Posted on 01/13/2013 7:33:08 AM PST by EternalVigilance
Official Washington hailed the deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff as a significant bipartisan accomplishment. However, voters around the country viewed the deal in very partisan terms: Seven out of 10 Democrats approved of it, while seven...of 10 Republicans disapproved.
Just a few days after reaching that agreement, an inside-the-Beltway publication reported another area of bipartisan agreement...while Washington Democrats have always viewed GOP voters as a problem, Washington Republicans "in many a post-election soul-searching session" have come to agree. More precisely, the article said the party's Election 2012 failures have "brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem."
As seen from the halls of power, the problem is that Republican voters think it's OK to replace incumbent senators and congressman who don't represent the views of their constituents. In 2012, for example, Republican voters in Indiana dumped longtime Sen. Richard Lugar in a primary battle.
This infuriated establishment Republicans for two reasons. First, because they liked Lugar and the way he worked. Second, because the replacement candidate was flawed and allowed Democrats to win what should have been a safe Republican seat.
So, according to Politico, the Washington team is gearing up a new effort to protect incumbents and limit the ability of Republican voters to successfully challenge establishment candidates.
That makes sense to those whose sole goal is winning a majority in Congress rather than changing the course of government policy. Seen from the outside, though, it sounds like the professional politicians are saying that the only way to win is to pick more candidates like the insiders. Hearing that message, the reaction of many Republican and conservative voters is, "Why bother?"
That's why more than two-thirds of Republican voters believe GOP officials in Washington have lost touch with the party's base.
(Excerpt) Read more at rasmussenreports.com ...
I figure it can't hurt - if the bastards see a few million less R registrations all of a sudden, especially if all the new non-R folks take their $ with 'em.
Not one cent to the RNC .. individual worthwhile candidates ONLY !
All the frustration in the world doesn’t change math. And the math always says third parties just hand power to your worst enemies. It is no more complicated to understand than 2+2. But the base of both parties is constantly trying to get to a new party that will represent their views.
Every political party is a coalition of disparate groups who conspire together to get 51% of the vote and then fight each other for what to with the power.
Any other vision is at best...charming.
Amen!! Ain’t no other way—impossible. No matter what, they’d absolutely need the votes of all Republicans we already have. This is just a unrealistic pipedream.
There is only ONE way to move this thing to the right. It requires patience and it will probably never get to where we desire but still we must follow the advice of Wm F Buckley. Always vote for the most conservative--that can win. There is no other way. Sorry, I'm only pointing out reality.
At the same time, we won some of the elections with Tea Party candidates that kicked out establishment figures, e.g. Ted Cruz. And, last I checked, establishment Republican Senators lost elections along with the upstarts last year.
Coattails from the presidential election always drive the down-ticket results, and in this case the whole party suffered due to the establishment getting their unelectable pick for the presidential ticket.
That doesn’t mean that the Tea Party shouldn’t consider electability along with ideology as factors in selecting their primary picks. Experience in running campaigns and winning elections does help. Most of the Tea Party candidates that lost made some avoidable rookie mistakes.
If anything, the establishment should work with us on this. They should start giving full backing to grooming candidates who agree with conservative ideology. The message they should take from us is that we will not back down on ideology, so they should work hard to find candidates we will support and which they can then groom to be smoother politicians.
Doesn't matter much when your "worst enemies" are in both camps. 2 liberal Democrats plus 2 liberal Republicans equals 4 liberals.
But the base of both parties is constantly trying to get to a new party that will represent their views.
Oh? Looks to me like the Democrats are being represented pretty accurately. Shoot, they've even got the Communist Party USA on board.
But, in any case, one only needs to read down through this thread, or have any faint awareness of the political lay of the land, to understand that few conservatives in the Republican Party believe now that they are being represented.
Every political party is a coalition of disparate groups who conspire together to get 51% of the vote and then fight each other for what to with the power. Any other vision is at best...charming.
Well, putting aside the bleakness of a "vision" based solely on conspiratorial, factional political warfare, again, it's obvious that few groups in the current GOP believe they are being well-represented. So, your whole paradigm means nothing in the real world.
Which is exactly the scam the statist slugs in the GOP have been running the last several election cycles: put up a liberal candidate that for all practical purposes will go along with the K Street crowd, cloak said candidate with the patina of conservatism to fool the right-wingers (nudge nudge wink wink), and enough of us fall for it. Based on the posts on this thread, it looks like enough still do.
Disagree. We want the brand name recognition, and we want the equity we've sunk into the GOP. Those guys owe everything they ever won politically, to our votes and support. If there's a parting of the ways, they walk -- we don't.
Main Street is what makes the GOP worth anything at all. If F. Clifton White and Barry Goldwater could find all the levers and buttons and where the money is that runs the Party, then we can, too. We don't need the charlie-boys and legacy princes and their homosexual cuddle-buddies.
Time for the Republican Party to regenerate as a party that means something great and grand and represents the aspirations of the Founders and the American People. We have this right. Those people haven't the stature to tell us, "no".
No one disputed that under the POLITICO spin this article shows the weakness and desperation of the RINOs- because we're winning.
No one disputed that conservatives increased their numbers in both the House and Senate GOP caucuses this election.
Don't be so quick to run from a discussion on FR. Admitting you can learn is a good thing.
No prob. I’ll spend my vote elsewhere then.
“That is why you’re willing to lie to make your point.”
Good God, calm down. I was speaking of the whole caucus, not the individual elections. The republican caucus in the senate is now more conservative than it was even though we lost two seats. Cruz is more conservative than Hutchison and Flake is more conservative than Kyl. And the moderate republican seat we lost in Indiana was washed with the conservative seat we gained in Nebraska.
Snowe and Brown were democrats. They had an “R” next to their name but they were democrats all the same. Brown especially would have pulled a Jim Jeffords before long. He was already running as an Independent on the ballot in some districts here in MA.
My statement was correct. Three moderate senators going out, three conservative senators coming in. The republican caucus is much more conservative. All the establishment nominees lost, and Akin and Mourdock defeated themselves.
I don’t shed any tears that Snowe and Brown and Lugar are gone. They always voted with the democrats and were always used as cover to make democrat bills “bipartisan.”
Remember we have two elections--the primaries and the general. Always vote for the most conservative--that can win and the Democrats will never gain on us.
This is a significant factor. To support your comment for a sec, the night Clint Eastwood made his speech endorsing Mitt Romney, two 'Rat Talking Heads popped up on PBS by prearrangement. They appeared first on Gwen Ifill's PBS convention coverage, and then they stuck around another 90 minutes or so to appear on Charlie Rose.
The two talking heads were Mark Halperin, chief political writer (Clinton/Obama flack-hack in journodrag, like George Clintonpoulos at ABC) for TIME magazine and son of the arch-traitor Morton Halperin (Pentagon Papers, "Get Nixon" campaign); both father and son worked (for the KGB) in the Clinton Administration.
The other was John Heilemann of New York magazine.
Halperin made the telling comment. He was stung by Eastwood's star power being used against The Won, and he went out of his way, on both Ifill's and Rose's nickel, to deride and deprecate Eastwood's "empty chair" as "a Bayonne dinner-club routine" -- knocking Eastwood socially, professionally, culturally, and every other way. He did it twice, and so I knew Clint had scored with Halperin and stung him.
Halperin then went on to say -- boasting, actually (so how pissed was he, voluntarily to come out from behind his usual sangfroid? how stung? -- a lot!) -- that in the first place, Clint's "empty chair" fell outside the time allocated by the Big Three networks to GOP convention coverage, so people wouldn't see it (gloat), and the networks would make sure people didn't see it. He then went on to say the same thing about the video the GOP had prepared at some expense and effort, to introduce Mitt Romney to the American People and lay out his CV, his ideas, his values. Halperin boasted that the Media would make sure the People didn't see that, either. He then summed up by saying, these efforts by the GOP to communicate directly with the People over the heads of the MSM would be fruitless: that he and his Media colleagues would "spin and refract" the GOP message with so many "takes" and twists, as to make the message all but incomprehensible to the public, and its value to candidate Romney and his party, zero.
That was his prediction and his brag, and it came true.
Having said that, it remains to say this as well: That the Republican Party did not fight for the air time, did not fight for their candidate and their message, did not kick Halperin's sorry Communist-loving ass all over the United States so that he couldn't drag it onto Rose's set because of all the bruising and bleeding. Because his own authority as a talking head would be in tatters before GOP Oppo got through with him. In other words, the GOP does not recognize the MSM as another 'Rat faction and "candidate" and give them "the Treatment" the way the Media give the GOP the "Treatment". Take them to court, sue for equal time, sue for their refusal to cover Clint Eastwood and the presentation video and for curtailing convention coverage. Do whatever it takes to mow down the filter faction, the spinners and liars, and get that message unfiltered, uncut, un-"refracted", out to the People.
The Media can be engaged. The RNC guys have just given up trying. Which is as good an argument for the "B" Team to take over, as anyone has ever needed.
Too bad about Mourdock, but I saw the question he was asked, and it was a malicious live grenade handed him by a 'Rat journopuke.
More training will help, but you're right, he hurt himself. But as I just posted above, when DemonRat journalists do that, they must be made to pay a price, every time. It will help level the field and abate the spiteful campaigning and "gotcha" stories they want to do.
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