I will admit that I am REALLY enjoying watching the shrieking and wailing going on amongst the Kool-Aid drinkers of the Republican Party who seem to be grasping for any explanation for the Romney/Ryan ticket's loss on Tuesday - they seem to be trying to ignore that they also lost seats in the Senate and House of Representatives as well - other than the simple truth: the majority of Americans simply did not want what they were selling. They are having an even harder time accepting that things will likely be even worse in future elections if the GOP doesn't radically alter course. They are however, correct that a majority of us want things: a separation of church and state; an end to racism and bigotry; an end to government intrusion into a private lives; equality under the law for all citizens gay or straight, male or female, white or non-white; an equal playing field for all citizens; and an end to special privileges for the wealthy and certain religious groups, to name a few of such "things." Even once the GOP leadership belatedly accepts this reality, the perhaps biggest hurdle will be to wrest the party back from the extremists who have taken it over. A column in the Washington Post looks at the way in which the extremist party base almost guaranteed a Romney/Ryan loss. Here are highlights:
Before Mitt Romney lost the election, the Republican Party lost its head. The GOP started the presidential campaign in the black cold of the Iowa winter, appealing to evangelicals and other cultural conservatives. Good people though they may be, they are no more representative of the typical American voter than the equally good people of Beverly Hills’s ultra-liberal precincts. Romney pandered. He would end funding to Planned Parenthood and he recommended making things so tough on undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport.” Goodbye, Hispanics, and goodbye, many women.
The venue for that first contest and the field of candidates was the biggest break Barack Obama got. The entire Republican field swung to the right. One stupendously unqualified candidate after another took the early lead — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich.
The winner of the Iowa caucus, you might recall, was Rick Santorum, who had lost his race for reelection for Pennsylvania senator. He campaigned as an inquisitor, a stern and humorless champion of his own morality. He was against abortion — not just late-term. Not even in the case of rape or incest.
Now it will start all over. Santorum was in Iowa at least twice last month. A GOP that might have won the presidency had it earlier steered a middle course, will once again veer to the right. Zealots of one kind or another will run — and one by one become front-runners. The early contests will be held in the most unrepresentative of states. A debacle is looming.
About $2 billion was spent on the 2012 race, more than half of it, certainly, on Romney. The GOP would do itself — and the nation — a favor if the fat cats who put up this money started backing moderates and rebuilding the party. They could start by knocking Iowa and New Hampshire down the campaign calendar. They could begin in New York or Illinois or even Texas. Maybe that would encourage moderates to enter the race and not feel they’d be doomed by, perhaps, wondering out loud about abortion, same-sex marriage or immigration.
It took the GOP years to come to terms with the New Deal and the Fair Deal. It has taken the party a long time to come to terms with the necessities of modern government . . . . . Barack Obama never got the economy really humming. I don’t blame him for that. The unemployment rate always hovered around 8 percent. I don’t blame him for that, either. But these are the usual factors that doom a reelection effort. Mitt Romney could have won. He had the right opponent but the wrong political party.
Personally, I do not expect the GOP to get the message or learn a lesson. Most of the rational moderates who might have led a rebuilding of the GOP - people like myself and many of my GOP friends of years ago - have simply fled the GOP out of revulsion over the extremism and hate and fear that came to dominate everything. I don't see many of us ever going back. And by alienating a strong majority of younger voters by embracing social conservatives and religious extremists, the GOP has an inadequate pool of from the younger generations to rebuild what the angry white religious extremists and white supremacists have destroyed.
No comments:
Post a Comment