That is a very great pity, if true, because Gingrich has written the most intelligent postelection analysis yet.
Posted on 12/24/2012 7:07:23 PM PST by CutePuppy
To Chairman Reince Priebus,
Thank you for inviting me to present an analysis for the Republican National Committee about the current challenges Republicans face at every level.
Our working together goes all the way back to your early years in politics. I enjoyed doing events with you in Wisconsin and admired the work you did in helping Scott Walker become Governor.
I was delighted when you became RNC Chairman and I know how much you accomplished in the last two years rebuilding RNC finances and developing a better ground game.
Your creation of the Growth and Opportunity Project chaired by Henry Barbour is a very important step toward assessing what we have to learn from 2012 and what we have to do to succeed in 2014 and 2016.
I look forward to working with Henry and his team and hope this paper provides some useful thoughts about both the GOP's past record of responding successfully to election challenges and to the changing nature of American society and politics.
Reforming the Republican Party so it can create a governing majority is an enormous challenge which includes every element of the party. However as you have observed the RNC has a key role to play in bringing together the ideas and the critiques and helping shape a clear vision of a successful GOP.
I begin with three famous quotes about solving problems.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” Albert Einstein.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Einstein
“When I couldn't solve a problem I would always make it bigger until I could find the solution. I never solved it by making it smaller,” President and General of the Armies Dwight Eisenhower on problem solving in World War Two.
PROPOSITION
The scale of strategic thinking Republicans need is vastly larger and deeper than any current proposal recognizes. The Republican National Committee will play a particularly important role in gathering information, encouraging analysis, hosting dialogues about key changes, and helping implement strategies for victory in 2014 and 2016.
This will require a deep, bold, thorough, and lengthy process of rethinking.
I was so shaken by how wrong I was in projecting a Republican win on election night that I have personally set aside time at Gingrich Productions to spend the next six months with our team methodically examining where we are and what we must do.
In that context I was delighted when you appointed a distinguished team to lead the analysis for the Republican National Committee. I appreciate your invitation to work directly with them on a process that will be important to the entire Republican Party and ultimately to the country.
This paper is a step in that direction.
This initial analysis is direct, tough minded, and daunting.
As you recognize, the Republican National Committee is not merely the junior partner of whoever becomes the next presidential nominee.
The Republican NATIONAL Committee has a key role to play in every level of party activity including Congress, Governors, state legislators and local offices and activists.
That key role has often led to profound improvements in the GOP at a time of electoral disaster.
.....
Exactly.
Newt has spent the last 16 years trying to force Conservatives to talk like Democrats.
After losing two straight presidential elections, now Newt wants us to organize our campaigns like Democrats!
Let's examine political reality.
Romney lost by 3.68%.
He was a weak candidate.
He ran a poor campaign.
He had NO strategy to counter the relentless Hard Left MSM attacks.
Republicans lost, but it was not a crushing defeat by any measure.
To win in 2014-2016, we need to maintain our share of white votes (62%), we need to improve white turnout by 2%, and we need to peel off 2%-3% of the non-white vote.
To win in 2014-2016, we need to reject Democrat Party principles and methods.
To win in 2014-2016, we need well grounded, politically astute Conservative candidates.
Until the Obama liberal welfare state collapses because they have run out of other peoples’ money or their enablers at the Fed have driven us to Weimar levels of inflation, I fear the split between what one writer @ FR called “feral adolescents” who vote for free stuff (Democrats/liberals) and those rational adult voters forced at gunpoint to pay for it (conservatives/producers) will continue. Until that collapse — which may also trigger violence from the left which many on the right will just as violently resist — this country will remain in deep, deep trouble.
We are now in Tyler’s dependency en-route to slavery and the power hungry bastards on the left will, like the parasitic mutant microbes they are are willing to kill their host before they give up that power or die themselves.
Hate to say it Newt but no matter how many study committees you form or position papers you write, the thuggish opposition we face today will not allow this to end nonviolently.
I would urge you and your GOP friends to acquire the tools and training for what lies ahead unless you are OK with a Pol Pot style march off into a Georgia swamp.
If the GOP doesn't listen to Newt or a strong conservative, they are walking close to the grave. Personally, I don't know of hardly anyone with the intelligence to get in there and turn this around other than Newt and Thomas Sowell and a few others. Our government is corrupt. I still say if he can't do it, it’s over for them. Are they going to listen to the Tea Party. They maybe blowing smoke with Newt. Newt needs to stay firm and don't mellow out to them because we want a true person whoever it may be. This is not the politics of the 1960’s; people are onto the politicians; their every word and action.
You would think the republicans would want to save our country. That's what the base wants. It’s hard to accept the fact that republicans can be so respectful to the opposition party and their leaders while we all see the damage that those same people are doing. Republicans have no business selling out to the socialists nor watering down our fundamentals of this nation. if they want gay marriage and gun control, like the dems; to me they are absolutely dead other than that, I am praying they turn their loss into something positive. They will be stupid to tell the base to be more liberal. We could have won the base over if the base felt there was going to be a huge overhaul of their government and term limits. The person whoever does that in the future will end up as one of the most popular presidents ever regardless of what the democratic media does.
We need a person who can handle the tiers of government, managing the lower level process, keeping all factions of the message on the same page while being faithful to their intelligence, faithful to the constitution, faithful to their supporters and to the nation's ideals while balancing these things as well as the corrupt dirty media like Reagan did. Just follow the constitution, don't inject new age liberalism/compassionate conservatism. Go back to the old school basis. The founders have all of the answers set for us. No more new laws. Enforce the laws that we have. Protect our borders. I do believe Newt is a parrot and I also think he is very intelligent and sometimes could become bored with the process of things taking so long to see progress. He is very deep and many can't follow him. I am glad he is trying and hope he stays true to what has done over the years. He and others need to listen to conservatives, not the GOP who want to go along with the democrats. Imo.
That is a very great pity, if true, because Gingrich has written the most intelligent postelection analysis yet.
Just go away, Newt.
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Exactly!
My belief is that we do need a new party, there is no reworking this one with those present in it.
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Agreed
Thanks for posting the detailed analysis.
In my business, diagnosis comes before treatment - or, more exactly, when treatment comes before diagnosis, the results are difficult to predict.
But then he also does extremely dumb stuff like sitting on the couch with Pelosi, criticizing Bain from the left, etc. ???
***
And don’t forget one of his recent gems. He says we need to accept homosexual “marriage”:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2970873/posts
There is a very good reason for that. We lost this election largely because we assumed our own ideology. In other words, we could not believe that the electorate would be stupid enough to reelect a man who was destroying the country. We were not alone. Gingrich flatly states that he was astonished by the results and plans to take six months to find out what happened. Michael Barone, a man whom all of us must respect as one of the great political scientists who calls 'em as he sees 'em, got the election results in the electoral college wrong by scores of votes. The vaunted Karl Rove was humiliated on national television the night of the election when he could not believe the results in Ohio. I got it wrong, you got it wrong, we all got it wrong.
And we got it wrong mostly because we were blinded by our own ideology. We just could not believe the country could be so damn stupid.
But there was one guy who got it right, David Axelrod. You can see his analysis of the election, or at least as much is he will give away, on C-SPAN right here:
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Obama-Adviser-David-Axelrod-on-His-Career-in-Journalism-Politics/10737436338-1/
What does David Axelrod, the man who actually won the election, have to say? He talks about getting the right data. He talks about correctly analyzing the data. He talks about having intelligent people analyzing the data. He remarks on the dichotomy between what the public polls were telling people like us and, no doubt, the Romney campaign and what Axelrod's truly extensive polling and really intensive focus group research were telling him. It is clear that everybody on our side got it wrong and it was not because of voter fraud-although that might have played a small part in isolated incidents-it was because we did not read the electorate correctly. There is a word for this, we were purblind.
One example, Axelrod knew the swing voters were blaming the economy on Bush and excusing Obama. We had public polling that was even telling us that, but we did not accept the implications of it because we could not accept the reality of it. In this context, Romney's whole campaign on the economy missed the Mark.
Gingrich as outlined innumerable propositions and 25 questions and it is only after these propositions and questions are addressed that we should turn to ideology. If we do it in reverse order we will simply deceive ourselves one more time. The Rinos will sing their old song and we will make our old complaints. The Rinos will say "we delivered you the independents" and the conservatives will say, "where is the base?" Each side will indict the other, each will claim that the others ideological stubbornness, or ideological fecklessness, is bringing us electoral ruin. Neither side will have good hard data upon which to make its case. We will never know.
Ignorant but impassioned, we will be doomed to repeat.
To return to Axelrod, he talks about the need to be informed by the data and, having assessed what is attractive, having identified the vocabulary that works, at that point the strategist applies the data to the service of ideology. If you are sick and tired of having David Brooks tell you how to win elections and having the Republican establishment inside the Beltway listen to him, arm yourself with the data to refute him.
Last night, Christmas Eve, I posted this reply, to "The story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama."
(http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/pings):
It is important for conservatives to understand the import of this article. It says that Romney did not lose the election for ideological reasons but for mechanical failures. Many FReepers no doubt will find this frustrating.(emphasis supplied)
I have been saying since the night of the election loss that we must withhold our judgment about why the campaign went the way it did until we have data. The primary question remains, why did so few white voters bother go to the polls?
I think this article tells us a lot about why black and Hispanic voters went to the polls. It suggests that white voters did not go to the polls because Romney's rope a dope strategy permitted Obama to demonize Romney and the election was then and there lost. That seems plausible to me but what do I know? No more and no less than any other FREEPER with an ideological ax to grind on these threads. In the absence of data which tells us why our voters stayed home, we are just setting ourselves up for another fiasco by engaging in political onanism.
To the degree that we choose to believe it, the article tells some things that are obvious and some things that were not obvious to us at the time. For example, it was obvious to us that unanswered attack ads are poison especially for a candidate who is not already established in the minds of the electorate. I remember posting that it was far more expensive to try to unconvince people who have been convinced against you and then convince them on your behalf than it is simply to convince them in the first place. By not engaging Obama early on, Romney put himself in the position of arguing against the voter' s judgment for making a wrong assessment. That is almost an impossible sale. Without data, I can only say this is my opinion, but it seems to me obvious that the spending on television ads in the future will go on in the beginning rather more than at the end. As the Democrat said, he never saw an effective ad after Labor Day.
It was not obvious at the time that Obama had taken his ground game to a new level, that his level of technological innovation was light years ahead of Romney, that Romney's cyber war capability would be a fiasco, that Romney, who could have had access to the best polling and bogus group data ever, would permit himself to be misled. Apart from what that says about Romney and his vaunted ability as a manager, it tells us that no political campaign should be conducted when it is dependent on only one source of intelligence. No competent general would do it and no candidate should do it. In the future, a prudent candidate will engage a competing polling service to play the devil's advocate to his campaign manager' s polling service and require both sides to litigate in an adversarial setting the meaning of their data.
My conclusion from all of this is that the campaign for the 2016 election began on November 7, 2012, at least it has on the Democrat side, but one wonders what, if anything, is happening on the Republican side. Republicans seem to have decided to form a committee to tell them what happened to them. If Rino consultants form the committee I suspect Romney's Rino consultants will have little to fear from the report. I would much prefer them to consult pollsters of the style of Michael Barone to find out what happened precinct by precinct. But even Barone, as competent as he is, got it terribly wrong. So, I want dueling analyses of the postmortem just as I would in an ongoing campaign.
Since the campaign is already begun, Republicans should pay the price of attacking Obama beginning now and everyday for the rest of his term. Obama successfully ran against George Bush who was not on the ticket in 2008 and he was able to do it again in 2012, let a Republican do the same in 2016. But that can only be done if the predicate is laid. The predicate is an unremitting, unrelenting attack on Obama until the façade is finally eroded. All of this, so far, has nothing to do with ideology. It does not say a word about whether Romney ran his campaign too far to the left or too far to the right. (emphasis supplied)
This article and the data which has surfaced so far do not tell us what position we should adopt on immigration, whether we have to pander to Hispanics, or whether we should cling to the base. We simply do not know. It is no more proper for we conservatives to pontificate our doctrine than it is for Rinos to counsel cowardice. On the other hand, we can draw some conclusions about the mechanics. (emphasis supplied)
We get ever closer to some understanding but we are not there yet. If this article is correct and we manage to draw the right conclusions from it, we will know that we failed mechanically. But will we know whether the right mechanics would have won given the ideological position Romney advanced? Was it lost due to his reputation as a Rino or was it due to his failure to exploit Benghazi and Obama's ability to exploit hurricane Sandy? Would Romney have lost worse if he had campaigned farther to the right?
I do not want that to be the case, I want it to be that the more conservative the candidate, the better the candidate's chances, but I want to know what is real not what makes me feel good.
Merry Christmas.
Theoretically Newt would have been the best for nomination, but in TV world, perception is more important that fact and Newt generated some good mis-perceptions. Why? maybe he lives too much in history and longer range political planning and little things like the couch just don't register or he could also suffer from the general GOP misconception that if you are nice and considerate to dems, that they will act the same.
Newt also said last week that it's time for Conservatives to accept gay marriage. I guess you're OK with that too.
There's not one word in that whole wall of text about repairing the damage that the RNC has done to its relationship with the TEA Party movement or in reconfirming and strengthening the Republican Party's commitment to Conservative, originalist, limited-government principles. Not one!
Instead, Newt's just trying to land his next big gig---and as usual he's only out for himself.
That's easy---because they did not like Romney or his northeastern brand of big government liberalism. The RNC's dumping all over the TEA party movement (especially in Tampa) and Conservatives (like Palin) did not help him either.
It is comments like this that eradicate completely any vestige of respect I may have retained for his conservative past.
Regardless of anything else that happens, I do not have to accept this. I can have it imposed on me, pushed on me, forced on me, legislated on me, but if I think it is wrong (which I do) I will never, ever "accept" it of my own free will.
And for Gingrich to say that, well...that is the same as people like him saying we have to "accept" amnesty and uncontrolled immigration.
If those two things alone banish me to a political exile for refusing to willingly go along, then that is the way it is going to be.
Compromising with evil means accepting evil. There is no "win-win" in it.
All very important and all off subject.
No it is not easy, that is the whole point. You do not know anymore than I do why white Republican voters stayed home. We do not even know, for example, whether it was white conservative as opposed to white Republican voters who stayed home much less why they stayed home.
I would bet David Axelrod knows.
I find it interesting that in the entire document, the word “conservatism” is never used.
Well, why should it? This is about mapping out the future of the GOP....as new age democrats. Conservatism is now a dirty word. Embracing more government spending, increased taxes, homosexual marriage and gun control are all the rage with GOP politicos these days.
Sure I do. It's not rocket science. They could have cared less about Romney and "voted" accordingly.
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