Posted on 05/02/2015 1:34:03 PM PDT by Kaslin
In his latest column, Washington Post commentator EJ Dionne advises National Republicans to learn from California's mistakes, or face declining voter support in election cycles to come.
His first point of contact on this matter? The current Chairman of the California GOP, Jim Brulte:
“California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes,” Brulte said in an interview. “Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”
That is true. Up to the early 1980s and the 1990s, California was a majority white state, Republicans did very well working the entire state. Other critics can rightly point out that the party structures got complacent, with easily redrawn Congressional and state representative districts which made it very difficult to remove an incumbent. Still, the demographic changes took the California Republican Party by surprise, and indeed they are playing catch-up.
The strange turn of Dionne's article, however, highlights the liberal columnists’ infusion of their left-leaning vision onto everything. They would prefer all political parties participate and promote that view. The Republican Party, by platform and legacy, is dedicated to a conservative standard, i.e. limited government, local control, individual liberty, small-scale constitutional form of governance.
In one flagrant example of this liberal bias, Dionne plays the race card to diagnose the California Grand Old Party's middling appeal to minorities:
The principal cause of the GOP’s troubles is its alienation of Latinos, Asian Americans and African Americans in a state whose population is now majority nonwhite.
This statement is disconcerting and false. Lack of outreach, yes. Offensive, alienating policies? No.
Before anyone claims that GOP stands for "Grandpas and Old People", a little history lesson about the California GOP is well in order. From its early stages as the opposition to the otherwise Democratic machine dominance in San Francisco and Los Angeles (where Confederate sympathizers attempted to secede California from the United States), the Republican Party boasted a diverse array of candidates. The first Latino Governor of California, Romualdo Pacheco, had started out as a Democrat, but left the party over slavery (he opposed it!), then became an elected Republican.
In the next century, Progressive (when it really meant “progress”) Republican Governor Hiram Johnson initiated the referendum and recall process. Another famous California Republican Governor, Ronald Reagan, relied on Hispanic outreach to unseat Governor Pat Brown. After eight years of Jerry Brown Part One, Republican leader George Deukmejian, of Armenian descent, restored the Golden State from its wasteful, profligate predecessor. He also divested state funding from apartheid-run South Africa and engaged the black vote, depriving then-Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley of a possible upset during Deukmejian's 1986 reelection.
One of the latest (hopefully not last) Republican US Senators for California, Japanese-American S. I. Hiyakawa unseated an absentee incumbent Democratic US Senator John Tunney in 1976. What bolstered the profile of this non-politician? His courage, when he stopped unruly black militant protests during his tenure as President of San Francisco State, despite ethnic cries of prejudice. His bold stance against disrespectful disruption gained the respect of conservative voters. He campaigned on a pro-America, keep Panama platform, and won in a year when Jimmy Carter upset incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford. (Ironically enough, the roots of failed GOP minority outreach began with Ford, who failed to re-charter RNC groups to reach out to Hispanics.)
Refusing to be defined narrowly by race, Hiyakawa, a celebrated linguist and writer as well as outsider-politician, questioned paying reparations to interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, and even founded a lobbying group to promote English as the official language.
The California Republican Party already boasts a winning legacy with other ethnic groups.
Predictably, the party's more government-averse views jar with progressive Dionne and the Democrats whom he also interviewed for his column. No wonder they (and the media) counsel Republicans to go liberal: “Be like us, and lose more elections!”
Like many liberals, Dionne beats the CA GOP with the Prop 187 stick, claiming that the popular (passed by 57%) initiative to block public benefits to illegal aliens ended up alienating Hispanics. Despite this misleading information, Dionne still has to explain the growing array of California’s Republican state and federal legislators of Hispanic origin.
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance/Santa Monica), born in Taiwan, first elected to the Torrance City Council in the late 2000s, who mountaineered his way to federal office, commented that Republican opposition to in-state tuition for illegal aliens has hurt their brand:
“Republicans were saying, ‘Come support us, we like you, but we want to deport your children.’ ”
Another patently offensive remark with no factual basis.
Some California Hispanic voters opposed Governor Jerry Brown Part II's "DREAM" Act, which benefitted three thousand illegal aliens at the expense of the millions of legal students, in-state or not, who still pay high and rising tuition rates.
What really “rankled” Asian-American voters? The Democratic legislature’s attempt to reintroduce discrimination into the college application process. Dionne did mention the CA GOP’s strong and growing outreach to California’s Asian-Pac communities, with an unprecedented number of Asian-Americans in the state legislature, all Republicans, evidently CA GOP leaders are learning from their past mistakes. By the way, there are more women in the GOP caucus then their liberal counterparts. Who is waging a War on Women now?
Before conservatives nationally or in California panic about the Republican Party’s future, a historical and political perspective is essential. For the CA GOP, the issue has been messaging, not massaging the truth, but more importantly punching back at the heated, racist narrative played out by the California Democratic Party for the past two decades (see one example here).
In 2014, Republicans already learned and applied key lessons. With wide-spread technological advances, a broader appeal through recruitment, outreach, and grassroots investment, the Grand Old Party is getting more than its well-deserved make-over. The National GOP needs to follow on those reforms in California, not take up the “advice” of liberal California Congressmen like Lieu, or liberal columnists like E. J. Dionne.
The mistake the GOP made in California — was running RINOS.
Though to be fair, the RINOs have become the GOP.
So maybe the mistake the GOP made in California — was running Republicans.
There is a reason RINOs are almost extinct.
California and Hollyweed have certainly hastened their exit..
From the political stage, as it were.
Why is it that liberals are always giving conservatives advice on how to win. If conservatives are such losers, why not leave them alone and let them lose.
Not all republican politicians are RINOs. All you have to do is check with which party they mostly vote. Just because you don’t like a certain politician doesn’t mean he or she is a RINO
Well, I am just a nobody. But this nobody’s opinion is that anyone registered Republican who is not a liberal should consider finding a new political home.
Unless they are comfortable in the role of enabler for the those who are shoving conservatism clear out of the political scene.
CA is an example of a national strategy advocated by both RINO and conservative campaign managers (eg CLI-Campaign Leadership Institute).
This strategy says:
-Identify how many votes it takes to win.
-Work the hard R areas the most. Design the media message for them. Do everything for them.
-In the purple areas, find and target only the Hard R voters.
-Write off the blue areas. Don’t waste your time or resources on them. You can find more votes for hour of time and more votes per dollar in the hard R area.
Of course, we live in a mobile society. So people move often. Most of the time, when we move the hard R (or hard D) is lost from our voter registration. The result is that the number of hard Rs keeps getting smaller and smaller. The number of hard R areas gets smaller and smaller.
The opposite strategy is implemented only occasionally..but Jack Kemp in upstate NY and by a rare lower profile politician here and there.
In IL it was known as the Ogilvie Strategy..as strategy successfully advanced by State Rep Bill Robinson (R) of Chicago’s SouthSide projects. Bill recruited dozens of Youth-for-Goldwater college students to move into Chicago’s inner city upon leaving Wheaton College, Marion College, Northwestern U, Purdue U, etc.
I took on 3 precincts... precincts the Dems allegedly stole for Kennedy. I shifted the vote per precinct from 550-10 to 350-250. I still lost the precinct. But Goldwater tripled Ike’s vote in one precinct and doubled it in another precinct.
It was by reducing the margin of loss in the hard D precincts thru us dedicated volunteers that the Ogilvie team won Crook county many times...and even won the city a couple times. (That ended when Ogilvie created the state income tax and lost all us volunteers.
This lesson from history has more recent affirmation. In recent years, professional campaign managers give us a walk-list on paper (now on smart phone). This list tells us to work the turnout of the known hard Rs. We are specifically told (and taught in CLI classes) to not waste our time on those not on the list.
When go to one suburban door and then skip the next house where the voter is out washing his car in the driveway (or whatever). Those voters see us skip him and take it personally. They call out things like “What am I, chopped liver?”
The voters who are written off are very much aware that they are intentionally written off by campaigns. They are very much aware that the candidate spends many days in the hard R villages of the district by not in the purple or blue villages, not even in the red parts of the purple village.
People have ideologies. But they vote based on who seems to be friendly and their friend, not on their ideology.
Getting back to CA, numerous times those written off would vote conservative in the referendum and then for the liberal Dem candidate. The big failure of both the CA Republicans and nation-wide is that they are slow learners and do not understand why this happens.
Flooding the country with Democrats is the problem.
When CA goes bankrupt, thanks to Democrat Socialist rule, and resembles Tijuana on blocks, the abject failure of their politics will be a warning for all the rest of the states. That is the future that scares Leftists such as Dionne spitless.
The first American governor of California, Peter Hardeman Burnett, was a Tennessean, later a Missourian, then an early pioneer in Oregon. He and the other white men in Oregon went to California during the Gold Rush--they had a head start on those coming from other parts of the US. Burnett converted to Catholicism and is buried in the Old Mission Santa Clara.
The first American governor of California, Peter Hardeman Burnett, was a Tennessean, later a Missourian, then an early pioneer in Oregon. He and the other white men in Oregon went to California during the Gold Rush--they had a head start on those coming from other parts of the US. Burnett converted to Catholicism and is buried in the Old Mission Santa Clara.
Respectfully, this is the perfect prescription for total and perpetual election losses.
Instead of splitting the GOP (and handing the Dems a huge majority), work from the ground up to re-claim the GOP.
Run good (intelligent, squeaky-clean, camera-lens-friendly, and ideally military veteran) candidates against the Grahams and associates.
Send Reince Priebus packing, and replace him with a conservative.
Otherwise, the Dems/Marxists/progressives will own everything and everybody.
Extinct? RINOs totally control both houses of Congress.
Reagan won that election in a 15 point landslide, I doubt "Hispanic outreach" was a major factor.
There is no prescription nor theory that will turn CA GOP for at least 25 years and maybe ever. Even if the entire budgetary process of the state was not dedicated to providing union pension funding, the overwhelming influx of illegals, full-on brain-dead liberals, and government-dependents make this an impossibility. It’s over. It’s done. It’s like playing roulette and betting only on prime numbers. Over time, you will lose.
The formula is clear: Overpopulation plus underopportunity plus generous welfare benefits produces an ever larger dependent class. It is not the obligation of the dependent class to think intelligently about what’s trapping them in their situation and vote in people who will impose the conditions that have a chance of helping them out of it. They can’t evaluate that, and 3/4 of the people who claim they can do such things are lying anyway. Gov’t dependents are too closely tied to feeding their faces. And that’s that. There’s no message that will overcome the expertise the Dems bring to the process of pandering to that crowd.
I’m using Positive Projection... and a lot of hallucinogenics. ;-) pardon me. Obammy wont.
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