Posted on 11/08/2012 7:03:34 AM PST by Kaslin
Wait until next year -- 2016, that is.
That’s what disappointed Republican spinners kept saying Tuesday night as they watched Mitt Romney’s hopes crash and burn in swing state after swing state.
How many times did I hear a Republican talk about how their party’s deep bench of future all-stars will return it to power in Washington in four years?
But all the Ryans, Rubios, Bushes, Haleys and Christies in America can’t put the GOP -- or the country -- back together again.
The GOP is a wreck -- and not just in California, where the party’s registration is now below 30 percent.
Look how easily the Republican Party managed to turn what should have been a sure victory over an incompetent and dangerous incumbent into an embarrassing defeat.
First they tore each other to shreds in a bitter primary, smearing their eventual nominee in debates as a rich, uncaring profiteer who put working people out on the street and shipped their jobs overseas.
Then, while Obama’s ads in the battleground states reinforced the Republican-made caricature of Mitt, the Romney campaign did just about everything wrong.
It squandered the GOP convention and tried to make their candidate into “Mitt the Moderate.” Team Romney also shunned their natural allies in talk radio and didn’t reach out for help from conservatives like me.
I would have been glad to help the Romney campaign in Ohio or Pennsylvania, where I worked for my father in 1980. I offered, but the phone never rang. It didn’t ring for Bill O’Reilly or for the other major radio and TV talk shows, either.
But Team Romney’s biggest mistake was playing prevent defense after his big victory in the first debate. It was a terrible, fatal blunder.
Instead of hammering away at the horror of Obamacare, the cover-up in Benghazi and President Eye-Candy’s four years of failure, Romney ran the last five weeks hoping the clock would run out before Obama could recover.
But you don’t play prevent defense when you are running in second place in Ohio, Virginia, Florida -- and Tuesday’s results proved it.
Hurricane Sandy struck Mitt a final blow, giving Obama the chance to look presidential and making Mitt disappear from the media for four days.
But give credit to Obama’s Chicago Gang. They ran a much better campaign -- on the ground and in the air. They got out the vote and Obama got out his message of class envy and federal entitlements for all, without any trouble from his toadies in the media.
Now bigger deficits, higher taxes and a stagnant economy lie ahead for as far as the eye can see. And socialized medicine -- which my father warned was coming to America 50 years ago -- is going to soon become a reality via Obamacare.
Team Romney blew an easy win because it had a poor game plan. But it also lost because the Republican Party is all talk and no guts when it comes to fighting for real conservatism -- Ronald Reagan conservatism.
GOP bigwigs constantly praise my father. For years they’ve used him to suck true conservatives into the party, but they’ve never really embraced Reaganism or its ideals.
They didn’t in the 1980s and they still don’t today. They only talk about him. The party bosses don’t really think like him.
Most of those Republican candidates who lost Tuesday played the same game of pretend. “I’m like Ronald Reagan!” “No, I’m like Ronald Reagan!”
But most of them aren’t like my father. They weren’t waving the “bold colors” of real conservatism he talked about in 1975. The banners of the losers -- like Mitt’s -- were colored in “pale pastels.”
The GOP needs a new playbook. Unless it starts embracing my father’s conservative ideals instead of just paying lip service to them, the so-called “Party of Ronald Reagan” may never win another national election.
The campaign is not the time to go for votes ~ that's the time to get your own people prepped and interested in voting.
You line them up with a lot of hard work over the years preceding the election ~ you find them, register them, and keep them informed.
You then avoid insulting them, or telling certain factions you don't need them.
It's good to see Romney out of the election circuit. Now to get rid of his feckless advisors.
Rondald Reagan got 54% of white voted and won in a landslide.
Romney got 60% of the white vote and lost by a couple million.
Latinos were 10% of all votes abs voted 71% for Obama (amnesty).
Single women voted for Obama, especially single mothers. 40% of all births are now out of wedlock in the U. S.
California used to be solid Republican. Now Dems have a super majority. What changed? Demographics. Look at the projections for the next 50 years. We’re on the way to Whig party status.
The GOP needs to clean out the Democrats it has in it.
First things first.
Get rid of Boehner and Mitch McConnell and find someone with a pair of balls. Make Newt Gingrich head of the RNC.
Well said. Was talking to a fellow Republican co-worker this morning about the loss. Question I asked him was, "What GOP candidate since Reagan has even tried to make the argument in favor of conservatism?"
Answer: None of them.
I still believe what Miit Romney said is true, we are becoming a nation of takers not makers. I don’t know if 47percent is accurate but it probably is close. There are too many who want their lives to be controlled by the government today. How can any conservative win against that philosophy? Now eventually money is going to run out. We will be like Europe. Then those who are takers will be rioting when they are truly hungry. The makers just need to be sure to safeguard whatever they are able.
What all these analyses miss is what I think really cost Romney. Mitt would repeatedly say “The president has tried, but it isn’t working, time for a change”. Totally inept tactic. That legitimized Obama as ‘making the effort’ to correct Bush’s ‘mistakes’. That helped the voters buy into the meme that Obama just hadn’t had enough time.
Hate to say it, but its Mr. Reagan’s father that opened the door to our current troubles. He is the one who basically stopped patrolling our Southern border and granted amnesty to illegals back in 1986. Back then, the GOP was more concerned about getting “cheap labor” to business than the long term political implications of flood our country with illegals.
Let’s face the ugly truth: we have lost control. The inmates are running the asylum and they will gain incrementally more control every year. Only a total crash of the System will change the equation. I actually think that’s inevitable, but it will be very painful for everyone.
I like Michael Reagan but I don’t think he is right here. Republicans governors now account for 2/3 of the governorships. Republicans are making gains at state levels. The GOP convention showed the Republicans have a very good bench.
100% correct. We CAN’T win. Factor in the fact that nearly half of us are in the welfare wagon, AND HALF THE PEOPLE PULLING THE WAGON, ARE HAPPY DOING SO, AND WANT EVEN MORE PEOPLE IN THE WAGON, and we are FINISHED!
Then there were the "sure pickups" in ND and MT. We lost them both. We couldn't beat that idiot Stabenow in MI. Tommy Thompson lost in WI. Basically all the Senate races that were within our grasp slipped away. That is a facet of this disaster of an election that hasn't got much attention.
"Rondald Reagan got 54% of white voted and won in a landslide. Romney got 60% of the white vote and lost by a couple million. Latinos were 10% of all votes.... What changed? Demographics."
Nope. What Major Demographic Shift?
Romney lost on his GOTV effort.
Republicans are eons behind Democrats in getting the vote out via social media, etc. Republicans worry more about upsetting Democrats and Republican strategy has been to play defense. Republicans have failed miserably to teach minorities how Democrats have kept them as substandard citizens through 40 years of welfare, treating people only as pawns to who deliver votes in return to things like Obamaphones and welfare checks. Democrats fought the civil right movement yet Republicans would never tell you that. Democrats use tax money to create social programs that never offer minorities a chance to better themselves or the future of their families but Republicans don’t tell you that. It’s time to get nads and get tough.
I agree with every word you said. Unfortunately, supporting amnesty (which Latinos want) will only hasten the transition to a Socalist state. Too many of the new arrivals want free stuff, not Capitalism or liberty. We will not get a two party System—we will get Mexico...or worse South Africa.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what a peaceful solution might be. There may be none.
Answer: None of them.
Are you referring the Republican fields of candidates competing in primaries, or only those who made it as the Party nominee to the general election? Because the former offered several true conservatives, the latter, not so much.
Sure haven’t heard much out of Reice Pubis. Where’s he hiding?
If the Republicans can’t win against an incumbent who has 8% (really 20%) unemployment, 2% GDP (really <1%) growth, foreign policy is shambles (Benghazi, Iran nukes, Al-Queda on the rise), illegal immigrants pouring over the borders, drug kingpins dumping TONS of drugs into our nation(And the F&F scandal on top of that!) and crime rates rising for the first time in 20 years, then they don’t want to win, they want the status quo in perpetuity.
They quibbled over Big Bird, name calling, and anything else except the real record of the incompetent incumbent.....
It was unfortunate, that President Reagan was under continous pressure from the Rockefellor-Bush camp to satisfy their urges.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.