While I agree with Kathleen Parker’s overall analysis, I do not think she understands the nature of the party she clings to like grim death. And I don’t agree with giving Mitt Romney a 100% pass. He ran the most dishonest campaign in modern history. The high point of his campaign was the first debate, but historians will note that Romney told about 150 unrebutted lies in roughly 45 minutes of speaking time. Romney was a terrible candidate who stood for nothing, least of all honesty, and made one gaffe after another. If it is true that he was head and shoulders above his Republican competition, and it is, that still doesn’t speak well of Romney. In Haley Barbour’s words, Romney was a shitty candidate.
The whole party should put on their clown suits and go play in the street.
Ouch! But oh so true. Romney was the very best of a very bad lot, the king of the grifters.
Ron Paul: The people who won just want free stuff! Mitt Romney was right on the autobailout.
“Mitt Romney would have been a fine president and might have won the day but for the party he had to please.”
Bullshit. Romney coulda stood up to the wingnuts and made a claim for the center. After all, he had enough money to crush everyone in the field. He chose to pander to the wingnuts and got what he deserved because he’s a spinless fluff of a man with no core.
All that stuff about him moderating if he was elected is bullshit, too, because if he did he woulda been primaried in 2016.
Exactly. The Money Party acts like the GOTP primary electorate is frozen in amber. Romney and any other seriously moderate R could work to get unlikely Republican primary voters out to vote (and to save their party).
The real truth is the moneymen backing the Money Party want to undermine national consensus for the public good by nurturing and growing hatred and division. As long as we’re supposedly “bitterly, closely” divided about the way forward then they preserve their practically unfettered access to the public treasury.
The Republicans lost it when they put Palin up as an actual candidate. All of their credibility flew out the window the moment she opened her mouth in her Couric interview. It was a lesson that the Republicans should have taken to heart, but instead they doubled down, offering the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. None of their candidates even resembled responsible party members.
So Mitt was the most Presidential-looking guy they had to offer. Never mind that he had a checkered past as a corporate wizard, never mind that he reversed and re-reversed practically every position he ever held. He had a family, solid religious underpinnings (just kidding) and he was a white guy. How could he lose?
What the Republicans must do now is take the blinders off. They can no longer ignore the minorities and the women and the poor. They can’t pray for immigrants to self-deport or for women to walk back fifty years of hard-fought gains in personal freedom. There has to be a hard look at the facts that try as they might, they cannot simply buy an election. If we triumphed nowhere else as Democrats, it was this eye-opening result that will allow us to be confident and keep doing what we know is best.
So I’m not gloating, but there is definitely a feeling of satisfaction as I watch the Republicans take stock of themselves and come up short. I don’t care if they never learn from their past mistakes. Let the Dems keep winning.
What the Republicans must do now is take the blinders off. They can no longer ignore the minorities and the women and the poor. They can’t pray for immigrants to self-deport or for women to walk back fifty years of hard-fought gains in personal freedom.
Who’ll believe them even if they did? No one. They can’t go around screaming Ni-CLANG at every opportunity then 5 minutes later expect anyone non-white to vote for them, among other things.
In retrospect this was a very dangerous election for the Democrats. While Obama’s team did a good job of defining Romney as the person he was they’ve done a poor job of countering the “everybody knows” memes from the MSM and the reich wing media – memes like “everybody knows spending is out of control” and “taxes have gone up under Obama”. As such, there were enough people who thought Obama is okay but were ready to vote for a promising new candidate to stir things up.
Fortunately, the GOP doesn’t have such a candidate and if they did they couldn’t nominate him or her. So many of the core GOP pine for another Reagan not realizing that Reagan’s actual positions on things (signed the biggest tax increase in history for one) would give him Jon Huntsman-like results in the primaries.
In the next few elections the economy should be well recovered. The Silicon Valley, usually a leading indicator on recoveries, is experiencing a job boom right now. The incumbent party will be in much better position going into those elections.
Hopefully the Democrats will learn two very important lessons from this. The first I am already reading stuff indicating that the lesson has been learned – that they have to focus on mid-terms as well. The second is that they could have avoiding the 2010 disaster and the difficulties of 2012 if they’d trusted their own numbers guys in early 2009 on the economic prescription needed instead of relying on conventional beltway wisdom. Hopefully the gossip vs. data discussion vis-a-vis electoral forecasting will get the Democratic leaders to trust their own people next time. I’m less optimistic on this.
Then there is the third lesson – for Obama himself. OFA has done a great job twice. But it can’t be just about Obama. It has to be his gift to his party. OFA has to be equally engaged for the next midterm (instead of being mostly on the sidelines as they were in 2010) and has to be supporting the next presidential nominee in 2016.
The real estate sector is also make a slow comeback and that is also a major sector for employment. I think the slowness of it could actually be a good thing – an indicator that it is not soon falling back into the previously typical boom-bust cycles.
I also agree, OFA needs to have a role in 2014. Obama too. I reject the great man theory but like it or not many Dem voters fall for it and develop that simplistic focus on the Presidential candidates. Obama is still the preferred medium of the Dem message and can help significantly if he helps in limited but effective ways.
I agree with everything you said except the part about OFA being on the sideline in 2010. They were very active, I got the same amount of contact as I did this year from them and what I’ve heard from my friends around the country they did too.
Really? In 2008 and 2012 I got texts every day for the last month and frequent calls and emails – in 2012 I got two emails per day the last week asking for funds from people like “Michelle Obama” and “Joe Biden”.
In 2010 I got one call.
really? I got way more than that and I live in IL, not really a swing state even for Congress.
I actually think that Romney might have been the only candidate in the GOP with the credibility to Say, “look I am a business guy and I am telling you that in a recession you are very limited in the spending cuts you can do without making the recession worse, and I am sorry but we have got to find some more revenue somewhere. The rich will have to pay more because no one else can afford it.”
It would have come off as authentic and courageous and he would have won a lot of votes in the middle.
And lost a lot of donors.
And the whackos would not have voted for him and would have gone third party.
But I think it was also the only way he could have won.
Unfortunately for mitt he is neither authentic or courageous.
That would have been Huntsman. And Romney would have shared his fate.
When the Democratic Party lost sight of the working populace in the 70’s they started losing big time. Finally, the big city bosses who held the only remaining strongholds started backing the DLC and people like Clinton. They had no real social or ideological goals. They only wanted to hold and expand their power and cash.
Similarly, the Republican Party, which came to power alleging to be for the ordinary hardworking American, lost control to the crazies. The Wall Street finance boys who hold the only remaining strongholds and have no social or ideological goals, just to preserve and expand their power and cash will turn left to an analog of the DLC.
Karl Rove and his super PAC vow to press on – The Washington Post
We’re gonna need a lot more popcorn…
grifters gotta grift
Well, what she’s saying is correct but trivial. All she’s really doing is pointing out that the Republicans have become the party of xenophobic assholes, which is maybe slightly more noteworthy coming from a conservative, but it isn’t breaking any new ground.
But yes, she doesn’t appear to have noticed that the Republicans don’t really have anything to offer right now besides xenophobia and assholism. I mean, if what you’re left with when you’ve factored out all the xenophobes and assholes is “Mitt Romney would have been a fine president,” you’ve got a lot more soul searching to do.
Don’t forget the misogyny. I know women that would have considered voting GOP up until they started in with vaginal ultrasounds, calling them sluts and arguing about rape and birth control.
I thought the GOP was already off the rails, but why they started with that stuff I’ll never understand. Stupid. Disgusting.
It’s almost like they got caught up in oneupsmanship.
I’ll see your no-exception anti-abortion and raise you legitimate rape.
Yeah, well I’ll see your legitimate rape and raise you vaginal probes.
Nah. They should actually play on the freeway.
Speaking of which…
I looked through quite a bit of the Indiana Succession Petition and noticed that the great majority of signers:
As AG says, “Wadda buncha maroons!”