Posted on 11/11/2013 6:20:29 PM PST by SoConPubbie
Politics is in the eye of the beholder.
Post-mortems about the Virginia gubernatorial race are gushing forth about why Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd. They tell us more about who produces this punditry than about the reality of the situation.
We're hearing that tea party activists killed Cuccinelli's candidacy with the government shutdown (according to The Wall Street Journal editorial page, they "stabbed him in the back") and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can't win women's votes.
What I see is very different. What I see is a Republican Party that still has not learned lessons necessary to reverse setbacks of recent years.
It was not the tea party that stabbed Cuccinelli in the back but establishment members of his own party. Once a real conservative candidate gets nominated, party leaders lose interest. Then they hold back funds, thus ensuring their own prediction that this candidate can't win.
Cuccinelli lagged in total funding by $14 million. In the campaign's early months, he was brutally attacked in ads that went unanswered because of lack of funding.
Last month's 16-day government shutdown, led by hardline conservatives, supposedly had a disproportionate negative impact on Cuccinelli because so many Northern Virginians work for the federal government. But he was well behind in the polls for months before the shutdown -- again, largely because of unanswered attack ads.
Members of the Republican establishment can't seem to grasp that they would have helped their cause by embracing efforts to defund "Obamacare" led by tea party activists Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
Each day, Americans see more clearly what a disaster the Affordable Care Act has created with its health-insurance exchanges. If Republican leadership would have unified clearly around the efforts of Cruz and Lee, and shown Americans a clear picture of Republican commitment to slay the Obamacare monster, it would have helped the party and Cuccinelli.
It's also clear that Republicans still haven't gotten the message about race and the country's changing demographics.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2012, with just 38 percent of the white vote, Republicans supposedly learned something.
Those lessons appear to have been lost in Virginia.
In Virginia, blacks account for nearly 20 percent of the population -- much higher than the national average of 13 percent. McAuliffe got 90 percent of the black vote, as did Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for Virginia governor in 2009.
But in this election, blacks constituted 20 percent of the overall vote, up from 16 percent in 2009. So the impact of the black vote grew by four points. That increase in the black vote as a percentage of the total could have made the difference, given that Cuccinelli lost by 2.5 points.
The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor was a no-nonsense black pastor, E.W. Jackson, a graduate of Harvard Law School.
This would have been a classic opportunity for the Republican Party to aggressively visit black churches, talk about the conservative religious values that these black Americans care about so dearly, and explain the deep damage that welfare-state policies and secular humanism embraced by Democrats has done in black communities. Where were they?
Then there's the claim that conservative candidates can't attract women. Not true. It's not about gender but about marriage.
Cuccinelli captured the votes of both married men (50 percent) and married women (51 percent). McAuliffe captured the majority of singles' votes: 51 percent of single men, 67 percent single women.
Republicans have lost in recent years not because they've been too bold or too conservative. They've failed because of a lack of clarity, conviction and courage.
Ken Cuccinelli's defeat in Virginia is not an encouraging sign that Republicans have learned their lessons.
(Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education in Washington, D.C. Reach her at www.urbancure.org.)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The GOPe is as much our enemy as any democrat. If you care about liberty.
Did anyone hear BOR and Bernie G trashing the Tea Party tonight?
The GOP didn’t shut the government down.
The house voted repeatedly to reopen various parts of government and those votes were stopped dead in Hairy Roid’s senate.
Bears repeating.
The reason Cuccinelli lost is obvious. Single young women voted 9:1 against him. Only other block to vote against him in larger percentage was African-Americans.
And why is that?
The GOPe is as much our enemy as any democrat. If you care about liberty.
The candidate is 100 percent at fault. If you need others to help you win, you are probably weak to begin with.
Because he wanted to ban oral sex apparently. Why he wanted to do this is beyond me.
Like the Whigs that preceded them. The GOP is going through death throes and perhaps like a bandaid it must be yanked quickly to avoid undo pain
What % of the vote did Cuccinelli get in the Primary?
In other words like Santorum wanted to ban birth control.
Yeah I know its crap but I’m not going to turn around and play the same stupid game.
Santorum at least won many many states. COOCH could not even win a simple governorship.
This says absolutely NOTHING about the actual candidate. The DemONs could run whoever is the head of the Ku Klux Klan, complete with commercials of him raping little black girls while eating watermelon... as long as there's a "D" after his name, he'll get the "black vote."
Now they have a governor who not only supports oral sex but wants technique taught to elementary school children.
Brilliance.
Nope.
I know. It seems that Virginia Democrats may have every area of leadership if they lose the AG too. McDonnell really screwed the pooch with his stupidity.
Look - we need leaders and ones who will also have the IT factor to win against DEMS like Terry McAwful. I believe that Tea Party candidates and Republican candidates are part of the same team.. We need to stop slamming one another and instead slam the opposition. Once the primaries are done, then so should be the bashing within the party. This HAS to be the standard for both 2014 and 2016 if our nation has ANY hope. This may include doing all for a candidate like Chris Christie...We fault him for all the things we don’t like about him, but if we run Ted Cruz up in 2016 and he doesn’t wind up being our guy, let’s not take our toys home and not vote k>? THIS NATION CANNOT SURVIVE HILLARY CLINTON after the 8 YEARS of BO! WE have to think of how best to pull this Nation from the ABYSS the DEMOCRATS have thrown us into.
Also, on the weekend before the so-called shutdown, the GOP senators were burning the midnight oil on Capitol Hill trying to avert a shutdown.
Harry Reid and the rest of the democrats refused to show up.
Obama refused to negotiate.
I wish Star Parker and others would knock off this “hard-line conservatives shut down the government” meme, which the democrat-controlled media has been lying about for six weeks.
Wrong again — he lost because of the straw candidate, Robert Sarvis.
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.