(Above: Rush Limbaugh, the most popular conservative political radio talk show host in America. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Introduction: The Truth Hurts for the GOP as It is At a Crossroads in the History of Its Existence
In previous articles on this blog, I have stated clearly my assertion that the lawmakers who are members of the Democratic Party are far superior politicians than those in the GOP. This has been made abundantly evident as Republican lawmakers for years have caved into the Left's demands that we adhere to the principles of political correctness, that they take great pains to endeavor not to offend people in minority groups or to respect the sanctity of a woman's rights to her body, up to and including her right to have an abortion upon demand. Finally, there have been instances when the Left has pressured the conservatives within the GOP to such an extreme that it recanted on their philosophical pledge to cut the fat from government and increased funding on social welfare problems. The last article I published, "The Uphill Battle of Social Conservatives Against the Leftist Mass Media," states the reasoning behind this in clear, unequivocal terms for all to read. I also authored an article addressing the lack of direction that is so obviously plaguing the GOP over the past 20 years in "A Discourse on the Division Within the Republican Party That is Playing Into the Hands of the Democrats Despite Their Being Embroiled in Multiple Scandals", which remains to this day out of all of my 54 previous articles published to this blog the most unpopular based upon the lack of positive feedback compared to the rather-widespread show of support for every other article.
(Above: Former presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who both combined to serve from 1921-29. They were among the first conservative GOP presidents to serve in the White House. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
My parents used to tell me upon explaining a concept that would prove to be unpopular with me at the time but would no doubt prove to be prophetic and true with regard to my posterity that "the truth hurts." In this case, that cliche is, indeed, just as prophetic as those our parents taught us so many years ago. At my present age of 32, I have come to accept that the truth does, indeed, hurt, far more often than it actually feels pleasurable. And so it is with the current state of the GOP, who not only cannot seem to develop an identity now since George H.W. Bush destroyed the greatest era of national unity and social harmony in American history after the Reagan Revolution brought a 12 year retraction of the values of social unrest and upheaval that had its roots planted 25 years before Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 by raising taxes and paving the path toward the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 to the Oval Office. As I have stated many times, including within the introductory sentence of this article, the greatest collection of politicians this country, and the world, has ever known are those in the Democratic Party. This has been true since 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to the presidency upon the perception that conservatism was to blame for the stock market crash on Black Tuesday in 1929. Yet, never do the liberal Democrats mention how Herbert Hoover, the predecessor of FDR's, was a big government Republican, and therefore no conservative like Warren G. Harding or Calvin Coolidge, who had together presided over what was then the longest and most prosperous period of economic growth in U.S. history. Hoover broke with the conservative principles of his two predecessors who had worked diligently during their presidencies to reverse the course toward which the nation had been steered by the Woodrow Wilson administration, which began with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment that created the federal income tax in 1913 that would ultimately manifested the conditions which would spring to life upon FDR's rise to power when he transformed America from a nation of economic and social liberty into a welfare state endowed with socialist economic and fiscal policies. As the rate of taxation for the wealthiest Americans reached a high of about 75% in 1916, by the end of the Coolidge administration, that total had dropped down to 25%. The federal deficit, which had soared during the Wilson administration (1913-1921) both as a result of World War I and increased public expenditures that cost more to fund than the massive amounts of tax revenue that was created through the enormous amounts of income collected, was reduced between 1921 and 1929. Hoover reversed the good works of the Harding and Coolidge administrations when he raised taxes as well as public expenditure initiatives, leading to an increase in the federal deficit, and setting the chain reaction of events that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Republican Party, which had dominated the political landscape since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. As Calvin Coolidge was no doubt the champion of the private sector when he made the simple, yet famous quote, "The business of America is business," Hoover was the exact opposite; he did not trust the free market to propagate economic growth, but rather the government, and as the last Progressive president from the Republican Party, he enacted policies that were not only pernicious to the perpetuation of the economic growth begun by Harding and Coolidge, it ultimately led to the collapse of the entire economy on the monumental level in U.S. history.
(Above: Former presidents Herbert Hoover, R, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, D, who were opponents in the 1932 Presidential Election. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
In an irony when one who reads history reflects upon the domestic policies of his administration, FDR stated the following during his campaign for the presidency in 1932 against the incumbent Hoover:
I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peacetime in all American history - one which piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs or reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer. We are spending altogether too much money for government services which are neither practical nor necessary. In addition to this, we are attempting too many functions and we need a simplification of what the Federal government is giving the people."
Through cunning political tactics of promising to take care of the people through government activism and yet throwing in a traditional conservative barb into his attacks on Hoover, FDR won the presidency by a landslide over the embattled incumbent. The GOP would not see another president from its party against until Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1953, and it was all caused by the division within the party even back then rather than the importance of philosophical unity and strict adherence to it in implementing public policy. And as a grisly reminder of the gross irony of FDR's quote mentioned above, the unprecedented growth in federal spending and the federal government in terms of bureaus and bureaucracy, not to mention enormous public deficits, left a smarting feeling to those within the Republican Party who managed to survive the Democrat's rise as the dominant political party in America in 1932, just as it remains so today.
(Above: Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, and the first Republican Party member to hold the office. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
The Republican Party was founded upon the principles that the Reagan Revolution resurrected upon the election of Reagan to the White House in 1980 of "free land, free labor, free men." As the Democratic Party is fond of claiming that they is the party of Thomas Jefferson, the principles which it espouses could not be further removed from those of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party philosophies than night is to day. The GOP conviction that America is a Judeo-Christian society holds true to the core beliefs of the Founding Fathers. It also believes, at least in its official platform and therefore in theory, that less government leads to greater liberty and opportunity for prosperity, just as our Founders did. And until the beginning of the Cold War, whereupon the victories of the U.S. over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Empire of Japan in a war fought in two different hemispheres resulted in our opposition against the spread of Communism due to the other major victor of World War II, the Soviet Union, to the nations it "liberated" or more descriptively conquered, the Republican platform was one based upon isolationism, with the lone exception being the Spanish-American War of 1898 conducted by the administration of William McKinley and later propagated by his successor Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive in the same cloak worn by his Democratic presidential successors. Even during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first GOP member to hold the title as the nation's head of state and government since Hoover in 1933, "Ike" cooled the rhetoric toward the Soviet Union that had been intensified in each successive year of the Harry S. Truman White House that ultimately culminated in the Korean War that resulted in approximately 35,000 deaths of brave American soldiers in a war that was unnecessary. And while Nixon initially accelerated the military presence and war efforts in Vietnam, he succeeded in implementing his exit strategy by 1973, even though this ultimately resulted in the South Vietnamese government falling to the Viet Cong in 1975 when the Communist guerrillas sacked Saigon (now known as "Ho Chi Minh City"). On domestic matters, both Eisenhower and Nixon adhered to the majority of the New Deal legislation signed into law by FDR, and were not fiscally conservative. And unfortunately for Nixon, his involvement in the Watergate scandal led to the public's development of mistrust and skepticism toward government. While his successor, Gerald R. Ford, attempted to do damage control, the GOP's image had been greatly tarnished yet again, and led to the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.
(Above: Former presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, the three GOP presidents who served in the position between FDR and Ronald Reagan. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
The agenda of the increased role of the military in U.S. foreign policy under a Republican president did not occur until the Reagan presidency. At the point when he discovered how President Jimmy Carter had destroyed the U.S.'s military superiority over the Soviet Union by severely cutting funding for the armed forces, Reagan was horrified, and he quickly acted to not only bridge the gap, but to leapfrog the Soviet military once and for all. At this, Reagan decided that rather than engaging in a foreign policy strategy with the Soviet Union predicated upon the principles of appeasement and amelioration in what had previous been the governments' Containment and Detente policies, his was simple and had an means to an end rather than a desire to maintain a status quo: He decided he was going to end the Cold War once and for all. To do this, an enormous military buildup, the largest in U.S. history, was necessary. Though Reagan, among the most well-known of world leaders who have been tagged with the "conviction politician" label, was horrified at the realization that to achieve this goal would require more federal spending rather than less -- as he had run on the platform in 1980 that he would dramatically reduce the size of government by cutting taxes and divesting government bureaucracies, agencies, and cabinet departments of their previously-exorbitant levels of funding in order to resurrect the economy and to engender greater sources of tax revenue despite lower tax rates due to the increase in taxpayers as a result of the massive creation of jobs -- he nevertheless felt it was for the greater good of our national security to undertake in this endeavor. In achieving this end, he delivered a message over national television to the American people on March 28, 1983 outlining his plans to not only dramatically increase the number of nuclear missiles and improve the quality and functionality of our tanks and aircraft, but to devise and build a measure for defense against a potential Soviet nuclear missile attack against the U.S. that become known to history as the Strategic Defense Initiative, (aka. "Star Wars"). Though this never actually came to fruition, the announcement struck fear into the Politburo in Moscow, and ultimately led to the other world superpower of the Communist world's dissolution beginning in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and finally culminating with the fall of the Soviet Union itself on December 31, 1991, thus bringing final closure to the 45 year Cold War.
You can watch the YouTube clip of President Reagan speaking to the nation about his plans for a massive military buildup and SDI below:
In Reagan achieving this goal, it came at a high cost. Because the Democratic-controlled Congress failed to act to pass all of his proposed domestic budget cuts that would have counter-balanced the great cost of the military buildup throughout his administration, the federal deficit that had grown at record amounts during the Carter administration to $900 billion when he left office in January 1981 tripled to a sum of $2.7 trillion by the end of the Reagan presidency. Unfortunately, Reagan has been blamed for this, despite that in his 1986 State of the Union address, he called for an amendment to the Constitution that would require an annual balanced budget that would legally eradicate the practice of deficit spending. Reagan, a proponent for state's rights, wanted to dissolve dozens of federal bureaus and departments and delegate the authority to operate and maintain those to the states. As the story goes, though, several states balked at the idea, leaving him no choice but to continue funding their existence. But through the initiatives with the tax cuts, an estimated 18 to 20 million new jobs were created between 1983 and 1989, and through closely working with Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the rate of inflation, once at 13.5% when Reagan took office, was reduced to below 4%. Unemployment, which at the conclusion of the Carter administration was 7.6%, at first spiked to a post-Depression era high of 10.2% in 1982, would be reduced to 5.3%. And while the Left has for years claimed that the jobs created by "Reaganomics" were low-paying "hamburger jobs," the truth was quite to the contrary, as most jobs were geared toward those who were college graduates entering management positions in businesses and corporations. In essence, the Reagan Revolution, which in my opinion lasted from 1981 until George H.W. Bush transferred the power of the presidency to the Democrat Bill Clinton in 1993, destroyed the social institution long propagated by the Democrats in the federal government of popular dependency upon the government for funds and survival in favor of putting record numbers of people to work earning higher wages than every before at all levels of income. Furthermore, the myth by the Left that Reaganomics made the "rich richer and the poor poorer" was also fallacious, as fewer people were classified as living below the poverty threshold by the end of the Reagan presidency than there had been when he entered office. In the words of Reagan's greatest foreign ally and fellow right-wing ideologue Margaret Thatcher, the Democrats would have been happier "if the poor were poorer so long as the [income] gap were smaller." The Reagan years, indeed, were characterized by the three-word cliche in his campaign commercials in 1984: "Morning in America." It was a great era when Americans gained the greatest sense of self-confidence and independence in the nation's history, and all President Reagan did was create the right conditions to make this phenomena never seen before and not having occurred since possible for the people to achieve their dreams, not the government.
November 3, 1992: The Day the Sun Set on America
(Above: Former presidents George H.W. Bush, R, and Bill Clinton, D, who campaigned in the 1992 Presidential Election. Photographs courtesy of Wikipedia)
November 3, 1992 was a watershed day in the history of the Republican Party. The fate of the Reagan Revolution, inherited by former Reagan vice president George H.W. Bush, rested upon the votes of millions of Americans. The incumbent president's campaign was geared toward defeating his Democratic Party rival Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, and the Independent candidate, Texas billionaire business tycoon Ross Perot. Bush would lose the election to Clinton in ignominious fashion, not because he prosecuted the Persian Gulf War in 1991, but because he raised taxes in 1990 as he was applied with great pressure by the Democratic-controlled Congress to do. The tax increase under Bush, much like the implementation of the surcharge by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, led to a recession, with unemployment rising well-above 6%. This, of course, might not have been so bad had he not promised during his first presidential campaign in 1988 in rather bold, brazen, and declarative rhetoric, "Read my lips: No new taxes," but as he did say that, he was portrayed as a liar by the Clinton campaign, and it worked to perfection. As Ross Perot was perceived to be a bizarre-type of conservative, many officials of the Republican National Committee have since blamed the Texas billionaire for costing Bush the election, as no one came close to winning a majority of the popular vote, as it was widely-perceived that the votes garnered nationwide by Perot would almost all have been votes for the president. Still, the point is that President Bush lost and Bill Clinton won, marking the end of the 12-year long phenomena of the Reagan Revolution.
As I have said both in this article as well as in various forms in others, the Republican Party lost its identity upon losing the White House in 1992. Even though the Republicans would sweep the 1994 midterm congressional elections behind Newt Gingrich of Georgia's "Contract with America" as a result of President Clinton's signing into law a massive tax hike and the Brady Crime Bill banning assault rifles in 1993, the die was already cast for the foreseeable future. Even though Clinton was forced by the Republican Congress to retract toward the center from what was a very liberal agenda that included designs on implementing a national health care service much like exists in most European nations and Canada, the GOP's strong-arming him into signing into law the Welfare to Work Act and ultimately his balancing the budget and creating a surplus in 1998 that began payments on the federal deficit, the damage was already done. This could not have been more evident than in 1999, whereupon the Republican-controlled Senate was charged with the task of voting to either remove the president from office or to acquit him after the House had passed a resolution of Articles of Impeachment late in 1998. The Senate GOP had the chance of a lifetime to end the presidency of the strongest Democrat to inhabit the White House since Kennedy, and failed to seize it by voting against his removal. There is, of course, created widespread speculation that because Clinton had a high approval rating in the 60% +/- range, it would have been political suicide to act in that way. In support of this theory, an article I once read in the liberal publication The Huffington Post mentioned that because the Republicans in the House voted to impeach him, the Democrats gained seats in both houses of Congress in the following election. Thus, it can be stated with some degree of accuracy that rather than the public growing disdained by Clinton's lack of morals and professional ethics, it reveled in what essentially became a political soap opera laden with sex and power struggles. As I mentioned in my last article published on this blog earlier today, the culture had changed from that which been created by the Reagan Revolution during the 1980's. Sex, indeed, was selling at that point in time as pop culture blended in with politics just as it sells today... only now it sells at a much greater, more graphic extreme now than even during the Clinton years. We are seeing this now with the New York City mayoral race with the front runner, former congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, running just a couple of years after resigning his seat in the House after a scandal involving his forwarding sexually-suggestive photographs of himself to women on Twitter.
(Above: Former president George W. Bush of the GOP. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
As the 2000 presidential election that pitted Vice President Al Gore against Texas Governor George W. Bush of the Republican Party arrived, there was a golden opportunity to be seized by the GOP to regain some of its former glory it had attained during the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's. Unfortunately, while Bush won the election, he did so illegitimately, as he did not win the popular vote, and the decision that led to his become president came by way of a conservative-heavy U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore was ironically an act of judicial activism, the judicial practice most reviled by conservatives. Though Bush did what he could to ameliorate his critics by appointing a Democrat to his Department of Transportation Cabinet position (Norman Mineta), he never was considered by a large portion of the population to be the real president of the United States, especially at first. But upon the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths of civilians, Bush capitalized on the moment, leading a new wave of national pride in a new initiative of national defense and foreign policy we now know as the War on Terrorism. Unfortunately, he did not stop there. President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security, a wasted initiative that further increased the size of government and has acted to persecute the American people rather than serving as a mitigating force of law enforcement along with the FBI and NSA in deterring the threat of terrorism. He then signed into law the Patriot Act of 2001, which led to the NSA's surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners worldwide under both his and the current Obama administrations. America was less free under Bush than it had ever been before, and even though the economy he inherited was mired in a recession as a result of what essentially was a policy of austerity implemented by President Clinton when his tax hike from 1993 led to a surplus of tax revenue and government expenditure programs saw a decrease in funding which resulted in the deficit being paid on would result in the younger Bush cutting taxes on three different occasions and led to a sustained period of economic growth until the financial crisis of 2008, Bush not only failed to cut federal spending on domestic programs, he increased expenditures, citing the necessity to assist people in the wake of the terrorist attacks fundamentally damaging the very infrastructure of the economy that had experienced the longest period of relatively-consistent growth in the nation's history between 1983 and then. As a result, the deficit that was being paid down well into the first year of the second Bush presidency had been undone, instead beginning the longest period of deficit spending spanning from his administration into the Obama presidency in U.S. history, leading to the current total of approximately $16.7 trillion, up from the $5.5 trillion in 2001 when Bush took office.
This failure in reining in government spending was not what led to the ultimate downfall of the Republican Party. Remember that I have established that the downfall actually was initiated upon the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992. What led the Republican Party into its current state of malaise was Bush ordering the invasion of Iraq under the pretense that he was going to seize what had long been believed to be a cache of weapons of mass destruction. Bush was not the first to state the belief of their presence in Iraq; it was President Clinton, who cited that intelligence surveillance had concluded they were, indeed, present in the Middle Eastern nation. In 2003, the U.S. and British military forces invaded Iraq in what became known as a show of force called "shock and awe." Other than deposing Saddam Hussein and later arresting him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, nothing was accomplished other than eight years of fighting that resulted in more than 4,000 deaths of America's troops. After winning reelection in 2004 as the first president since his father in 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote, his approval rating began its abysmal decent to the lowest percentage in the history of the Gallup Poll upon his exit from the White House. The financial disaster of 2008 was only the icing on the cake of what proved to be a disastrous presidency. Nothing Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) could have done in his campaign against Barack Obama would have won him the presidency in 2008, though it did not help that both he and Obama's GOP challenger Mitt Romney were a moderates. George W. Bush set the party back in ways it had not experienced since Nixon with Watergate.
Conclusion: Rush Limbaugh Echoes What Other Members of the GOP Such as Myself Have Already Said
As we rapidly approach the 2014 midterm congressional elections, the GOP currently finds itself in yet another position to regain some of its influence in national politics. With the slew of scandals in which the Obama administration is currently embroiled -- scandals which are far more insidious and threats to the democratic process of this nation than that of the Clinton/Lewinsky sex scandal of the late 1990's since they are matters of constitutional violations of the American people's rights -- the approval rating of the president has dropped precipitously over the past month and a half. While at first the CNN poll showed that his approval rating improved from 50% to 53% between May and June, it has now dropped eight percentage points to 45%. Unfortunately, the GOP members in the Senate have managed to jeopardize this great advantage they currently still find themselves in by not only supporting the NSA's surveillance of the Internet, cell phone and credit card records, it also had nearly a third of its Senate representation vote in favor of the immigration bill that will create 30 million new Democratic voters and cause massive amounts of unemployment by employers laying off nationalized American citizens in favor of hiring those who were granted unconditional, universal amnesty who will be willing to work for far less pay. While GOP House Speaker John Boehner has sworn that the bill will not pass in the House, the damage may already be done to the party's credibility yet again.
There have been several notable figures of the GOP who have voiced their displeasure on the state of the party, echoing the same sentiments I have posited before my readers for more than two months. The following article from March 18, 2013's Bloomberg, though it be a mouthpiece for the Left, provides comments from several key public figures within the party suggesting that the GOP is currently lost and without a sense of direction:
A Republican National Committee report says the party should change the way it recruits candidates, talks to voters, uses technology, raises money and reaches out to minorities in an effort to appeal to a broader base of voters and win elections.Republicans have become too insular, frequently sound like bookkeepers and need to be more inclusive in dealing with those who disagree with the party platform on abortion rights and same-sex marriage, the report, released today, says. Party leaders commissioned it after 2012 election losses spotlighted demographic and technological shortfalls with Democrats.
“There’s no one reason we lost,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, 41, said this morning at the National Press Club inWashington. “Our message was weak, our ground game was insufficient, we weren’t inclusive, we were behind in both data and digital, and our primary and debate process needed improvement.”
Priebus said the RNC would spend $10 million this year, an unprecedented amount in a non-election year, to hire hundreds of workers to network with, court and register minority voters.
“We’ve never put this many paid boots on the ground this early in an off year,” he said. “We’ve also never been this dedicated to working at the community level, to win minority votes, household to household.”
Philosophical Divisions
Some of the report’s proposed mechanical changes could be accomplished with adequate funding; those that call for a philosophical pivot -- becoming more accepting of those who disagree with the party’s positions -- will be harder to enforce. Candidates straying from Republican doctrine in recent years have been penalized by the party’s base in elections.
“Our standard should not be universal purity,” Sally Bradshaw, one of the report’s authors and a longtime consultant to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, said at a briefing today.
The report, which includes more than 200 recommendations and runs almost 100 pages, is often blunt.
“The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” it says. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”
More Inclusive
The report calls for the party to be more inclusive, or risk becoming further marginalized.
“When it comes to social issues, the party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming,” the report says. “If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.”
Priebus said party leaders need to “constantly remind everybody” to treat all, including gays and minorities, with dignity and respect. The party would continue to support Senator Rob Portmanof Ohio, who last week said he would back same-sex marriage after revealing that his son is gay, he said.
“It’s his decision,” Priebus said. “I support him having that opinion.”
Priebus also made clear he doesn’t expect any of the party’s policy positions to change.
“Our policies are sound,” he said. “But I think that, in many ways, the way that we communicate can be a real problem.”
The report calls for a shorter primary campaign season and no more than a dozen debates during that period, with the first no earlier than Sept. 1, 2015. It also says the party should consider penalizing candidates through the loss of convention delegates if they don’t abide by the party’s debate structure.
Female Voters
On wooing more female voters, the report calls for the creation of a list of surrogates based on their policy and political expertise and calls on the RNC’s media team to focus on “booking more women on TV on behalf of the party and be given metrics to ensure that we aren’t just using the same old talking heads.”
The party also needs to “educate Republicans on the importance of developing and tailoring a message that is non- inflammatory and inclusive to all,” the report says.
On immigration, the report calls on the party to “embrace and champion comprehensive” changes.
“If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” it says. “Comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.”
Younger Voters
To court younger voters, the report says Republican leaders need to more actively participate in interviews on the programs that they watch. It also calls for all party digital and data efforts to have the young voter as a major focus.
To match the Democrats’ advantage in technology, the RNC should hire a chief technology and digital officer by May 1, the report says.
It also calls for the creation of a data platform for the party that would be accessible to all qualified Republican organizations and campaigns so they can share information. Priebus said the RNC plans to open a field office in Silicon Valley to boost its ties to the technology development community.
The report also recommends a more populist tone.
“We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare,” it says. “We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.”
Electoral Success
Formally known as the Growth and Opportunity Project, the effort was initiated by Priebus on Dec. 10 as a way to study how Republicans can find more electoral success -- from the local level to Congress and the presidency.
The study group’s other members included Henry Barbour, nephew of former Mississippi governor and RNC chairman Haley Barbour; Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary under President George W. Bush; and RNC members Zori Fonalledas of Puerto Rico and Glenn McCall of South Carolina.
Priebus also said he wants the party’s national convention, typically held in late August or early September in presidential election years, moved to June or July. He argued that 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was hampered by his inability to tap funds slated for the general election to defend himself against Democratic attacks ahead of a late August convention.
Core Message
Before any of the proposed fixes can take full effect, Republican leaders may face their internal fissures that have led to the nomination of candidates viewed by independent voters as too extreme.
Some Republicans unhappy with losses in 2012 are pushing for a new core message and moderation on social issues and views on how to deal with undocumented immigrants, while others are arguing the party needs to stick to principles.
That tension was on display this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, where most of the speakers called on the party to stick to its core beliefs and there was no indication that the party base is willing to change the type of candidates it backs.
Exit Polls
Exit polls of voters in the Nov. 6 election showed President Barack Obama dominating Romney among single women, Hispanics, blacks and younger voters en route to carrying eight of the nine states both camps viewed as the most competitive. Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, the exit polls showed. That translated to a 44-percentage-point advantage over Romney, who won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote -- down from 31 percent for the party’s presidential ticket in 2008, 44 percent in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000.
Blunting those Democratic advantages is critical for Republicans: Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority bloc of voters, and the party risks losing much of an entire generation if they can’t appeal to younger voters.
One area not directly addressed by the study group is how the party goes about selecting its candidates for statewide races in the era of the anti-tax Tea Party movement.
Losses by Tea Party-backed U.S. Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana who drew controversy with comments about rape and pregnancy cost Republicans seats that they were poised to win a year before the election. When combined with similar defeats in 2010, some Republicans have complained that the primary fights that led to Democratic victories prevented them from gaining control of the Senate.
“We don’t pick winners and losers in primaries,” Priebus said. “It’s a business that we’re not in.”
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Former GOP Senator from Kansas and presidential candidate Bob Dole also expressed his disapproval with the direction the party has taken in recent years (Courtesy of CNN.com):
(Above: Former GOP Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Courtesy of Wikipedia)
(CNN) – National Republicans have shifted so drastically in the past decade that the party’s most vaunted figure - former President Ronald Reagan - would no longer find a home in the GOP, former Sen. Bob Dole claimed Sunday.“Reagan couldn’t have made it,” Dole said, adding he too would also have faced challenges in today’s Republican Party.
Instead of operating day-to-day in a nonelection year, the national party should focus on broader plans to rehabilitate itself after the losses of 2012, the former Kansas lawmaker said.
“I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says ‘Closed for repairs’ until New Year’s Day next year. Spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas,” Dole, who was the Republican nominee for president in 1996, said on “Fox News Sunday.”He also assigned blame for Washington’s current state of gridlock to President Barack Obama, who he argued was failing to bridge divides between the capital’s ideological camps.“I think that the president, he lacks communication skills with his own party, let alone the Republican Party. And he’s on the road too much,” Dole said, quipping Obama was a “good golfer.”“I think one mistake he’s made was not getting together more with Congress early on in his first administration. There's nothing like knowing the person you are talking to on the telephone, if you had an opportunity to sit down with that person and visit - not about anything, but just visit."
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But perhaps the most damning condemnation and admonition of all emanates from the preeminent conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, whose reply to a caller reflected the above people's thoughts, but from the perspective of a voter and private citizen, not that of a GOP political insider (Courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.com):
GOP Establishment Authors Its Own Demise
RUSH: John in Westchester, New York. Great to have you on the program, sir, as we head back to the phones. Welcome.BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
CALLER: I'd love to know more the details of the financials of this thing 'cause it's driving me nuts, and... I don't know. Maybe we'll get some more of that as time passes, but we're on a short string here.RUSH: Well, I gotta tell you something. I've been tracking this and following this, and the Republicans are celebrating this vote in the Senate. The Gang of Eight. I don't meant this to sound threatening or intimidating in any way. I honestly think that the Republican establishment doesn't know what awaits it regarding this issue. I don't think... Maybe they do and they just don't care. That's just as likely, actually, 'cause they were the same people in 2007 when your phone calls shut this down then.I think they know, actually.But let me put it this way. I don't think... They know that there's opposition, and they know it's their base. I don't believe they realize how deep it goes. I don't think they have the slightest idea how deep the anger at the current thinking, as expressed by supposedly smart Republican establishment people, exists. The anger. I don't think they have any idea how deep it is in towns large and small all across this country.People are livid every time an establishment leader opens his mouth and says, "We gotta do this to make amends with the Hispanic community! We've gotta do this so they will love us!" Now, certain members of our establishment, certain establishment members are running around talking about how they are loved now, that the Hispanics get us now. It's a fantasy like I've not seen in a long time, and I just don't think they know. This issue, even if it were the only thing happening, the anger would be deep and solid.But in connection with back home, it comes after the wrecking of the US economy, it comes after wrecking the job market, it comes after the exploding debt and interest rates in the student loan program. It comes after all of this other Obama stuff was not stopped or even pushed back against. I think the degree to which people like you are fit to be tied out there over this is something that has escaped them or they're either aware of it and are ignoring it. But they're certainly not factoring it, and they're going to regret that if they continue to push this thing through the House or if they start playing games in a conference committee.You have people more and more talk about third party now.If that happens, you can kiss the Republican Party good-bye.
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Is the GOP "dead on arrival" once again come November 2014? Much will depend upon how the House votes on the immigration bill. Unfortunately, the bulk of the Republicans in the Senate, the house of Congress charged with giving advise and consent to the president on matter of national defense under the Constitution, have already sided with President Obama in defending the surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners around the world under the guise that they are "taking care of us." Furthermore, in doing so, many Republican lawmakers and pundits are crucifying NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and labeling him a "traitor." Donald Trump, a well-known conservative, has even gone so far as to call on the federal government to have Snowden assassinated. Virtually all of my family members and friends with whom I have discussed this issue at great length have proudly declared Snowden a "patriot," a crusader against a government whose ever-growing stranglehold on American society is, in his words, "abusive," and leading to "tyranny." At this, the party that traditionally prides itself on greater liberty through a small government is once again swimming against the current like a school of salmon.
And just like the vast majority of salmon swimming upstream, the GOP is experiencing a slow, self-inflicted death.
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