Over the weekend, Politico published an update from the RNC conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Over the course of the article, the various Republican party members and leaders interviewed insisted that the 2012 elections weren’t a rejection of the GOP’s policy platform; rather, it was simply that the GOP’s messaging was poor and that no policy changes were needed.
You know, for a second I was concerned that the GOP might actually figure it out.
The article, available here, begins by noting that the RNC leadership and members determined three key areas in which they had to improve in the future. The first is the need to welcome women and Latinos into the party. The second is to close the technology gap with Democrats. The third is to stop the self-destructive talk about rape.
However, no one suggested that perhaps it’s the GOP’s policies that are the problem, and not how members of the party talk about them.
“It’s not the platform of the party that’s the issue,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday after being easily reelected to a second, two-year term. “In many cases, it’s how we communicate about it. It is a couple dumb things that people have said.”
I’d like to point out that Michael Steele presided over the Republican wave election in 2010 and was promptly shown the door, while Reince “Obvious Anagram” Priebus got his ass handed to him in 2012 and yet still kept his job.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told a luncheon crowd that the GOP is at “a turning point” and needs “real change.”
Then he clarified: “It’s not about ideology…The people on the left are the people on the left, and they ask us to come to them – which is absurd…Obama’s a hard core left-winger. I want him to compromise with us on our terms.”
Ah Newt, that veritable font of wisdom. So, let me see if I get this straight. The people on the left, who are on the left, ask you to come towards them from a policy perspective, and that’s absurd. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, who is presumably on the right, asks the people on the left, who are on the left, to compromise with him by moving right, and that’s a perfectly reasonable sentiment.
Perhaps someone should explain what the word “compromise” means, because I don’t think it means what Newt Gingrich thinks it means.
Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett said the key to a GOP turnaround is to catch up with Democrats technologically.
“Listen, we’re a conservative party. I’m proud of that,” he said. “They were on the ground for four years in Ohio. We didn’t pick up what they were doing in that four-year period, and they were pretty damn effective.”
Oh Bob. Let me let you in on a little secret: the people that design and create the fancy tools that Democrats use tend to be relatively liberal or libertarian, which is to say completely and totally opposed to pretty much everything in your party’s platform. Consequently, you’re going to find it hard to find anyone in the tech sector that’s willing to give modernizing the GOP’s online get out the vote infrastructure a real college try. Instead, you’re going to end up with something like the Romney Campaign’s “ORCA” system, which as we all know was a colossal, expensive disaster, specifically because all the people that might have made it not a disaster don’t particularly like the GOP.
Also, who knew Democrats were so sneaky? They were in Ohio for FOUR YEARS, and the GOP apparently had no clue what they were doing. I mean, it’s not like they’re a major political party that controls the Presidency and the Senate. I guess they thought they were selling Girl Scout cookies or something.
A big focus of the four-day session, which wraps up Saturday, was adopting a more positive attitude – and smiling! – when interacting with voters and reporters.
Yes, because the reason the GOP got blasted in 2012 was because their candidates didn’t smile enough.
New Hampshire chairman Wayne MacDonald said party [leaders] need to work on “not being sour-pusses on television or the radio” – that there is a way to be firm and assertive without being mean-spirited.
“Nobody is saying the Republican Party has to change our beliefs in any of our platform planks,” he said. “This party wants to serve everybody that believes in our principles.”
Perhaps someone should remind Mr. MacDonald that, at any given point in time, half the country doesn’t believe in his party’s principles, and voters took a pretty good look at the GOP platform in 2012 and decided, in the immortal words of Jay Sherman, “IT STINKS!”
Many of the 168 elected members of the committee brought up the comments about rape by GOP Senate candidates Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Each lost, even as Romney won both states handily.
It’s a good thing that none of these people are doctors, because I’m pretty sure this is textbook “treating the symptoms, and not the disease”. Telling your candidates to not talk about rape isn’t the answer; finding out why your candidates say dumb and offensive things about rape is.
“On some things, we have the right policy and do a terrible job conveying it. And the Democrats have a bad policy and do a great job,” said Mississippi Republican Chairman Joe Nosef.
“So conservatives feel like, whether this is right or wrong, that if we’re talking about the issues, that we have a really good chance at winning. The thing we can’t do is start talking about crazy stuff… We run people off… A collective number of these people are tired of doing that.”
“I feel like a pro-life position is a position that a lot of people have, but that doesn’t have anything to do with crazy talk about rape,” he added.
Of course, there’s no acknowledgement that the GOP might have bad policies, and might also be doing a bad job conveying them to the general public, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s focus on this statement: “The thing we can’t do is start talking about crazy stuff… We run people off… A collective number of these people are tired of doing that.”
Without objection, the full RNC approved a resolution by voice vote Friday calling on Congress to defund Planned Parenthood and redistribute the money intended for cancer screening and preventive services to organizations that do not perform abortions.
So it’s OK if you DO crazy stuff, you just can’t talk about it. Gotcha.
Behind closed doors, party bigwigs discussed “strategic partnerships” with blacks, Asians, Hispanics and women. There was talk about developing a “comfort factor” so that minorities feel they are part of the process.
Perhaps if the Republican party didn’t have a platform that was designed to keep all of those groups from attaining the same level of social and economic equality as white men, they might be a little more comfortable in engaging in the process, as it were.
[Curly Hagland – national Committeeman from North Dakota, is] confident that Obama will overreach now that he’s secured reelection – and that this will drive voters to Republicans in the 2014 midterms.
“This administration is a socialist administration. There’s no question about it,” Haugland said. “America’s not a socialist country.”
I threw that in there just so I could quote a guy named “Curly Hagland.” Also, if anyone is in, near, or passing through North Dakota, please feel free to track down Mr. Hagland and beat him with a high school Social Studies textbook until he learns what exactly “socialism” is.
Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary, noted that some Republican governors have won much higher percentages of minority groups than national candidates. Tone makes a difference, he said.
“It is a tale of two parties,” he said. “There’s a lot of success out there built around people who fundamentally have the same world view as the federal candidates.”
In fact, some border-state governors hold dramatically different views on the best approach to immigration than Romney and congressional leaders. And Romney’s view was much more hard-line than George W. Bush’s in 2004.
It’s almost as if Latinos responded electorally to being treated with a modicum of respect.
Separately, the chairman told the conservative publication Human Events: “Look, we had the most conservative platform ever last year. There is nothing [the review committee] will do to change that.”
So you had the most conservative platform ever, and voters across the country basically gave you a giant double bird. But it’s not the platform that’s the problem! You just did a bad job selling it.
Every day I wake up terrified that today will be the day the GOP finally figures out that the American people rejected their candidates and their platform en masse in 2012, and they did it because the GOP’s candidates and platform were a giant steaming pile of dog shit. That that day will be the day when they finally figure out that poll after poll after poll shows the American people agree with the vast majority of what President Obama said in his “far left-wing” inaugural address, and that there are conservative cases to be made for the vast majority of those policies.
And then, after I have my coffee, I read an article like this and exhale a deep sigh of relief, knowing that today will not be the day the GOP figures out that a turd in fancy wrapping paper is, in fact, still a turd.
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