The hate and extremism fest known as CPAC has continued to provide great sound bites to use against individual GOP candidates and the Party in general. Interestingly, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd of loons to take a good look in the mirror. It's doubtful that the advice will be heeded, but long term I suspect that the only way to save the GOP is to allow it to largely self-destruct as it remains a puppet of an aging and soon to be extinct segment of the population. Given that the GOP has become a de facto religious party, the Party like the Christianists who control it is known more and more by what its against and who it hates. In both cases, the only ones not hated or opposed are those in the shrinking tent. A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon. Here are highlights (Dana Milbank coined the nattering nabobs of negativism phrase):
“How many of you,” Scott Rasmussen asked the crowd at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, “have ever mocked or made fun of the president’s call for hope and change? Raise your hands.” Most people in the Marriott Wardman Park hotel ballroom raised their hands. There were cheers and whoops. “With all due respect,” the conservative pollster and commentator told them, “I’d like to say that’s really stupid.”
This time, there was uncomfortable laughter. “Voters are looking for hope and change as much today as they were in 2008,” Rasmussen explained, and “you ought to be encouraging Republican candidates, people you support, to offer that positive step forward.”
Rasmussen had put his finger on a major problem for Republicans in 2012, and conservatives in particular: At a time when the national mood has begun to improve, they remain nattering nabobs of negativism. At CPAC, any hint of a “positive step” was buried in vitriol.
[W]ith optimism and confidence finally on the rise, Republicans are left with an anger management problem. They risk leaving the impression that they are rooting against an economic recovery. Take, for example, the speech to CPAC by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. . . . . “The president seems to have forgotten . . . that he was elected to be president of the United States, not the Occupy Wall Street fan club,” McConnell lectured, spitting out the words.
The unrelenting anger in the ballroom was an extension of what’s been happening on the campaign trail. In the week preceding the Florida Republican primary, 92 percent of the political ads were negative, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group. There was only one positive ad for Mitt Romney — and it was in Spanish.
The dour message has contributed to low voter turnout and an enthusiasm gap among GOP voters — a worrisome development that the Washington Times’ Ralph Hallow tried to warn the CPAC participants about. “None of these things I see are particularly good,” he said during one of the conference panels. “Intensity and enthusiasm about voting is now with the Democrats.”
. . . . . But at the moment, the message remains backward-looking and negative.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) even dismissed the significance of the death of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Moammar Gaddafi and the birth of the Arab Spring. They are “tactical successes” that pale against the “mess that Barack Obama has created,” she said.
Such nattering is exactly what Obama needs.
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