Look, Pubs, here’s what you have to accept before you can make any progress: Obama is a centrist. Yes, he is. He is not a socialist radical. He is not a stealth Communist. He is not even much of a liberal. His neoliberal politics are not much different from Bill Clinton’s, who tried to get a rather more vigorous health-care reform package through. They are different from Romney’s politics, but not by a real whole lot. This election was so close because both candidates were centrists and the people usually prefer centrists. If you run a far-right Pub in 2016, as so many of you* are already talking about, any centrist Dem in Clinton’s and Obama’s mold will eat him for breakfast and order more bacon. Hillary Clinton v. a Rick Santorum/Ron Paul/Newt Gingrich? No contest, Hillary landslides. The only way it can be a real contest is if your far-right Pub’s opponent that year is a far-leftie, a Ralph Nader or a Bernie Sanders or a Dennis Kucinich; which is not likely to happen.
Some on the far-right are actually blaming the result on the lack of effective voter-ID laws. Not even they can really believe that. Look, based on exit polling, the turnout nationwide was 38% Dem, 32% Pub, 30% Independent. Can anyone seriously mean to argue that ineligible voters (noncitizens, convicts) on the Dem side made up the disparity there? No, it is simply that there are more Dems than Pubs, a fact which has been very well-known for decades. As for the Independents, some are far-right and some are far-left, but most are centrists, the ever-hunted “swing voters”. That’s just how it is. Obama won because most of those swing voters preferred the just-slightly-left-of-centrist they knew to the just-slightly-right-of-centrist they didn’t. A far-right (or far-left) candidate will never appeal to them.
By “you” here I mean Pubs in general; Dopercons are mostly more sensible.
I mostly agree with your conclusions, but I don’t agree with your reasoning. That is, I do think that if the Republicans run a far right candidate in 2016, they will likely lose. I also think that that’s a big part of why Romney lost, because he tracked so far right for the Republican base and when it came time to race to appeal to the centrists, he had too much ground to cover.
Also, I don’t think it’s so much that the population prefered the slightly left of center over the slightly right of center, but that the Republicans were trying to sell that the economy sucked and Obama was at least doing a bad job of handling it or making it worse, and Romney would come in and fix everything. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of the swing vote didn’t blame Obama for the economy, felt like things were better off than they were when he took office, or at least better than they could have been, and didn’t feel that Romney had sold his case that he’d do better.
So, I think those are the the two biggest factors that cost Romney the election. As long as it took the primaries to come to the inevitable conclusion, that they spent so much time attacking him and weakening his support with the base and forcing him to pander to them, also ultimately weakening his support with the centrists. And that Romney wasn’t able to capitalize on what should have been his strength with business experience, and that the Obama campaign was able to downplay that or even turn it into a negative.
Either way, unless the political atmosophere changes considerably, I think trying to find a moderate candidate and letting him be moderate will give the Republicans the best chance of winning. Of course, four years is a long time in politics, so who knows.
Here’s another thing: The new 500-pound gorilla in American politics is the Latino vote. Pubs, do you want to win over those traditionalist, family-oriented Catholics in 2016? You can, perhaps – but moderate conservatism is the way to appeal to them; radical conservatism cannot be disentangled from nativism and immigrant-bashing.
Yes, yes they can really believe that. Many on the far right can believe 6 impossible things before breakfast.
Polls? Romney did not believe the polls. He knew he was going to win.
They will simply convince themselves that statistics and math are a socialist tool that has been used to unfairly defeat them. Fox News and Limbaugh will sooth them by saying that it is not their fault; they will invent a boogeyman to scare the far right.
Reality will be manufactured for the far right, and stupid stuff like polls and facts will not be needed thank you very much.
I’m sure this is a joke thread. When we vote a guy back into office who scoffed at both the Ryan budget plan and the Simpson-Bowles budget plan, but couldn’t garner a single vote for his own budget plan in either the House or the Senate, that kills any idea of doing so because he was a centrist.
Hey. On account of your ability to take the definition of ‘Wrong’ to hitherto unforseen levels of wrongness maybe a few months of quietly introspective humility while immersing yourself in the Real rather than Alternate Righty-Tighty Bizarro World may be in order don’t you think?
On account of you being Mr Wrongly McWrong from Wrongsville and all that.
Centrists usually work to get both sides of the proverbial isle to agree. Obama shown the ability to do neither and, when it comes to budget deals, has shown himself to be an army of one, with no one willing to follow behind.
It certainly appears that the fact-proof bubble is still intact. All of OMG’s points have been thoroughly debunked in other threads, but he insists on believing them.
The national Republicans just need to look to the California party for guidance - they’ve spent the lsat 20 years working on their ideological purity, and they have zero statewide offices and less than a third of the legislative seats to show for it.
When the Republicans agree to a balanced approach to budget deficits (taxes and cuts) then get back to me about who is or isn’t working across the aisle.
Obama spent months wooing those guys, trying to find out what sort of health care bill would be acceptable to them, ready to craft it around their stipulations.
But you can’t negotiate with people who don’t want to negotiate. It takes two to deal.
He has quite reasonably scoffed at the Ryan budget plan. But I’d like a cite about his scoffing at S-B.
Well, if California shows one thing, it shows that Democrats are incapable of taking the blame for anything. For all intents and purposes, the GOP is a minority party in California yet they still get blamed for any and all economic ills, even though the Democratic party is running the state into the crapper and is chasing businesses out at an alarming rate.
Personally, I’d rather be Texas than California.
Apparently, you guys have thoroughly short memories. Boehner was open to the Simpson-Bowles budget plan. So, too, where Senate and House Democrats and Republicans, if begrudgingly. Obama was not. He considered it unsatisfactory, presented two successive budget deals to Congress and received a grand total of zero votes between them both. This is a fact.
Now if you consider that to be proof of Obama centrism, then there’s not much more to be said in this thread.