You can’t afford to abandon a sizeable fraction of your base. These “far-right loonies” supported Perry, Bachmann, Cain, et al in your primaries, when given a choice.
You should abandon them, of course, and you will, eventually, but it takes a lot of guts to stand up to ridicule by Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump and Ann Coulter. You don’t have that kind of fortitude now.
It has nothing to do with fortitude. It’s a practical matter. They aren’t going to play to a sector that ensures their defeat in the general election. They are discovering that this kind of ridicule could perhaps be beneficial, in that it distances them from orthodoxies that the public at large finds distasteful.
Look, we may stumble, perhaps through a few cycles, trying to find out what the New World Order is. But IMO that stumbling won’t be because we think we weren’t conservative enough, or need a “real conservative” candidate, or any of that stuff. The Senate races showed how well that worked.
That you talk about fixing the brand shows that you are willing to change the message to better match what the general population wants. The loons would much rather lose than do that. It is admirable that you want to dump them, but they appear to possess the fervor that wins primaries. Politicians want to be elected - but to do that they have to get nominated which is where the problem is. What you need is another politician like Reagan who told the loons what they wanted to hear and then went off and did reasonable things for the good of the country like tax hikes, fixing Social Security, and negotiating with the Russkies. And the loons never appeared to have noticed.
These guys are scarce.
You can make insulting comments about political parties, but here you’re insulting Stratocaster as well. Don’t do this again.
I think the difference know is that we realize that our formula for winning the nomination ensures defeat in the general election (or seems to). The loons who would rather lose than sacrifice any aspect of “party purity” by definition need to be out of the new calculus. We’ve already figured out how to lose general elections.
I believe the GOP can have a populist message consistent with our core values. Both parties can debate ideas when one doesn’t have the luxury (which we granted) of demonizing the “rich white guy” party. Just as an example, most polling data I’ve seen suggest that blacks and Latino values in MANY aspects correlate more closely with the GOP. But they ain’t listening if they think we won’t welcome them in the tribe. We have to fix our brand.
I used to be a Republican. The first Democrat I ever voted for for President was Al Gore, and I started voting in 1972.
You realize that about the nominations. The old pols realize it also, which was why they were for Romney. But the voters didn’t quite realize that.
You can talk all you want about Latino cultural values, but Obama was the one who both spent more money than ever guarding the border and letting kids who were brought here young stay without fear. Unless you can convince the base that this kind of thing is a good idea you are going to get trounced. Bush realized this, and got nowhere, even as the President. Sorry, the label of party for rich white guys is going to stick as long as you are willing to shut the government down to protect tax breaks for rich white guys, even when this is very unpopular.
Changing any brand image is tough. Even WalMart failed when they tried to change their brand image into one where you could buy fashion. To really have done that they would have had to abandon a lot of their customer base.
What is going to take is for someone to have the guts to pivot right after he wins the nomination, and basically challenge the right to come with him or be left in the cold. It might not work. Like I said, I thought Romney was going to do this, but it turns out he didn’t have the guts. So I agree with you on what needs to be done, but I don’t see how it can be done or who is going to do it.
Not going to happen. It’ll either take place earlier in the process or it won’t happen at all.
The election is over. You can drop the pretense now.
Obama was so effective in his first term at accomplishing what the majority of Americans wanted that the Republicans had to make shit up to make him look bad, such as the lie that he didn’t accomplish anything.
But it isn’t blindingly obvious to all, especially to the extremist tea party types who are the source of the only political power Republicans have now–in the House. It’s pretty hard to see Boehner and company willing to give that up in order for the party to re-birth itself. But otherwise, you’re right, and may I say, it’s refreshing to hear a sane conservative here for a change.
What mainstream middle? Right now we got crazy ass loony Republicans and a bunch of Reagan Republicans who call themselves “Democrats.” There IS no middle in American politics, just two big blobs on the right and a big mostly field with a smattering of progressives and greens in it.
The middle relative to the two parties.
But if that “sector” is highly organised and votes in the primaries in large numbers, for the rightest of the right, how can candidates avoid playing to them? Arlen Specter and Richard Lugar are the grim examples of what can happen to someone perceived to be a RINO. How can you “re-brand” when that re-branding is anathema to a large section of the most committed Republican voters?
Not trying to be snarky here, but I think it’s a basic question to consider.
They are, as long as THAT is the sector that gets them TO the general election.
Long may that sector continue to hold such power. Only thus can the Republican Party be brought to ultimate extinction.
I don’t see how ‘re-branding’ is going to work either. A sizable chunk of the far-right seems to treat their political views as a sort of religion, if they aren’t literally lifting it straight from religion itself. Does anyone really believe there can be reasoning with such people?
I like a lot of the things you’re saying, but I don’t think most of them can be implemented. This quote though is a pretty common GOP misconception IMHO. You treat your party’s problems like a marketing or an optics issue when the reality is guys like Obama and Clinton accomplish big things like balancing the budget or providing health care for most while the Republicans simply would never do such things- on principle.
It goes back to my snarky comments in post 2. A guy with better tone and body language isn’t going to hide the message. And I don’t think you can change the message much- I for one will not believe a GOP candidate with suddenly different stripes. A GOP president will always implement W policies once in office no matter what noises he makes during the campaign. More local GOP officials will be a part of the Borg and not necessarily responsive to their constituencies. Ideology and not data.
The GOP is what it is. It can’t just put on a mask and fool everyone.
Because of all the wonderful things he should have done. Accomplished real healthcare reform by dismantling Medicare and Medicaid. Defended Social Security by declaring it unconstitutional. Saved GM by letting it go bankrupt (worked with Boeing!). Amended the constitution to prevent abortions and gay marriages. Dismantled the federal reserve, FEMA and the DoE. Stayed out of Libya while simultaneously providing consulates with squadrons of soldiers. Provided huge cadres of arms to Syrian rebels while staying out of another Middle Eastern war. Personally hunted down Kony and Butt Naked and squeeze the life out of them with his bare hands. While cutting taxes on the wealthy and broadening the base to avoid a fiscal cliff.
Have you considered the possibility that they actually are more concerned with people’s pain? Nozick, an influential conservative philosopher of around the time the Republicans were the reasonable party that Voyager and Little Nemo could embrace, rejected utilitarianism as subservient to property rights.
Which aspects do blacks correlate strongly with the GOP on? The sole issue I can think of is gay marriage (they support abortion). Maybe that’s what the GOP tone needs to be: more hostile to gay marriage. That’ll cause blacks to ignore the GOP’s stance on abortion and economic matters. After all (and I’m not being facetious here), people are not rational actors capable of choosing the most efficacious path to maximise their utility in all cases.
So many Republicans just don’t get it, even now, over 2 weeks after the election and with all the data pointing to the fact that they were wrong, they just came seem to bring themselves to acknowledge the simple truth: their views are utterly abhorrent and must change.
Even people here are trying to say the right things but hold on to their old, archaic beliefs, thinking people will fall for it if they just repackaged the same old message. Though I’m not as optimistic as some of my fellow liberals (I still think the Reps have a shot for presidency in the near future), its no secret that it’ll be increasingly harder. Change of this magnitude is going to take time, more than just a couple of terms by the first black president. But change is coming. The GOP will do well to begin to abandon their extremist stances on abortion, immigration, taxes, and gay marriage because those are going the way of slavery, not letting women vote, and isolationism.
Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a good question, and I think we’ll see the answer evolve. But I do believe that survival instincts will force us to abandon a losing formula. I think we’ll hear less and less about all that RINO stuff, less and less about extreme positions on social issues like SSM where society is already starting to leave such views in the rear view mirror. I think it’s just Darwinian. So long as there was widespread belief that one could win with the current model, people stuck with it. Why won’t they now? Because it’s a losing formula. That’s all.
In answer to some of the other posts, I don’t think it’s about becoming like Democrats or masking our true intentions. There is a populist message in our core values: protecting individual liberties, ensuring that social programs like SS and Medicare actually survive so they’re there when people need them, spending within our means–just like everyone else in the U.S. has to. Those messages, properly delivered without the need to demonize vast portions of the population, can resonate with lots and lots of people.
We have to stop playing the “my conservative cred is more solid than yours” nonsense, that endless pissing contest in the primaries. That’s what leads to hard-line positions that offer no compromise and that can’t be framed in any other way. Seriously, there’s no program the GOP could get behind for amnesty for illegal immigrants? Nothing? That had to be true before. Now it’s a suicide wish.
Let’s fine-tune (but not abandon) our core principles and stop picking hills to die on that most of the country doesn’t care about. Stick to those principles and deliver them with a message of caring and hope. I truly believe our country is healthiest when both parties are viable and robust–we check each other’s worst excesses while forcing real debate (or whatever passes for it in politics). Right now, there’s no need to engage any GOP idea. The well is poisoned, and we have to stop blaming the Dems for poisoning it. That’s a loser’s game. Let’s fix it.
In fact, they came to the exact opposite conclusion – the only reason they got trounced in the past 2 elections is that they did not nominate a true conservative. Their views are in fact quite popular, if only the party would nominate someone willing to champion those views. And they know their views are popular because all of their friends share them, and besides, opinion polls are clearly skewed.
You must be reading different columnists than I am. I’m not saying this sentiment doesn’t exist, but I am seeing LOTS of soul searching and hard questions. The Senate race is all the evidence we need about how well “true conservatives” did.
We are now a LOOOOOOOONG ways off from what needs to happen for the GOP to become viable: the base of their party needs to recognize that their core beliefs are outdated. They need to speak with convincing assurance of their embracing of SSM, a path to legal immigration, an acceptance of Roe v. Wade, and an acknowledgment that Obamacare is here to stay, to win future elections, and they’re not even close to that position yet. They’re about a decade from taking that position, and until they do, that will handicap them seriously. After about a decade, the hardest-core of them will have begun dying off, and New Republicans will have established some sort of contrarian voice within the party to be able to back those positions up as genuinely their own, but it’s going to be a long hard struggle.
By “convincingly” I mean this: the Republicans argued this time, with somewhat strained logic, that they were all about “saving Medicare and Social Security.” On rhetoric, there was very little difference between them and the Dems on this one issue, with one exception–the Dems had built a reputation of supporting such social programs and the GOP had built a reputation of opposing them, so the Dems were believed on it more than the GOP was, not because of what they were saying about it, but because of what they’ve done on it.
The GOP will need to lead on the issues mentioned previously to make some inroads into the moderate vote. They haven’t started yet. They’re still debating internally whether they need to.
It doesn’t matter if there are hard questions if the answers circle back to the same old thing.
The week after the election, I spent a lot of time reading conservative viewpoints on various websites. I wanted to see if they saw what everybody else saw: that they lost because their views are outdated. Its true, a lot of them asked themselves if conservatism can survive in the wake of the exploding Latino population, the youth, women, etc. That first day after the election had some seeds of real change
But then I kept reading. “Are we too old and white? Do our views need to change on immigration, gay marriage, etc.?” And more and more the answer came back as “No, it was simply because of Romney, it was simply because he wasn’t conservative enough, if it wasn’t for Akin and Mourdock opening their mouths, it was the messengers and not the message…”
I give credit where credit is due, but even Mitt was conciliatory right after the election then two-faced again: last week in a speech to donors, he goes out to spout the same old crap we heard during the election. “Obama won because he gave “gifts” to the young, to minorities, to immigrants”. Sound familiar? He was repeating the same old thing that lost him the election! That speech he gave is practically the exact one he gave where he mentioned that 47% of people are lazy moochers!
In a time when you’d think that the GOP is at their lowest, and their brightest stars are the least afraid of not being conservative enough recognize the need for moderation, you have Marco Rubio pretending he doesn’t know how old the earth is. I bet if you asked Bobby Jindhal when he was complaining about the GOP needing to be wiser in their speeches if he thought exorcism and creationism were myths, he’d give you an equally non-answer
You know what I would have liked to hear? Something like Jon Huntsman, when he said he believed in evolution and that climate change was a real thing because of science. I would have accepted from Rubio the age of the earth as “billions of years”, “about 4 billion”, or “4.6 billion”, not “I’m not a scientist so I don’t know, oh by the way we need to teach both sides”. There is no “both” sides when it comes to a concrete fact like the age of the earth. There is no science-equivalent contrarian viewpoint to evolution. That tells me that the GOP hasn’t matured yet past the crazies who dominate it.
Its no wonder so many Republicans want to defund education, it must make them feel stupid when any kid in high school knows more about science than people on the Congressional committee on science and technology. The easiest and cheapest way to have better government immediately is to send every Republican in Congress to a 9th grade science class for a year