Posted on 11/24/2012 4:19:03 AM PST by Kaslin
Win, lose or draw, we're always supposedly hitting a tipping point where social issues just no longer work for the Republican Party. At first glance, this would appear to be a rather puzzling sentiment. After all, in 2010, despite the fact that the GOP was just as socially conservative as we were this year, the Republican Party had its best year in half a century. Furthermore, in 2008 and 2012, the GOP lost despite running moderate candidates who were soft on social issues and who barely brought them up at all. If anything, you'd think that seeing two non-social conservatives like McCain and Romney go down in flames should start to make Republicans wonder if we're not pushing social issues enough instead of the reverse, but if people were thinking about it logically in the first place, everyone would realize that it is a terrible idea to dump social issues right off the bat.
1) How would we replace all the votes we lose? It's highly ironic that you hear people claim that social conservatives aren't fiscally conservative, right before they urge us to purge them from the party. After all, if that were true (More on that in a moment) and the GOP abandons social issues, wouldn't those tens of millions of voters migrate over to the Democrats since we'd no longer have anything to offer them? Then, whom would we replace them with? There's already a fiscally conservative, socially liberal party called the Libertarians and they usually collect about 1% of the vote. Telling tens of millions of Christian conservatives that they can drop dead as far you're concerned to try to appeal to a few million wishy-washy independents who change sides based on the last commercial they saw and a million Libertarians who still probably won't vote Republican unless we agree to legalize crack, support open borders and close all of our overseas military bases doesn't seem like such a good deal.
2) Social conservatism is part of the Republican Party’s core: Social conservatism is not some fringe issue that's on the margins of the GOP. To the contrary, as Ronald Reagan used to say, the Republican Party is like a three legged stool comprised of a strong defense, free market policies, and social conservatism. You rip one of those legs off -- as the GOP found out during the Bush years when it started to move towards big government -- and there's a heavy price to be paid. Furthermore, if you think abandoning social conservatism would just mean that Pat Robertson, Rick Santorum, Tony Perkins and Brent Bozell would be hacked off, you should think again. If you're talking about Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Thomas Sowell, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Walter Williams, Laura Ingraham or most of the other big name conservatives in the party, you're talking about people who are pro-life, favor God's definition of marriage and are generally friendly to social conservatism. People get into politics because they want to see their values reflected in the government and if you think are going to shrug their shoulders and do nothing while issues that are near and dear to their heart are tossed into the trash like an old sneaker, you have another think coming.
3) Social conservatism can be a winning issue: The words "can be" are in there because they're certainly not always winning issues. If a candidate comes off as looking down on people who disagree with him or blunders around like Godzilla through Tokyo on a sensitive issue like rape and abortion as Todd Akin did, it can be a killer. Of course, bad messaging can kill you on a lot of issues. That's how Mitt Romney got portrayed as an uncaring, rich jerk even though he's the kind of man who rakes leaves for the elderly and anonymously buys milk for hundreds of needy veterans.
Much has been made of the fact that gay marriage finally won for the first time at the ballot box in Maryland, Maine and Washington. Of course, constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage have passed in 30 states including swing states like Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Virginia. Do we really want to turn off voters in those swing states to make ourselves more appealing in a handful of blue states? The GOP did get pummeled on abortion in the 2012 election cycle and most people are blaming it on Todd Akin, but Mitt Romney deserves a lot of the blame, too. Barack Obama made attacking him on social issues a core part of his strategy and Mitt responded with the same tactic George W. Bush used in his second term: letting his opponents hit him in the face as much as they wanted and hoping that their arms got tired. It didn't work for W, it didn't work for Mitt and it won't work if we try it again. If you're up against a man who loves partial birth abortion and voted three times in favor of killing babies born after attempted abortions and you get beaten into the ground on abortion, it isn’t the issue, it’s that you stink as a politician.
4) What about minority outreach? "Keep in mind that just over 78% of Americans are Christians and that number swells to roughly 85% of black and Hispanic voters." When you consider those numbers and the fact that black and Hispanic voters are still on board with Obama after the economic beating they've taken in his first term, it suggests that the GOP has a better opportunity to reach them on social issues than we do on economic issues. If Republican consultants claim we can't sell Christian values to demographic groups we need to improve with that are 85% Christian, then maybe they should get out of politics and go sell shoes.
“As far as the last two (legislatively), all 50 states legalized divorce at will and decriminalized adultery over 50 years ago.
The reason they did so was because of the incredible popularity of the central organizing principle of the Democratic Party : F*** who you want, when, where, and how you want, and let the taxpayers bear the consequences.
From the two major legislative victories (divorce and adultery), two others, abortion and homosex, follow naturally.”
I completely agree
Individuals can be whatever they want, but for the most part if they want their votes to count they gotta' go one way or the other.
That's why I am always very careful to differentiate VOTERS from the various broad classes of people we use to discuss politics.
Now, about people who don't vote ~ the last serious discussion of that situation focused on the number of about 90 million adults who are eligible to vote but don't. They are not exactly UNDECIDED ~ they just don't do it. It used to be proportantely larger. They are probably the 35% or thereabouts who never responded to polls of any kind ~ not ever! Check that Pew report discussion at http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/09/30/we-are-the-91-only-9-of-americans-cooperate-with-pollsters/ ~ goes way beyond the original report's parameters, but 53% who can actually be reached by a pollster yet they refuse to deal with the polls.
That's probably a chunk of the 90 million adults who don't vote!
These people may well not have a political bone in their bodies, but we'll never know that because they don't let us know their opinions nor do they vote!
Do they use social media, do they listen to music, do they watch television, do they have babies, do they engage in abortion, do they buy, do they sell, do they drive cars, do they walk down the street, do they live in houses, do they........... whatever ~ we can never know because they won't tell us yet, we do a census on a regular basis that somehow gets them to tell us about how many toilets they have. On the other hand do they know if they have an hispanic surname, or were their people from Cornwall ~ maybe they just don't want to know, nor for you to know what they don't know, or don't care to know. Census may get as far into it as is possible, but seriously, with this dramatic revelation that only 9% of people polled provide any kind of answer, just how accurate and meaningful is our census data?
In short, people vote their own self-interests. Nothing new here.
What happened with that 4% loss?
Were they Evangelicals, or black Mormons perhaps, or maybe people tired of 5 solid years of total unemployment?
When you get a situation like that with massive defections, and you are the opponent, you speak to the question ~ and that was JOBS
I'm still waiting on Romney to start his campaign where he will tell us what he's going to do to get folks employed ~ FAST!
You got it! We told them (GOP e) not to, but they did it anyway. It would be funnier if we weren’t stuck with the results, but I’m trying to stay positive and think we’ll have another chance in 4 years...
Now, the following quote is an example of the kind of garbage -- I call it "Christopher Caldwell's crap" -- that the RiNO elitists have been dining on for 20 years. It's an instance of Caldwell's being quoted and reverenced in a liberal blog article in 2005, seven years after his original article appeared, the key passage being this one:
The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders .... only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a "tipping point," at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.
Source: Digby in Hullabaloo, "Southern Fried", Dec. 2005.
The point of interest here is that Caldwell is a Neoconservative, and neocons are demonstrably, reliably, and quotably visceral detesters of everything Southern, country, Middle Western, outdoorsy, or self-reliant. They despise that stuff -- their idea of relevant is debating, for 55 minutes, the best way, as some Seinfeldian wag once said about New Yorkers, to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park.
Therefore it would be just as valid to question Caldwell's cultural and policy preferences, as it is for him to derogate Southerners as universal moral and social pariahs. But of course, he's writing the article, and the Atlantic Monthly edited and published it in 1998. (I have a dead-tree copy of the original.)
Notice, too, that Caldwell, like many antisemites, makes it "all about X", that is, none of the many things Democrats did to win the White House in 1992 and 1996 is here discussed -- rather, it was all because of Southerners being let run around loose by the grownups, in Caldwell's structuring of the issue, that the GOP has lost its core, lost many adherents, lost seats and statehouses, lost, lost, lost. Oh, woe betide our country, that has so many Southerners in it!
He does make a reference to loss of focus on shrinking government, and the moral loss the GOP suffered by exposing itself as a party of big government, big budgets, and bigtime crony capitalism after all -- but how that's Bubba's fault, he does not elucidate, nor does he clarify how, if these sins of the "Pigs at the Trough" -- who were the Bush/Yacht Club wing of the GOP -- were so damaging morally to the GOP's message, how it is then that the Party is too Southern and too socially conservative, rather than too Wall Street, too uptown, too banker-ridden, too Porcellian-at-the-trough.
I thought some of you might like this thread.
That's what Prescott Bush did, before he decided he could do better in life by going to Yale to become a facilitator and gofer to legacies and lettermen. It worked -- they made him a U.S. senator.
A Catholic theologian said many years ago that “all heresies begin below the belt.” People try to reshape religious doctrine and social life to justify their thrills and chills.
When you have a democracy where the voters are shaped entirely by an amoral celebrity culture, this presents a major challenge, particularly at a time when the normal moral standard-bearers have fled (although I think the Catholic Church is reviving from her 1968 swoon and the Evangelicals are having a shaking-out).
But note that I used the word “amoral.” This doesn’t mean they are “immoral,” in the sense that they are conflicting with a moral standard, but that they are non-moral. In other words, their decisions are not governed by any standard of personal morality and they don’t even think this is important. They were never taught any moral standard, in most cases, and even for the younger ones, it certainly formed less and less of their natural environment as they grew up.
That said, I think the GOP or conservative side or whatever you want to call it still must cling to the idea of morality, even sexual morality. There will be a turn around because there always is...once the age of consent is lowered to 7 and people’s first-graders are getting molested by the public school teacher and the teacher can’t even be charged. And this will happen, because people are being debased by pornography and even women suddenly seem to be turning up in child porn arrests.
I seriously think one of the appealing things about the GOP is that there is at least the ideal of holding up standards of how human beings treat each other, and if we abandon this, it honestly doesn’t matter which side wins.
All “morality” will be dictated by the government, and the government’s standard is only to facilitate what will enable the cogs in the wheel to keep on producing for the people in the government (in a socialist country, which this is becoming, that would be the governing party, which henceforward will be only the Democrats).
Economics is all dependent on your vision of life and of the individual and individual moral responsibility.
Evangelicals voted 79% republican, which is pretty typical for them.
Catholics voted for Obama, again which is pretty typical for them.
We need to emulate Evangelicals, and make them examples of conservative virtue and commitment, we need "outreach" to try and persuade Catholics to become like Evangelicals in voting, or at least to become more republican.
If people voted like Evangelicals, our problems would be over, as we returned to our American roots.
It doesn’t help either if the election is stolen.
I don’t think that Christians believe that taxes are charities. However you must have forgotten that Jesus said give to Caesar what is Caesar and unfortunately that are taxes
It would have been better if you had used paragraphs :(
How many votes did your guy get? Be honest
“Give my post another try. If I’ve been welcome here for fourteen years, I don’t think Mr. Robinson will ban me over this.”
I wished the threads would show which thread number the responder is responding about. I was taking extreme exception to your continued denigration of Todd Akin just like sakic continues to do. It serves no purpose but to do the MSMs attack job on future conservative candidates like they did last week to Rubio. It really doesn’t matter that Akin was not “electable.” What matters is that he was injustly attacked over a set up issue that was not his main focus. However, although not the best at defending his position, he had the guts to stick with it and not run away when ambushed by the press. Your bad mouthing him repeatedly on this forum was a disgraceful thing. Additionally, you failed to acknowledge that the voters of Missouri picked him to be their candidate in a primary. That is what I was deriding you about.
I will say I should not have said you should be off this forum. I have been looking over other times you have posted recently. You are not consistently obnoxious like “sakic” is and I enjoyed your rebut of him.
However, realize that being right on an issue (especially moral ones) is more ultimately important than being electable. You have written on the importance of being ready to take hard stands for a time, knowing the candidate will not be elected, for the long term good. A little pain now and losing a battle, but having a better chance of winning the war - and for the right reasons.
“It really doesn’t matter that Akin was not “electable.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree about that. The avalanche of Leftists who are killing our country are in office because they DO care about electability, and they are darned good at it.
I think throwing away that Senate seat was a terrible error.
Thanks for letting me stay :-)
“It really doesn’t matter that Akin was not “electable.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree about that. The avalanche of Leftists who are killing our country are in office because they DO care about electability, and they are darned good at it.
I think throwing away that Senate seat was a terrible error.
Thanks for letting me stay :-)
And you don't see a problem with your position? No internal contradictions, no cognitive dissonance? You might want to re-read the condensed version of your post above.
It reads like the Straussian take on hell: "If we must burn with the idiots down the street, then it were better that we not make a fuss about it; let them proceed as fools and sinners and burn us all, than disturb their depravity and scare them farther into the charms and arms of Lord Moloch."
You and Christopher Caldwell over at The Weekly Standard would seem to get along fine. He appears to want social conservatives, especially the Southern ones, to solve our problems by emigrating.
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