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.
Amazing bashing Evangelical, the most conservative voters in America, while defending the democrat voting block of the Roman Catholics.
Evangelicals are the least of our concerns, the pro-abortion Catholic vote is a huge problem.
Pollsters don’t define Catholics, a Catholic has to declare that he is a Catholic to be counted as such.
The Catholic church itself counts many, many, more people as Catholics, than the actual Catholics who identify themselves as such, to voting pollsters.
We need outreach to Catholics to get them to switch to the pro-life party.
I’m not bashing evangelical Christians at all, I was one for twenty years myself. Where you get “bashing” out of my statement that we ought to get every evangelical registered to vote is difficult to see.
And I’m not defending the democrat voting block of RCs at all. I don’t think they’re real Catholics at all since most of them are in complete rebellion against Catholic Christian doctrine.
I don’t know whose posts you’re reading, but not mine. I’m trying to agree with you and add some additional insights. Clearly this is not working out. Good night.
Evangelicals registered, they turned out and they voted 79% republican, they were the same portion of the voters as in 2008, and higher than in 2004. I disagree with you that they are the problem and that they need outreach. They are pretty much a finished product.
The Catholics are the ones who we need to work on, we need to figure out how to turn them from their loyalty to the democrat party, turning Catholics into pro-life voters is the key to national success, we could even take California back.
I've just now gotten around to really reading lentulusgracchus's post (#47) and followed the link to "Southern Fried". I concur that lent's post was indeed very good and quite thought-provoking. The marginalization of Southerners (and Social Conservatives) by the GOP does not portend well.
There are quite a few who believe that he government is a charitable organization. They redistribute wealth and thereby paying taxes is charity. Joe Biden thinks this way.
The original article of Caldwell's appeared in 1998 but is around online -- in the Atlantic Monthly archives, but also elsewhere. I picked the "Southern Fried" article on Hullabaloo because it epitomizes and condenses Caldwell's long thinkpiece pretty well, as well as adding a liberal's reaction to it for more perspective.
It's pretty bad when liberals start quoting so-called "conservatives" and "neoconservatives".
Jennifer Rubin is the successor to Dave "Why-Lie-I'm-Really-a-Liberal-and-I-Hateyouhateyouhateyoubwaaaaahahahahahahaaaa!" Wiegel at the Washington Post's "conservative politics" desk, and she's another neocon much like Caldwell and the Podhoretzes and Kristols. She supports conservative/Tea Party causes, someone tallied up, right about 53% of the time, almost always on economic and defense issues, but the rest of the time she falls right into line with the Moonbats. That's because she shares the urban-liberal prejudice (google "Sarah Palin" + "Commentary", and then cross-reference her with David Frum and www.jewschool.com, to get the full double-barrel treatment) against "Flyover America", country people, country pastimes and pursuits like hunting, stock-car racing, and old-fashioned, "corny" patriotism, and all the array of 20th-century American conservative values. To all those things, urban "neocons", like liberals, react with a visceral disgust that you won't talk them out of anytime soon.
Then they can pivot and use their liberal chorus to argue that "respectable" conservatives don't doubt Obama's eligibility or the absolute virtue of his black racism.
Which doctrine, the one Before or After? After they started putting long-haired, bare-headed girls with guitars on barstools inside the sanctuary for a "guitar Mass", and performing other gestures of High Unseriousness and "We-didn't-mean-it" congregant-chasing? Which Church are you talking about?
Thank you for the kind words.
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