No. The election was a lot closer than many make it out to be. If 450,000 votes (out of 118 million cast) in four states had changed, Romney would have been President-elect. Hardly a mandate. Some of it is strictly technical. One forum poster invoked this link http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07...ped-obama-win/ describing how the Hussein Obama team better managed its data. The GOP’s “ORCA” was a poorly developed loser. OK. That’s entirely possible. Adventures in IT. Better databases and information systems can be developed and the GOP can get cracking on that right now. There are tens of thousands of very capable IT types out there looking for work. If they get after it and invest some of the money spent on TV, they could be at least at parity by the middle of next year. Another GOP weakness in tactical politics was too much emphasis on the air war in the battleground states and not enough emphasis on the ground war nationwide. A better ground war would have at least partially offset the ennui of the Ron Paul types who sat out the election. (More on that later). TV is an over-rated medium. You need only spend enough to offset and rebut the Democrat/MSM message. The saturation carpet-bombing of Ohio was a colossal waste of money better spent on good information and volunteers and paid canvassers. TV is in a long-term decline and Americans get numb to advertising at an early age. Most Americans were just glad to have an end of both parties’ ads. The GOP as a whole and the Tea Party and the religious right have to invest some time and money in training candidates on how to face a hostile MSM. Few people have the natural media gifts of Ronald Reagan (even his ability came as a result of four decades in front of a camera). The GOP lost two Senate races of the basis of a few sentences blown all out of proportion by the MSM. GOP candidates simply have to remember that the MSM is the enemy. Just as one should immediately lawyer up with interrogated by the police, GOP candidates must be trained to stay on-topic and not let the MSM lure them into blowing their campaign on some imaginary redefinition of rape. Candidate training is a tough thing for political candidates to swallow. By definition, these people are very self-confident. But so are boxers and boxers are smart enough to train for the fight. To some extent, there needs to more “smoke filled rooms” prior to primary season. Too many primary candidates force (usually the marginal) candidates to take outlandish positions jockeying for attention. This gives the opposition way too much ammunition for the general election. By having the campaign leaders get together prior to the primary season, the marginal guys are promised a place at the table if they drop out and support the eventual winner. Winnow the field to two candidates before the primary and even there limit the scope of the issues they are going to fight over. Limiting the primary field and the primary issues also has the salutary effect of getting the general populace on board even if only in the vaguest of ways.
The Tea Party needs to grow up, politically. It simply has to become more organized and focused on its core beliefs. It does need to develop an official spokesperson to keep their agenda simple and on-topic. Let’s say ol’ Taxcutter held that job. When Michelle Bachmann comments while claiming the Tea Party imprimatur on a social issue, ol’ Taxcutter would immediately issue a rebuttal: “Ms. Bachmann may hold positions congenial to the Tea Party agenda of less spending, less taxation, and less government, but her comment s of last night outline her position on (the social issue in question) but not those of the Tea Party. As such the Tea Party does not support her stated position on (the social issue in question).” This adherence to topic must be as disciplined as that shown by GW Bush. You may not agree with his politics, but you have to admire his self-discipline. The religious right needs to grow up as well. Rather than stridently demanding all sorts of picayune measures making abortion inconvenient, they should simply go to the pre-primary meetings and demand of the top candidates that the candidates for President (and Senate) that they will appoint (and confirm) SCOTUS justices amenable to overturning Roe v. Wade. Abortion as a political issue is going nowhere as long as Roe stands, just as Jim Crow was going nowhere until Plessy v Ferguson was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education. At that point the religious right keeps their efforts low-key and geared mainly toward supporting the GOP candidate. Likewise, the religious right should lead the effort to reach out to the Hispanic community. They have much in common. Politics on a big scale involves coalition and sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. How the Democrats keep the enviros and the unions from strangling each other is a mystery, but they do it. The religious right and the fiscal right and the strong-defense right simply have to get along because they are not going anywhere without the others.
Good post. The GOP isn't dead yet but if they don't get it in one sock they sure as hell will be. Lose the Christian Taliban, they're nuts. Stop the idiotic waste on military spending, take care of the country you live in for (*)(*)(*)(*)s sake. Stop the jobs going over seas, if it's not too late already. Get in touch with America.
Romney lost to arguably the weakest incumbent in history. The GOP is dead if it doesn't actually become a small government based party.
The Tea Party expects the House to stand strong against any expansion of government until we get another shot in 2014. If they give in even an inch against Hussein Obama, the House GOP wobblers can expect primary opposition.
Lol, they lost one election and your burying them? Only 2 years ago they swept into Congress en masse but now they are history? How about you wait like 3 more presidential elections and if they don't win anything you may be on to something.
Republicans lost the election structurally. They kicked and screamed fire and murder for about 4 years. It resulted in the most liberal electorate in the last 50 years. They lost, structurally. Fair-minded Republicans will need to pop the Conservative bubble.
I don't know. You would think looking at Obama credentials, the economy and the past 4 years, statistically he should of been easy to beat. I thought Romney was going to win. I look towards 2014 election to see what happens next.
The GOP is dead. Yes dead. IF IF !!! They continue with business as usual. Ill add to this thread. The GOP has to kick out the Republican Establishment. This idea that "it's so and so's turn to run for President" notion has to stop. It was Bob Dole's turn. He lost. It was Mitt Romney's turn. He lost. The next thing the GOP has to do is become media savvy. A few year ago, there was a Republican candidate that was a NAZI reenactor. Then there was that other candidate that said "A child born of rape is a gift from God.". The GOP are the most inept when it comes to media and expressing themselves. The most important. I mean the number one thing the GOP needs to do is to go after the Hispanic vote. Period. Sadly, they should have done this back when Reagan was President, but, we are here. In order to get Hispanics to vote Conservative will require the equivalent of winning the hearts and minds of the Hispanic community. The GOP needs the civilian version of "boots on the ground". Conservative activists in the community. In the schools and churches. Unfortunately the GOP does not have what it takes. They need to invest time and money in the Latino community. Here is a promise. I live in a Latin community. If I ever see Conservatives here. I'll post it on this forum.
It wasn't just ORCA. It wasn't just that Obama had better IT staff. It was that when the Romney campaign (like the Obama campaign) was handed incredible valuable information, they cast their pearls before the swine and said, "Those polls are skewed". I mean, how were they to know that the guy who got the 2008 election almost 100% correct, using almost exactly the same methodology as before, wouldn't have suddenly grown a (career-destroying, at least in his field) partisan bias over the course of the last 4 years? How could they have known? How were they to know that the pollsters who "oversampled" democrats were doing nothing of the sort? They got caught in their own spin cycle and it burned them. They didn't lose the race on two sentences that the MSM blew out of proportion, they lost it on one position. One incredibly unpopular position, a position which not only is unpopular, but is flat-out disgusting to a great number of the electorate. I mean, imagine if a democratic candidate had said, "I personally believe that n*ggers belong back in the ghetto", there would be no god(*)(*)(*)(*) debate; he would be run out of town, torn to shreds by the media (because the media loves a story like this, regardless of which party it comes from) and rightfully so. Saying "if you are raped, we expect you to spend the next 9 months to 18 years of your life in torment, with a constant reminder of what was done to you" is going to turn off a hell of a lot of women. Any rape victim, anyone who is friends with a rape victim.
With 47% of the nation relying on at least government transfer payment. The small government message won't work. There is no political solution possible at this point. A majority of the American ppl are now into social democracy. There is no hope for small government and low taxes. The democrats will get their symbolic tax increase, there will be no cuts to entitlements and America will economically fail. The onlyh solution is revolution.
Seeing as how 99% of the people voted for Obama and his clone, Romney, "revolution" isn't an option, either.
No moddern day politician is going to be acceptable to libertarians. They take the extreme right wing economic position and pair it with extreme leftwing social positions, thereby appealing to no one in the mainstream.
You'd be suprised at how many people out there want the nation to be fiscally sound and leave people alone. They simply aren't offered a choice with the two circus tents, and since most people for some dumb reason won't vote third party, they have to choose between the (false) promise of fiscal soundness from the Republicans or the more open society offered by Democrats. Offer both and you can gain a lot of votes.
If Romney would have only won the election. We could have got government subsidies to give to Walmart to build more giant Chinese goods service outlets, and they would have created sheet paying jobs for us all and solved this problem. Darn...
