TEA PARTY VS. PROGRESSIVE REPUBLICANS — BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE GOP

www.theBLAZE.com ^ | December 3, 2012 | Meredith Jessup

[Yosemitest]

TEA PARTY VS. PROGRESSIVE REPUBLICANS — BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE GOP
December 3, 2012 by Meredith Jessup

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles examining what went wrong for the Republican Party in the 2012 presidential election and where the GOP goes from here.
Please visit our special section GOP: What Next? to follow the series stories and find related content.

–

Since Nov. 6, there has been no shortage of opinions as to why challenger Mitt Romney and the Republican Party failed to ouster President Barack Obama.  
Pre-election divisions in the Republican Party between moderates and conservatives have only widened since Romney’s defeat
and the party’s strategy for the future remains unclear, a source of contention and heated internal & external debate.



Specifically, many now wonder what the sobering 2012 election results means for the right-leaning Tea Party,

the champions of personal freedom and smaller government who exploded on the political scene in the 2010 midterm elections.
The re-election of a progressive like Barack Obama would seem to signal the end of the conservative Tea Party, but the movement’s conservative leaders insist that last month’s election results only vindicate the group’s message.


“The Tea Party is not a political party; it’s an informal community of Americans who support a set of fiscally conservative issues,” says FreedomWorks’ Matt Kibbe.
 “And when you take a look at the roster of new fiscal conservatives being sent to Congress next year, it’s clear our issues are winning.”

Indeed, although the Tea Party may be focusing the vast majority of its ongoing efforts on local issues,
the conservative movement has left an undeniable mark on the national GOP establishment.
The group’s mantra of uncompromising fiscal conservatism and limited government has remained a driving force in shaping Republican platform.

For proof of this, one need look no further than Rep. Paul Ryan’s ascendancy to the No. 2 spot on the GOP ticket.  
Once considered a fringe of the congressional conservative coalition, Tea Party-backed fiscal hawks like Ryan are now considered key players at the core of today’s Republican Party.

Critics, of course, will argue that Romney’s defeat in November signals a rebuff of these ideals.
“The 2012 elections have been the undoing of the 2010 Tea Party tsunami that crashed upon Washington,”
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) proclaimed in November.  “The Tea Party is over.”

But the actual election results suggests this declaration is a bit exaggerated and vastly underestimates the conservative Tea Party’s influence in the GOP.

Despite defeats in states like Indiana and Missouri, the Republican Senate caucus gained three new Tea Party-backed members with the addition of
Ted Cruz of Texas,
Jeff Flake of Arizona
and Deb Fischer of Nebraska.
In the House, the Congressional Tea Party Caucus had 60 members before election day.  
Of those 60, six did not seek re-election, seven lost their races and 47 were re-elected.  
In addition, candidates endorsed by former GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s conservative PAC — Missouri’s Ann Wagner and Montana’s Steve Daines — also secured victories for the right.


“The Election Day losers were not the so-called ‘tea praters,’” Kibbe points out,
“they were the candidates embraced by (and some hand-picked by) the Republican establishment who failed to run on the winning message of economic freedom.”
When you boil it down, Kibbe argues, the lack of serious conservative candidates in 2012 meant many principled Republican voters chose to just stay home on Election Day.

This much is true — GOP turnout in 2012 was lower than both the 2008 and 2004 elections.
Turnout this year dropped by 7.9 million voters, falling to 123.6 million from 131.5 million in 2008.
This year’s underwhelmed electorate marked the first decline in a presidential election in 16 years.
Additionally, only 51.3% of the voting-age population went to the polls.  
When you couple low turnout with a few obnoxious and offensive comments on rape from gaffe-prone politicians,
it’s hard to say whether the GOP ran with bad policies or just bad candidates.

History also seems to be on the Tea Party’s side.
Election results aside, Bloomberg News‘ Albert Hunt predicted the end the GOP establishment
and continued rise of the conservative movement after Romney clinched the party’s nomination:


From Washington to the state capitals to the local level, the movement conservatives are in the ascendancy.
For years, the Republican base was divided; it’s now dominated by the movement types.

A comparison of Reagan’s last year in office to today illustrates the dramatic change.
Then, more than one-third of Senate Republicans were either genuine liberals such as Mark Hatfield, Lowell Weicker and Arlen Specter
or moderates such as Bill Cohen, Bob Packwood and Nancy Kassebaum.
With the retirement of Olympia Snowe of Maine there’ll be no more than two or three moderate Republicans in the Senate next year.

A quarter-century ago there were dozens of moderate Republicans in the House,

members like Chris Shays of Connecticut, Amo Houghton of New York, Bill Gradison of Ohio, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Bill Frenzel of Minnesota.

Today there are very few House Republicans who break with conservative orthodoxy.

The changes are equally dramatic at the state and local level.
Moderate Republican governors are relics.

In Kansas this month, the right wing, led by the state’s conservative governor, drummed a number of the Bob Dole-type centrist Republicans out of the party.


Columbia University political science Professor Brigitte Naco has studied the rise and influence of the Tea Party movement.
“Some Democrats say the Tea Party is dead. That’s all baloney,” Naco says.
“The fact of the matter is when you look at the basic agenda of the Republican ticket, it’s pretty much what the Tea Party likes.”

But does the GOP’s Old Guard establishment acknowledge or understand this fact?

In recent weeks, House Speaker John Boehner has appeared wobbly on his commitment to the New Guard’s steadfast fiscal conservatism.
Before the election, Boehner downplayed any likelihood of a Republican compromise on the so-called fiscal cliff — the $1.2 trillion in mandatory spending cuts coming at the end of this year.  
But after Romney’s defeat, Boehner seemed to pivot, then characterizing Republicans’ re-elected House majority as a mandate to find “common ground” with House Democrats who demand increased spending and higher taxes.

“There will be some kind of war” between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party over the future direction of the party, longtime Republican Party consultant Mike Murphy told the New York Times.
On one side of the divide there are “mathematicians” like Murphy who argue
that the GOP must shift its political strategy and policy focus to attract the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger voters and women;
on the other, there are those who believe that basic conservative principles — when articulated appropriately — will ultimately restore unity within the party and attract a wider base of national voters in the future.

Whatever course the party chooses to pursue, it will need to decide quickly as the countdowns to the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential election have already begun.
“We are in a situation where the Democrats are getting a massive amount of votes for free,” Murphy warns.

“Republicans need not jettison their principles.
But they must avoid appearing judgmental and callous on social issues,” esteemed GOP strategist Karl Rove argued in the days following the election.

Tea Party favorite and Florida Senator Marco Rubio agrees:
“The party has to continually ask ourselves,
What do we represent?
But we have to remain the movement on behalf of upward mobility,
the party people identify with their hopes and dreams.
People want to have a chance.”

FreedomWorks’ Kibbe predicts the party’s pivotal shift that began in 2010 has put the GOP’s Old Guard on a collision course with a new generation of Republican leaders,
including Rubio, Ryan, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker,
whose steadfast support of small government and limited spending launched him to national fame in a (successful) battle against some of the country’s most ruthless labor unions.

“You are going to see a continuation of the fight between the Old Guard and all of the new blood that has come in since 2010, but I don’t know how dramatic it is going to be,” Kibbe says.
“It is getting to point where you can’t reach back and pull another establishment Republican from the queue like we have done with Romney.”

With Republicans holding onto their strong majority in the House of Representatives, we may see a more conservative voting bloc emerge in the 113th Congress than the 112th,
and the ongoing debate over the nation’s fiscal crisis may be a good indicator of the divided Republican Party’s trajectory for the next four years.

Will the party establishment steer the party to be more conciliatory when pressured by the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill,
or will the GOP dig in against political concessions that threaten their undermining ideological principles?

“Republicans lost this year because they failed to recognize that economic freedom is trending in America.
The shareholders in America have spoken,
and they want senior management
to stay out of their homes
and to stop spending money we don’t have,”
Kibbe wrote days after Obama’s re-election.

“The party that can communicate that message
is the party that will win over the American electorate come 2014.”

[Theodore R.]

Reagan and the “killer instinct”. Do you mean GHWB, Sandra Day O’Connor, or others who undermined his administration measures?

[muawiyah]

Then there is no point in running primaries ~ what you've done is shut out the rank and file Republican voters.

Tell you what, it's much better to purge the GOP-e. They're the ones with the bad candidates who can't win even when the election is handed to them.

[Yosemitest]

" ... nice people don't fight the communists very well."

True, but God's people know how to fight.
And most of the retired military know how to fight.
But if we do fight, we have to fight the judges too.

Problem is ...
the Justice System,
now filled with Obama appointees and their preferred hires,
who have been "weeding the system" for almost 4 years
... have so corrupted the system,
that now the entire Justice department needs to be gone through with a fine toothed comb, and rebuilt.

To do this right, the Republicans MUST START HEARINGS TO DRAW UP BILLS OF IMPEACHMENT for the Arab-Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama II, (a.k.a. Barry Soetoro) and for all who had any thing to do with his TREASON.
It must be televised, and it must include every dirty detail against them we can find.

Benghazi is the drum to beat.

[Yosemitest]

Thank you for reading it.
Pass it along to those you think will use it for good.

[Yosemitest]

Do you have some links to prove "Turnout for Romney was higher than in 2008, and is still higher even when accounting for population growth."?

[Yosemitest]

Anything to avoid the facts, right? < /sarcasm>
You could always go to the original source !

[muawiyah]

Be careful how you deal with total turnout versus Republican voters and Democrat voters.

The Democrats suffered a serious drop off in voters ~ Republicans failed to achieve as high a total as they had in 2004, but there was no 2008 to 2012 drop off.

At the same time there were still 10s of millions of potential Republican and Democrat voters out there who did not vote ~ as is usually the case.

We already know there's little mixing of the two bodies of voters ~ that sort of thing happens only over a long period of time and by the election, people who are going to vote know how they're going to vote. Probably the reason why someone who says he's switching is news ~ 'cause it doesn't happen all that often.

The purpose of a political party is, after all, to win elections. They do this by building up a following that can be depended on to vote for the party's candidates. To get the voters to turn out they present fresh, intelligent and ideologically compatible candidates.

One screw-up and you lose ~ e.g. you decide the party is really just a narrow faction of serious donors within the party and the others just go along, because, after all, where else can they go. Another one is to run old used up candidates with a reputation for being dull ~ or disinterested in issues where the voters are interested. Then, let's say you run a candidate who'd be better matched by the other party ~ well, let's just say what Harry Truman said, Democrat voters know that when faced with a choice between a real Democrat and a fake Democrat they'll pick the real Democrat every time.

[Apple Pan Dowdy]

"Then there is no point in running primaries ~ what you've done is shut out the rank and file Republican voters..... it's much better to purge the GOP-e. They're the ones with the bad candidates who can't win even when the election is handed to them."

Sorry, I just don't agree. I would much rather have had only two candidates vieing for primary votes. One would have been Romney (chosen by the GOP establishment), and one would have been whoever the Tea Party "establishment" chose.... perhaps chosen by all the Tea Party candidate wannabes (Palin,Bachmann,Cain,Newt, & Santorum) getting together and deciding among themselves which one of them they will all agree to support. I could have lived with any one of those rather than Romney.

[Yosemitest]

I think you might see that very action about backing one candidate, and the TEA party telling the Establishment Republicans"

"Oh, why don 't you run, too?
You'd make a great candidate !" (to weed out the RINOs).

[mo]

“Establishment Republicans”

Basically 1970’s Democrats.....

[Yosemitest]

""Your candidate SUCKS.
Give us a Conservative to vote for, not some Progressive.""

I couldn't agree with you more!
They did.

[muawiyah]

All you needed to do was have closed primaries ~ that way you wouldn't have had all those Democrats showing up to vote for Romney. They knew he was the weakest possible candidate.

Remember for Conservative Republicans Romney wasn't ever a contender ~ NOT EVER ~ not this year, not in 2008 ~ NEVER.

In a closed primary he'd never gotten more than his 20% standard.

[Yosemitest]

"“Establishment Republicans”
Basically 1970’s Democrats....."

You got that right !

[Yosemitest]

QUESTION reference the voter drop-off:

Is it possible with electronic voting machines, for the machines to be programed to look like they counted Republican votes, yet in reality ... dropped them from the tally.

And would the Democrats do that?

I guess the signed sheets where people met the pollsters to get their cards that activate the electronic voting machines would show a real count,
but sign-in sheets could always be "lost" and new BLANK numbered sign-in sheets could be re-printed.
But I'm sure the Obama minions would NEVER think of something so corrupt, let alone ... actually do it.

[Apple Pan Dowdy]

"All you needed to do was have closed primaries"

Are you saying that Romney didn't win in any states that had closed primaries?

[Yosemitest]

Do you believe there was Voter Fraud?

Someone wrote:

"I believe there was voting fraud,
but that it was not the reason Romney lost.
Even without fraud he would still have lost. "

I don't completely agree.
I believe there WAS ENOUGH Voter Fraud to throw the 80 Electoral College Votes from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida.
I also believe that had Romney SAVAGED Obama, like he SAVAGED the Conservatives that ran against him in the Primary, Romney would have gotten more votes in the General election.
So yes, it's Romney's fault, but there WAS ENOUGH VOTER FRAUD to steal the election for Obama.

URGENT: ELECTION FRAUD VOLUNTEERS NEEDED IN WI, OH, PA, VA, FL

Maker of Unskewed Polls Creates ‘Obama Voter Fraud’ Map — See Which States He Thinks Should’ve Been Romney’s

Why There Won’t Be a Presidential Recount

None Dare Call it Stolen Ohio, the election, and America’s servile press

www.unskewedpolls.com

Black States = States Obama won by Voter Fraud. Click the state for more information.

Voter Turnout figures for 2012 indicate possible voter suppression and fraud

Vote Scamming in Philadelphia

Vote Scamming in Cleveland

Was Virginia won by vote fraud?

Vote Scamming in Florida

Question: Should President Romney Pardon Treasonist Barack Hussein Obama II, a.k.a. Barry Soetoro ?

Romney might have won, but with Obama's Criminals running the "Justice Department", they'll never admit Romney won.

Black States = States Obama won by Voter Fraud. Click the state for more information.

Photo Credit: Barackofraudo.com

[thesearethetimes...]

BookMark

May God keep watch.
Tatt

[muawiyah]

Romney 'won' a fixed primary in VA which does not have a closed primary.

That was one of the early ones.

But please listen to what i said, not the voices in your head still telling you that Romney and the Mittbots are God's own winners ~ they're not.

As a matter of principle we should have closed primaries, or use the convention system. Republicans should pick Republican candidates ~ not just the donors or Democrats out for a lark.

[lentulusgracchus]

“It is getting to point where you can’t reach back and pull another establishment Republican from the queue like we have done with Romney.”

Oh, sure they can. Suuuuure they can!!

Just sing along with me and the YachtTones and the Singing Bonesmen,

Duke, duke, duke, duke of Jeb, duke, duke,
Duke of Jeb, duke, duke
Duke of Jeb, duke, duke,
Duke of Jeb, duke, duke, ....

Pass the Merlot bottle and teenaged boys around and they can sing it all night long.

[muawiyah]

Democrats have used every method known to mankind to cheat in elections. Some Republicans have done similar things.

We could line everybody up on election day and have them raise their hands. Some Democrat would still try to cheat.