Posted on 11/09/2012 5:24:02 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
It’s been less than 24 hours since the polls closed and already the first shots in an emerging civil war within the conservative movement are being fired. Right-leaning pundits have been taking turns beating up on Mitt Romney and blaming him for the loss last night. Donald Trump just tweeted, “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.” And GOP leaders are already taking to the barricades on either side of the divide, which basically comes down to this question: Were Romney and the GOP too conservative or not conservative enough?
Steve Schmidt, a top Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, invoked the term on MSNBC this morning. “When I talk about a civil war in the Republican Party, what I mean is, it’s time for Republican elected leaders to stand up and to repudiate this nonsense [of the extreme right wing], and to repudiate it directly,” he said.
But on the other side of the fight, Herman Cain, the former presidential candidate who still has a robust following via his popular talk radio program and speaking tours, today suggested the most clear step to open civil war: secession. Appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio program this afternoon, Cain called for a large faction of Republican Party leaders to desert the party and form a third, more conservative party.
“I never thought that I would say this, and this is the first time publicly that I’ve said it: We need a third party to save this country. Not Ron Paul and the Ron Paulites. No. We need a legitimate third party to challenge the current system that we have, because I don’t believe that the Republican Party … has the ability to rebrand itself,” Cain said.
Fischer, a social conservative leader, noted that he predicted this summer that if Mitt Romney loses, evangelical conservatives would start a third party. “If Barack Obama wins this election the Republican Party as we know it is finished, it is dead, it is toast,” Fischer said in September at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.
Rush Limabugh, two months ago, echoed the sentiment. ”If Obama wins, let me tell you what it’s the end of: the Republican Party. There’s gonna be a third party that’s gonna be oriented toward conservatism,” he said.
“It is more viable today than it has ever been,” Cain told Fischer today of a third party.
After the GOP’s crushing 2008 loss, there was lots of talk about a new third party. When the Tea Party emerged, this talk almost became a reality. Instead, the conservative activists opted for a hostile takeover of the GOP. It’s still very unlikely that Cain or anyone else could start a viable third party, but his comments underscore the cleavage within the conservative movement in the wake of the defeat last night.
hope so
The way things are going the GOP WILL BE the third party.
I wouldn’t follow Cain into a third party. There are a couple of other names that could get me there, though.
See Post #36.
I can see problems with a third party challenge however. It would likely end up the same way that the ‘Dixiecrats’ did. We might win South Carolina and Alabama with effort, but we’d lose places like Montana.
The issue we have is that the Republican party is a coalition of different people. The religiously active conservatives who want pro-life and traditional marriage amendments pursued, and the more moderate, casual conservatives, who are mainly focused on fiscal issues, worry about the debt etc. One of the problems is candidates voted in by the latter group never serve as fiscal conservatives anyway. Look at Boehner.
The challenge for us is patching together social and economic conservatives in a strong way, whether that means starting a new party and doing some very careful planning, or simply working like hell to completely overthrow the GOP-E in 2014. Getting rid of Boehner would be symbolic.
The way the GOP has been going, we would Win in Montana by a mile.
Couldn't have anything to do with the talk of Jeb Bush for 2016, could it? [/sarc]
Hell, I think I'd be a better candidate for president.
Sign me up too!
We wouldn’t win for a while, but ‘winning’ with RINOs isn’t winning anyways...and we haven’t won much during the last 20 years.
The problem is far greater than you imagine - you need total organization in all 50 states, complete with full party registration, full party membership that runs well into the millions of members.
You can't create that fast enough, and there are too many tea party members working to build the GOP up from the bottom to stop them from doing that and get them to start all over again.
Take Scott Brown for example. Does any one here think that Massachusetts voters would have elected a real Conservative instead? I know this is an extreme example, but we're facing the same situation to a lesser degree throughout the country. If the GOP is running RINOs instead of Conservatives in the general elections, it's because the VOTERS nominated them.
I realize attacking the GOP is the easy way out, but if voters won't elect true Conservatives as Republicans, they won't vote for them under another party name. Until we address that and win Americans back to Conservative values, we'll keep getting RINOs.
It looks to me like we’ve lost the country, and we sure are not going to regain it with Northeastern Liberal Republicans running the GOP. A week ago, I strongly opposed a third party. But now I figure we have nothing to lose but despair...
Things are different, and things are broken.
We need a new approach.
What are you waiting for then? There are plenty of third party's and some fake Tea Party's that the Democrats fund too. You could even join FR's own Tom Hoefling's party that got some tiny fraction of votes and made utterly no difference.
We hear this 3rd party blather around every election and it isn't going to amount to squat. Even Ron Paul figured this out which is why he runs in the Republican Party now. The nutty LaRouchies even know this which is why they run as Democrats.
That was a disaster for another reason. Since Clinton was in the White House when Ecommerce and Y2K created all of those tech jobs, he got the credit. Even now, many Americans still give Clinton credit for that boom, even though it would have happened regardless of who was President. As a result, we're still fighting against the memory of "Clinton's economy".
Thanks.
Or we could form our own. A real, conservative American party.
I’m in if we do. I’ll vote for our guy (or lady) if we do not.
It’s a bit soon to get most interested yet. But let’s not wait too long.
:D
In a fair minded media this purple lipped bastard would have never made it in office to begin with.
Controlling the media is the first step in every communist/marxist/socialist takeover...they have had it for a long time now.
As much as I hate presenting a problem without offering a solution, as stupid as it may be, I have very little on how to get the 6 o'clock news, the Stewarts/Letterman/Lenos back to balanced...Even those powerful enough with cash are going to have a hard time getting through the FCC license regulations.
Like the socialists and communist that took over the democrat party, it is time to take the Republican Party back from the RINO’s, socialist lite, country clubbing executives and make it the party for the working man and small businesses.
Yup, the leftist media probably adds 5-10 points to the Democrats total each and every election - and it moves our culture further and further to the secular left.
Here is what I don't get. Conservative donors manage to pony up hundreds of millions of dollars to Karl Rove's SuperPAC among others, yet they don't seem to realize that this money could be better spent buying up media. Our side needs to be grabbing up media outlets - everything from magazines to entire networks if we can get them.
Isn’t this what the Constitution Party is?
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