Lou Dobbs Drinks the Insider Kool-Aid: The GOP will destroy itself by abandoning social issues

Lou Dobbs, business anchor, offers a lot of truly excellent and a little really atrocious advice to the Republican Party in his new book Upheaval, released on January 7, which he discussed in his January 6 broadcast "Steps to creating a winning election strategy for the Republican Party."

Dobbs's new book is a must-read; overall, the GOP should elect Lou Dobbs as its next party chairman. Though you may need to skip a few chapters.

The problem is that Dobbs insists that the Republican Party must abandon social issues. He argues passionately that the Republican Party must not give up even a single voter to the Democrats. Yet he then immediately recommends abandoning, alienating, and irritating the largest bloc of voters within the Republican Party: social conservatives, including socially conservative Hispanics and Catholics and Reagan Democrats.

Lou Dobbs has drunk the "Inside the Beltway Kool-Aid." He wants the GOP to pander to voters with very low probabilities of ever being persuaded to vote Republican, while alienating voters with a very high probability of voting Republican. This contradiction is a problem which business reporter Dobbs should be able to recognize.

A business-minded approach would follow the "80/20" rule, which teaches that 80 percent of a salesperson's sales come from 20 percent of his prospects. So a salesperson needs to focus on his or her best chances for success. (Note that "80/20" is not meant to be a precise measurement -- just a way of illustrating a point.)

It seems that one problem with Dobb’s recommendations, as is common with individuals who, although well-intentioned, do not have familiarity with the body of science on such topics as persuasion and marketing, is that he is seeking to avoid “turning off” potential voters rather than motivating potential voters to actually vote for your candidates.

Another problem that seems to be present in Dobb’s recommendations is that he is overlooking the success of the opposition party. The Dem party primarily campaigns on social issues while also spending whatever vast sums of money they can to “buy votes”. The Dem party assigns very little priority or gives much concern to economics. They are virtually entirely about social issues. If the R party avoids social issues, that entire playing field will be dominated and owned by the Dem party, leaving only the economic issues, defense, and foreign policy for the R party to market on. The vast majority of voters don’t understand or have much opinion about these three areas—they will accept whatever you say about those three areas and care so little that they won’t vote based on those issues. Voters care about personal matters and they don’t connect macro economic policy with liking their own job or how they are treated on the job. Social issues, however, are understandable and matter to voters. They have an opinion on social matters and you can make connections with voters on those issues.

The R party cannot win elections by satisfying a few large business interests. They can get donations but cannot get votes that way. The Dem party has a built-in system for kickbacks from, for example, unions, that ensures they have sustained campaign funding.

I keep hearing that the Republican Party needs to dump the social issues, and focus strictly on pocketbook issues.

Where exactly is this big Republican push on social issues?

Abortion is here to stay. In schools, prayer is out, condoms and common core are in. Homosexuality is portrayed as not just normal, but honorable. Christians are ridiculed and marginalized. We’re flooded with illegal immigrants who make constant demands of the country they broke into. Blacks are having fun punching whites randomly on the street while simultaneously playing the role of perpetual victim. The nuclear family is almost on the endangered species list.

Where again is this Republican frontal assault on social issues?

Two interesting items if you read the article. Things NOT said by Dobbs.

1) “Yet the greatest error is that Republicans have already been following the “fiscal issues only” approach.”

Republicans have been avoiding “fiscal issues only”. They have been playing Rove Games.

2) “I was Christine O’Donnell’s campaign manager in her 2008 U.S. Senate”
The only thing worse would be to say he was Todd Akin’s manager.

We know there are bad advisors on the GOP-e side but we have to consider there are bad ones supposedly working for the Tea Party too.

Had this conversation with a liberal buddy of mine. He isn’t left wing liberal, just socially. His position is, if Conservatives are so enameored with an individual’s rights and liberty, then why do they want to take them away? Isn’t that the Churches job and their own decision as it will with their maker that they have to answer to?

That’s the liberal republican argument.

The Republican Party was created, I believe, on the basis of a social issue-—slavery. So all the big thinkers, like Dobbs, think social issues don’t matter. In which case I suppose Dobbs believes polygamy, bestiality, children smoking dope, etc. are social issues that Pubbies shouldn’t be concerned with. A party that won’t stand strong for social issues is a party that doesn’t stand for anything. Dem-lite simply will not work.

In addition to the practical points made by numerous posters here, Dobbs seems to miss the point that a viable free market system has its philosophical base in a society with a strong ethical base - without that base, activities like bribes, sweetheart contracts, unequal application of laws and regulations, unequal enforcement of contracts and the like proliferate like weeds.

And of course that sort of stuff is already happening with the current regime as we transition from free-market capitalism to crony capitalism (Solyndra anyone?).

Dobbs may think that one can pick and choose what moral principles a political party tries to stabilize, but I’d say good luck with that approach - I don’t expect it has a prayer of working.

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