I posted long and hard at the time that John McCain would lose the election unless he morally destroyed Barack Obama and depicted him to be the Marxist that he was. Many of us in the beginning of this election season questioned whether Romney was correct in attacking Obama is "incompetent" rather than as a radical leftist. When the campaign appeared to be prevailing, I withdrew the criticism. I think we have to thoroughly examine the issue whether we can ever beat a Democrat candidate without personally destroying him. This is not cynical, this is only to bring a gun to a gunfight. So far, in the last two election cycles our campaigns have failed to take Obama on for his radicalism, probably because of fear of his race.We all know a demographic tsunami is about to engulf conservatism. We must decide how to cope with the threat. Do we cope by destroying our opponent the way attempted to destroy Romney or do we cope by pandering to African-Americans, or do we find a Marco Rubio to ingratiate us with Hispanics? Can we run successfully as conservatives by ignoring race as Romney attempted to do?

Before we take refuge in disdain for the electorate and find sour grapes satisfaction by saying they deserve to suffer in the implosion which we believe will come, we should figure out how to compete and win. Remember, it is human nature to rationalize failure by blaming others. Remember also that it is human nature to try to cure failed socialism with more socialism. That is the real reason why Obama was reelected. The electorate does not associate the great recession with government action, rather it associates salvation from the recession with government intervention. The electorate does not believe that government insistence on granting mortgages to risky homebuyers helped precipitate the great recession. They have come to believe that the government should step in to protect mortgagors who are underwater. The electorate wants more socialism to fix failed socialism. We lost the argument.

Unless we fix what is wrong we will lose it again and again until there is nothing left in America to save.

We are running out of time, we are running out of money, and we are running out of white people. This election forces conservatism into a race against the forces of Obamaism to fix itself in time to win the next election before we are bankrupted or engulfed. Either way we lose not just our prosperity but our liberty.

Alan,

The Democrats run a racist campaign, trample on the Constitution to pander to Hispanic votes, and blatantly play the race card to stimulate the African-American base in favor of a black candidate and you insinuate that I am the racist for criticizing them for it.

Shame on you.

I point out to you that in the midst of broadcasting the election returns last night, Bob Beckel, a Democrat spokesperson and former campaign manager for Democrat Presidential Candidate could say to the American people on Fox News that the Republicans were getting 73% of the white vote but they needed at least 74% or 75% to win. This is how fine the Democrats calculate their racism. It is not I who originated the idea that we are running out of white people, it is the Democrats and their spokespeople who appear on national television who maintain that idea.

The reference to running out of white people means that we have to recalculate our campaign so that we garner votes from people of color. How the hell you can turn that into a racist remark is quite beyond reason. In answer to your question, skin color does not have anything to do with conservatism, I never said it did but it has plenty to do with winning elections and I did not have anything to do with that reality, I did not create it but neither will I be victimized by it if I can help it. I will speak out against it and every chance the right of free expression gives me.

Nor will I be victimized by you playing the race card at me anymore than I consent to be victimized by Democrats playing the race card. I stand by my "about page" and the explanation for the use of the name and avatar expressed there. I regard your definition of my "true character" to be gratuitous and outrageous.

Alan Greenspam? That does "not fly with me" I know your "true character" is that of an anti-Semite. How much more outrageous than your statement is mine?

I would prefer to leave this on a better note so I thank you for the compliments contained in your reply.

Thanks for the graph, it is as you say, instructive. I would like to know more about the internals since these exit polls can be notoriously inaccurate. Offhand, they look to reasonably reflect the voting patterns as they occurred.

I agree with your comments about the selection of Ryan. As I said in my vanity I think it was the physical embodiment of the decision to go strictly on economics in the campaign. I believe that decision left the Romney campaign vulnerable to distractions let loose by Obama which were magnified by the media. In effect, Obama was thus able to control the message. Romney was always on the defensive. The selection of Rubio probably would have broken the thing loose and Rubio might have been a very effective counterpuncher which is the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate. In the event, Ryan, to a lesser degree than Sarah Palin, was somewhat restricted in his freedom of criticism of Obama.

Interesting comments concerning Asian-Americans.

——”The reference to running out of white people means that we have to recalculate our campaign so that we garner votes from people of color. “

Well then you most certainly did NOT make that clear at all in your writing. You are a good writer, but even good writers need editorial review.

I provided proper editorial review for you (btw, I write for a living) and if you think your prose actually made a connection between your “running out of white people” comment and the notion that we need to garner votes from people of color, I certainly don’t see it. Again, I suggest you rewrite that paragraph to be more clear.

Perhaps you aren’t a white supremacist, but no shame on me here, nor am I playing the race card on ya, dude. Just trying to help you out.

—”Alan Greenspam? That does “not fly with me” I know your “true character” is that of an anti-Semite. How much more outrageous than your statement is mine?”

Weak. Nice try.

Ending on a good note: Your article was superb on all other counts. I forwarded it to other conservative friends, each of which were wondering what was with that last paragraph.

All you predictions are coming true. Predictably so. Yet, you are correct, where is the data? Is there one answer. I ask? I say that greed, class resentment and racial guilt (among whites) won, but what do I know. Would any of the Obama voters admit to these sins? The low turnout of registered Republicans is a puzzle. Are the currently employed comfortable and lazy? Are the unemployed afraid to lose their benefits? Perhaps we ought to look elsewhere for answers, places like Argentina which voted itself from the 5th (?) economic powerhouse in the world into a permanent Third World status.

Something I read

"One thing that seems quite evident that not many if any are considering; the right maintained control of the House of Representatives where every seat was up for the consideration of voters.

IF like the electoral college applies to the States it as well applied to Congressional districts (as it does in Nebraska for example) THEN Obama would have lost. Unlike Senators & The President, Representatives are not elected based upon a statewide popular vote.

In summary, the collective regionally concentrated mobs elected Obama. It was the mob in key areas in key states that was mobilized.

The Right focused upon message which was often filtered by the leftist media.

The Left focused upon the logistics of getting voters to the polls in key areas."

Well if it is all about race, then:

1. 72% still beats 28% and the issue is why some whites do not vote on racial lines IF EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING SO.

2. In a two party system, you have to vote for someone. The interest of black, particularly working class blacks, and hispanics who want easier immigration conflict. So the GOP must pick off the groups they can.

the issue is why some whites do not vote on racial lines IF EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING SO

Yes, I used to wonder about that, too.

The best answer is that there is a war between two groups of whites (them and us), and that THEY feel superior to us and entitled to rule over us because of how much they do for minorities (or do to them, it's often the same thing).

In the mental universe of THEM, only whites have moral agency - good or bad, the minorities are just insensate lumps of carbon to be acted upon by virtuous whites or done dirt by evil whites (a/k/a us).

The key to understanding is that IT DOES NOT MATTER whether the things that are done for minorities, or to them, by virtuous whites are any good, nor does it matter what the outcome of what WE want is - the results are of no importance. It's the DOING of things that makes this white subculture virtuous.

Our futile protests that the things they are doing (AA, welfare, crime tolerance) are BAD for minorities only lower us further in their eyes, BECAUSE THEY DON'T SEE MINORITIES AS REAL PEOPLE, only as objects of their compassion.

Anyway, that's the answer to your question. No charge.

I just watched Rasmussen and Sabatino on Fox who say that the surprise is the accuracy with which Obama anticipated the ceiling on the white vote and the accuracy with which Obama could bring out minorities, single women, and the young.

Now Dick Morris is on saying the same thing. Parenthetically, before we sneer one more time at Dick Morris let us acknowledge that Michael Barone had it just as wrong as Morris. All three on Fox agree that the decisive factor was Obama's astonishing ability to keep these groups turned out at 2008 levels. That suggests a whole new wave in American politics, a reshuffling of alignment.

If these three pundits have it right, here is data that tells us where we went wrong demographically, if that is true, more important, if that is the whole truth, we now know to whom to direct the message and the next question is, what message?

Here's my take which I just posted on another thread:

Everybody knows and everybody advances and argues their pet theory. All of them perdictable, boring and cliche ridden. Mr Ruddy should have written and published the above last weekend or earlier, then it would have been brilliant.
I’ve my own theory too, which I am not advancing and won’t argue. Everybody knows the low turnout of registered Republicans, with Romney receiving fewer votes than Juan McCain 4 years ago. What ‘appened? First, I think that Peggy Noone, Michael Barone and Dick Morris were in a way correct in their last weekend’s predictions of Romney victory. Correct in that they all expected normal high Republican turnout. What ‘appened then? Oh, did I axe that already? So sorry.
Here’s my novel theory based if not on anything else then on the observations made on this very forum. The stigma of racism. The Republican voters were intimidated by it into refraining from voting. Cannot boo a lousy black stage performer, cannot not laugh at an unfunny black comic, cannot vote against a black man speaking TV anchor English (at least when he’s not addressing homies or senile old black folks who remember being ‘colored’, ‘Negro’, ‘black’, and now must accept being ‘American-African’.) In 2008 these same voters were NOT voting against Obama, since he was McCain’s equal. Now when he’s an incumbent, voting for Romney, would be, do I have to say it? RACIST! and that is a bigger crime than murder as Mark Fuhrman among others surely knows, Shirley! The stigma of “RACISM”, an invention some have argued of Leon Trotsky.

We’ve tried creating our our institutions. They get labeled “right wing” or “fringe.” We need to destroy from within.

We need to stop worrying about what they label us and start producing a better product than they, whether it be students, research, entertainment, news or whatever. We are better at everything than they are if we would just stop graveling before them, get our chins up, and do our own thing. They are defeating us because we have let them call all the shots while we try to dance to the bullets they shoot at our feet. They have us faked out.

Not that we shouldn't also destroy them from within as they have systematically been doing to us, with spies and infiltration. We need to view them as dangerous enemies, rather than just another form of politics. This is war, just as sure as if we were firing weapons. They are an enemy bent on destroying our Country and our Constitution and we must come to this understanding and deal with them as such.

But with Asian Americans what is it

I am married into an Asian family. I did not know this until I spent some time around Asians.They are the single, most racist people I have ever encountered. Bar none. Not just against white people but against each other.

My MIL can identify a person from Laos from a person from Vietnam from a Chinese person in one glance. And she'll have different reasons why they all suck. (she's Thai)

Having said that, if there is an undesirable Asian person --that person is immediately held in higher esteem than any white person.

Blacks? haaaaa --yeah. They hate them too.

This was all very eye opening to me because I always assumd we had so much more in common with American Asians that we had dfferences.

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