So who is going to lead them out of their mess? Chris Christie? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? There truly is a divide in the GOP, between those who think they are not Conservative enough and those who think they are not inclusive enough. Who wins? Who leads?
John Boehner can barely keep the House together. Pretty sure it won’t be him. I don’t think Christie has the physical stamina to do a national campaign. For reals. Won’t be him.
I predict there will be a real push to get one of their nice colored folk to take the reins. Jindal, Haley, Rubio…
Isn’t Christie persona non grata for praising Obama?
Until the 2016 nomination, they have no national leader. Similarly, who was the face of the Democratic Party from 2004-2008? I just don’t think there is one. The one with the most influence might be Boehner, since he leads the chamber they actually control, but he can’t herd the cats that he has.
One can hope this election broke the back of that particular odious tendency to eviscerate anyone who doesn’t fall in lockstep. It’d be the first step toward making the GOP less toxic.
I don’t really see that Political Parties have or need a single “leader” when they don’t hold the Presidency.
I imagine the “public face” of the GOP will, somewhat ironically, be whomever the Obama camp decides they want to focus on as a sparring partner in the coming debate over fiscal issues. Probably either Ryan or Boehner.
Hope in vain…the usual hive of scum and villainy in the Republican punditry has already issued multiple fatwas on Christie for actually, you know, caring enough about his state in the face of a major disaster to put partisan politics aside and reach out to the feds under That One.
I’ve heard some Republican comments along the lines of “why oh why didn’t we nominate Marco Rubio - the Hispanics and women would have loved him”. It’s a boneheaded way to look at things but maybe they’ll think that’s the “lesson” to learn.
You’d think they’d have learned that lesson back when they tokened Palin to grab all those disillusioned Democratic women who voted for Hillary in the primaries…
National parties are large and messy. There are too many different constituencies and party organizations to say any one person is going to be in charge. There’s Reince Preibus at the RNC, there’s an association of governors, a committee in charge of getting Republicans elected to the Senate and another one for the House, there’s the party leadership in both houses. Eventually the party will move in one direction or another as it settles on what it believes are the best ways to win more voters.
It goes well with the comments that Romney did not appeal to Hispanics and women. You just have to naturally appeal, without appearing to be trying.
Well yeah, but the “appeal to demographics” viewpoint kind of ignores the fact that the Republican policies sucked, and were influenced by extremists, no matter who happened to be the figurehead of the party. I don’t think style over substance works very well anymore.
Obama won some of the whitest states in the country, like Minnesota, so it’s just a cop-out for the Republicans to blame demographics, in my opinion.
There’s more to demographics than just race. I know some Republicans tried to find a positive in the fact that younger voters did not support Obama as strongly as they did in 2008, but even if that’s accurate, Obama crushed Romney among voters under 30. And of course we know that Obama did better than Romney among women even though Obama lost men this time. Which is a point I somehow forgot or failed to notice in 2008, by the way: conventional wisdom is that Democrats win women and Republicans win men, and while that’s usually true, Obama won 49% of the male vote in 2008 and McCain got 48%.
Yeah, chalk me up to the “there isn’t a national leader now and there doesn’t need to be one” camp. It’s just silly to think about.
The most visible republicans will probably continue to be Boehner, McConnell, and Priebus (inasmuch as he is visible at all… even I probably couldn’t pick him out in a line up of middle-aged white guys).
Jeb Bush is going to get more and more play.
The lesson they should learn is that they would have won if they allowed Romney to run on his record in Massachusetts. But that would have been boring and not allowed the pundits to have highly watched shows. Romney felt he needed to form his policies to fit what talk show hosts wanted for ratings in order to get the nomination and that made him look like a total political whore. The party needs to try and run a government not boost ratings for reality shows.
For 2016-- “Bush vs Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo”
Somebody is bound to point out to them that a Republican hasn’t won the presidency without a Bush or a Nixon on the ticket since 1928.
Well, now, to be ruthlessly fair, he didn’t have to. The reason it went as well as it did was the everything was already in place. And no way was Barry going to shut down the pipeline. So Christie could have made some shit up and bitched about how badly it was going if he wanted to. To his credit, he didn’t.
The boy has his moments. Too bad they are moments.
I think the decision not to nominate him was influenced by his unwillingness to run.