The GOP Isn’t Learning From its Mistakes

Former GOP Congressman and current TV news show host Joe Scarborough has been pretty blunt at times with the problems in today's GOP.   And deservedly so since Scarborough is a realist who understands that the lunacy that has become the norm for the Republican Party is killing the GOP brand.  If the GOP is to survive long term, it has to cast aside the fantasy world of the Christofascists and Tea Party racists and bigots and cope with a changing America. In a piece in Politico, Scarborough lambastes the GOP for not learning from its mistakes.  Here are highlights:

My children and I love watching Peter Pan. In fact, we’ve seen the Disney classic so often through the years that we could probably recite most of the movie from memory. Maybe that’s why the opening lines came so easily to my mind earlier this week while watching a far less joyful tale unfold on Capitol Hill.

“This has all happened before and it will happen again” are the first words to that sweet movie about eternal youth. Unfortunately, those lines also fit a bit too snugly on the carcass of a political movement that seems incapable of learning from past mistakes. Chances are good that Republicans will continue getting blindsided by political events until Republican leaders stop cowering to public figures who insist on filtering out all realities that are in conflict with their preexisting worldviews.

If this sounds all too familiar, it’s because Republicans were licking their wounds around this time last year after being blindsided by a presidential election whose outcome they should have seen coming a mile away. But ignorance was bliss as conservative politicians and talkers pushed bogus polls and political fairy tales to angry voters who were once again on the losing side of history. Media outlets that released polls showing President Obama winning were attacked as biased and conservatives who warned of Romney’s weaknesses were rhetorically burned at the stake as heretics.

Barack Obama won again and Republican leaders swore that next time would be different.

Well, next time came one year later, and one year later, way too many conservatives once again found themselves shocked by the obvious. The Shutdown Strategy was doomed from the start even though conservatives like myself, Scott Walker, Tom Coburn and Charles Krauthammer agreed with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page’s early assessment that Ted Cruz’s approach would lead to political disaster.

The costs have been pretty big to the GOP. This shutdown drove the Republican brand into the ground, with only 24 percent of Americans approving of the party’s performance. That may not hurt conservative senators from Alabama or Texas, but it is a nightmare for Republicans representing states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. More troubling is just how divided this episode left us. I’m not sure how it happened but the Grand Old Party is now divided in two camps over something as grubby as legislative tactics.

As the smoke clears, we now see a Republican Party holding on to its lowest ever ratings in both the Gallup and the NBC News/WSJ polls. There is enough blame to go around but the bottom line is this: Republicans will not win the White House back again until they unite behind a candidate who wins the vote of Ted Cruz and Colin Powell. The GOP used to manage that feat and that’s why nominees like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won 49 states against a hapless Democratic Party. Unless a unified Republican Party comes together, the conservative movement will keep getting blindsided by history, and what has happened before will come back to haunt us all once again.

Personally, I do not see what Scarborough is calling for happening unless and until the Christofascists and Tea Party are neutralized within the GOP.  They are by definition irrational and all consumed by their fear and hate based bigotry and opposition to modernity.  They need to be thrown into the political wilderness where they belong.