Posted on 11/10/2012 8:05:19 PM PST by neverdem
The GOP Establishment win the Morons of the year award.
They got their PERFECT candidate in Romney. A non social controversial squishy moderate “Fiscal Conservative”. They ran against the most corrupt incompetent President of the last century.
THEY LOST. They lost running the campaign they tell us EVERY 4 years they HAVE to run. Don’t blame the Soc Cons for the utter failure of the GOP-E political theories. They ran to the middle as hard as they could this year in a “Gimme election” and manged to LOSE.
I didn't throw away my conservative ideals. I voterd for them only to see these ideals soundly defeated. And I'm not talking about Romney's loss. I'm talking about nearly every other conservative candidate and initiative across the country.
Save a small handful of Tea Party candidates and anti-union ballot initiatives, conservatism lost huge on Tuesday. We want to get Roe overturned? We can't even pass a State amendment prohibiting taxpayer-funded abortion. Meanwhile gay marriage and recreational drug use marches onward towards voter-approved victory.
Conservatism is not advanced by losing elections. At some point we need to figure out how to win them. As it is right now, nobody's buying what we're selling.
The sad truth is that after the Perry campaign crashed in flames, Romney was the strongest guy in the race. Anyone who thinks Santorum, Gingrich, Bachman or Cain would've fared better is delusional. Those candidates would've lost in Mondale proportions.
And when Mitt Romney is the strongest guy running, we have problems. The entire GOP needs a top to bottom makeover, a "rebranding" if you will. Never again should the party allow itself to be populated by such a field of unelectable losers. We need new blood. New faces who can articulate conservatism to the masses so that voters will once again buy what we're selling.
The only positive note I can think of is that Obama will remain in office long enough to see his policies bear rotten fruit. I honestly don't think he planned this. Americans may have voted for Santa Claus but eventually the money will dry out. It's simple math. And when this happens, we just might have a chance.
“GOP doesn’t have to get rid of social conservatism entirely… but it’s going to have to moderate stances on abortion, gay marriage, etc”
And it does that when? When it decides that it doesn’t need the votes of Christians for whom those positions aren’t negotiable?
Well good for you!
2012 Primary Candidate…………………Delegate Votes
Mitt Romney…………………………………..1462
Rick Santorum…………………………………..234
Newt Gingrich…………………………………...137
Ron Paul…………………………………………122
Wake up and smell the coffee of reality dude, the people who participated in the Republican primary chose Mitt Romney, not the GOP. The sooner you get that into your head the sooner you’ll be able to come to grips with the fact that Romney had the best chance of getting elected than any of the others.
Unfortunately the electorate chose the candidate most willing to continue the free stuff…………..
No dear one. The MSM's version lost but true conservatism did not. Their false meme's lost.
I’m wondering what a CINO like you would think of my earlier proposal about abortion.
From my home page:
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I’ve posted this in a couple of places and it doesn’t seem to get much more than a yawn, even though it’s kinda-sorta an incremental approach.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1908148/posts?page=125#125
I believe a fetus is a human being who deserves protection under the law from being killed.
***I do too. That fetus deserves protection extended by the state.
I do wonder if it is biblical to extend “full” protection to a fetus? I.e. when a man hurts a pregnant woman, he’s expected to pay an eye for an eye & a tooth for a tooth. But if the unborn baby is killed, the price is not the same.
Perhaps it is time to consider a 3 (or even 4) tiered system of protection.
Tier 1: Living, viable, late term baby which will not be aborted unless the life of the mother is at stake.
Tier 2: Living, not-yet-viable pre-born human who should have the right to protection and life and a safe womb to which it can attain viability. Cannot be aborted unless there is an open rape case associated with the pregnancy or the life of the mother is at stake.
Tier 3: Living, early stage, not yet viable pre-born human for whom we do not extend the rights of life in this society because of a historical snag where we once considered such tissue not to be a baby. We as a society thought it was best to consider it a private decision. I personally do not believe in Tier3 abortions, but I can understand that there are many who think it is a “right to choose” at this stage. It may be time to consider a program where the woman declares her pregnancy and intent to abort. Our societal function at this point would be to provide a family that is willing to adopt this baby and to put up this woman for 6-8 months in a safe environment so the baby can grow and maybe the woman can learn some life skills. If our society cannot muster the forces necessary to save this baby, the woman has the sickening “right” to abort this pregnancy. Time for us to put up or shut up.
With a 3-tiered plan in place, women would stop using abortion as a means of birth control. Millions of lives would be saved. We would extend the right to life to every human that we have resources to save. Unfortunately, if we cannot put up the resources to save the Tier3 babies, we still would have this horrible practice staining our nation’s soul.
125 posted on 10/08/2007 1:43:20 PM PDT by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]
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I think it is now widely understood that we just can’t win elections on a socially conservative platform.
***It appears to be propotional to how widely MISunderstood is the fact that Free Republic is a conservative website, not a GOP website. Saying such things as what you just did is basically trolling. Would you go onto a hotrod afficianod website and talk about how important Global Warming and high gas mileage is? NO, because that would be trolling. What you are doing is trolling.
Dude, as you say, done playing the game, don’t care any more...
No it wasn't. We gained 2 points with women compared to 2008. I think Obama won women by 11 points this time and 13 in 2008. As always, we lose single women but win married women.
As this thing shakes out, compromising our principles needs to be moved off of the table. A lot of us are only involved in politics because we care about certain issues. We're not fighting for the right to have the letter "R" after our guy's name.
I'd rather spend a billion dollars trying to change the public's mind to my side on the issues I care about than spend it trying to get people to pull the lever for a specific candidate. So maybe the answer is to take money and move it out of politics and into advocating for specific issues. I'm certainly not going to leave the money in politics and take the issues I care about out of politics.
Supporting a pro-choice agenda or Roe vs. Wade are not options the Republican party has. If they change on those issues, a large portion of their base would be more likely to support a pro-life Democrat like Bob Casey than support a Republican.
“The GOP Establishment win the Morons of the year award”
You were vehemently adamant that the campaign Mitt and the GOP ran was an indisputable winner until way past Ohio was called.
oh- you mean you CAN discuss your point without labelling the other person a troll???
Young people have been becoming more prolife, and non whites are more prolife than whites.
In U.S., Nonreligious, Postgrads Are Highly "Pro-Choice"
Special Report: 3.4% of U.S. Adults Identify as LGBT - Inaugural Gallup findings based on more than 120,000 interviews LGBT is lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
But Gallup can be tricky with polls like this.
The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the “No Differences” Claim
If you check any link, check the last one.
Although I am not a Social Conservative or a religious person, I have never advocated that we throw Social Conservatives out of the GOP.
In fact, I have voted with the Social Conservatives for more than 40 years.
If we take the absolutely central religious foundation out of the Republican Party, then there is no rationale to even have a Republican Party.
We would simply become third party “conservative” Libertarians, or some other politically useless hybrid.
Politically, I am completely comfortable with the Social Conservatives, and I will never reject them.
But my point about Hispanic voters is completely valid...
No matter how much they “claim” to be Conservatives, they do not vote that way, they have never voted that way, and there is no reason to believe they will EVER vote that way.
Thanks neverdem for the ping, thanks zeestephen for that comment.
“The problem is social conservatives have gotten so used to thinking of themselves as the majority they’ve forgotten how to speak to those who are not and defend against those who accuse them of being fringe, most particularly the press. “
I don’t understand this. Social conservatives regard themselves as a deeply embattled and reviled minority. You have to be very tough to be a social conservative in public. Your enemies hate you. And so too do those who ought to at least be your allies.
Re my previous comment and the response, I am actually quite socially conservative myself but we’ve already gone through this same cycle in Canada and the choice is either to elect a fiscally (somewhat) conservative government or go down to defeat on social conservative policies. That may be the honorable choice and in fact I do vote for a smaller poltical party than the governing Conservatives, but then I have the luxury of knowing that in our system, my vote is not wasted because the local Conservative has no chance to win anyway and we don’t vote nationally for any office.
My suggestion is more along the lines of saying, face the reality that the country needs sound economic management, get that in place and advocate for unelectable social conservative causes in another arena where you can at least try to change minds one person at a time. A national political campaign seems wide open to distortion and probably results in no new converts to social conservatism, just an electoral defeat. People will turn back to social conservatism if they can be reached at all by the outreach of religious groups, in my opinion. The only real appeal you can make to voters who are not already on side relates to the fate of their eternal souls and this is really not the sort of issue that blends well with politics under the separation of church and state.
The other alternative is to ignore this advice and continue to lose more and more elections at various levels — now I am not saying to abandon all social conservative political activism but there are times and places for it, when we try to force the elephant through the window, it just can’t work, and so a strategy that can work is needed. That strategy is to separate out social conservatism from politics whenever it is guaranteed to result in electoral defeat, and one can only determine that either by polling or by trial and error. I would say the last two elections show a trial and error approach. It is well known that most people inclined to vote libertarian rather than GOP are in fact social liberals, not social conservatives, so really the choices (to be frank) are to keep losing national elections under a vaguely social-conservative GOP banner, or to support a new national party that is more explicit and that will (I guarantee this to be true) split the anti-Democrat vote further and result in a locked in socialist state.
I realize the choices are not good ones. This is why the Bible tells us that the world becomes evil near the end of days and that Jesus Christ will return to solve these problems for which there appear to be no human solutions.
And that could be very soon looking at today’s news.
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