Give President Obama’s team their due: a game plan that was organized, focused, well executed, and aimed to win. There were a dozen reasons he should have lost, but only one that counts: the Republican Party that animated the Romney campaign.
Give Mitt Romney’s team its due: organized, focused, well executed with an aim to win. There are a dozen reasons he should have won, and one reason he lost: the Republican Party. Going forward, there is one political party with a grand opportunity: that would be the Republican Party.
Ohio had not yet been declared by Fox News, before its commentators began sputtering. All the talking points of the GOP message machine – buttressed by billions of dollars of dark money from corporate America and its totemic leaders, the Koch Brothers, and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch – had failed with a majority of American voters.
The Fox News anchors struggled for a story line, without their back room helpers. And there, on the set, was Karl Rove, GOP architect, clinging to hope and expressing it clearly -- that if Fox News held out and stonewalled declaring Ohio that something would materialize to arrest Ohio’s slide to President Obama. He didn’t say so, but it was there in his body language: a rich man who had cost the nation trillions through the Bush term failures and had now cost his patrons, billions. It was all there on live TV.
The pitchfork politics of the Republican Party hit the ceiling with the American electorate last night. There were no more voters yesterday and will be no more voters in the next presidential cycle to bring to the fold. Charles Krauthammer, on Fox, instantly offered hope that the Republican Party would fall to the new generation of leaders, like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio. A pipe dream, but a revealing one.
The younger generation has been propelled by the same extremists – including Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich – that only generate support among a dwindling demographic drawn to the polls by fear and loathing.
In 1964 Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination to be president, articulating the the principle that has animated the GOP for nearly fifty years: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Then, Goldwater's message appealed mainly to John Birchers. Today the John Birchers, reformatted as the Tea Party and supported by special interest billions, control the Republican Party. Senate losses in Indiana and Missouri—Mourdock and Aiken – despite the infusion of untold millions by the radical right, tell the story. (click, 'read more')
What is interesting is that the radicals – including the young lions like Marco Rubio – reverentially point to Ronald Reagan and not Goldwater. But times have changed. Not even Reagan could have made it through the freak show of the Republican primary which Mitt Romney eventually won by repudiating every one of his moderate positions when he was governor of Massachusetts. “I’m a severe conservative”, Romney assured his base and lost.
Mitt Romney, pushed and pulled by right wing radicals, defaulted to his nature: a careful businessman who treated the campaign as a marketing project. American voters really did make an extraordinary decision: despite the worst economy since the Great Depression, they preferred to stick with President Obama who says what he means and means what he says, even if circumstances ought to have denied him a second term.
The GOP faces two choices: either put distance between officials and candidates who represent the extremist wing of the party, thereby gaining new traction with American voters, or allow the party to splinter. Doing the same in 2016 – following the Fox News gang and its mean spirited billionaires -- and expecting a different result is the definition of madness. Republicans, in other words, can’t spend more billions to change the outcome.
Last night, in those opening minutes of incredulity, this is what we heard from Fox: Sixty percent of the electorate believe the economy is the top issue, and yet Mitt Romney – the putative leader of corporate America – could not muster enough votes to win. Republicans did a dismal job with blacks and Latinos. How do you explain the president is holding on? Latino vote. “Republicans are looking all the way backwards to another century.”
In his concession speech, GOP Florida Senate candidate Connie Mack was at loss for words until he grabbed this one from the stupefied air, “We may have lost the battle but we haven’t lost the war.” That’s exactly the talk that dooms the Republican Party. If the party leadership wants to wage perpetual war -- the Mitch McConnell way -- they will continue to lose national elections.
Sheldon Adelson—who spent at least $50 million on Newt Gingrich and then Romney – may have bottomless pockets. The Koch Brothers, at the center of the Republican debacle last night, are wealthy beyond imagination. Corporate America may have a bottomless capacity to “tax” consumers by directing profits through political campaigns to the radical right. Perhaps paralysis and gridlock is their end game. It could be. It could be the aim of America’s wealthiest to foment partisanship beyond credulity in order to pillage and plunder the national economy until the middle class is vanquished and the whole lot plunges into a depression.
But if that is the Republican plan -- guided by the same "experts" and elected Republicans who have cost the nation so dearly, the outcome in 2014 or 2016 will not be different. Opportunity knocks for the GOP, but not through the same door, elected officials and candidates, that closed last night.
Give Mitt Romney’s team its due: organized, focused, well executed with an aim to win. There are a dozen reasons he should have won, and one reason he lost: the Republican Party. Going forward, there is one political party with a grand opportunity: that would be the Republican Party.
Ohio had not yet been declared by Fox News, before its commentators began sputtering. All the talking points of the GOP message machine – buttressed by billions of dollars of dark money from corporate America and its totemic leaders, the Koch Brothers, and the media empire of Rupert Murdoch – had failed with a majority of American voters.
The Fox News anchors struggled for a story line, without their back room helpers. And there, on the set, was Karl Rove, GOP architect, clinging to hope and expressing it clearly -- that if Fox News held out and stonewalled declaring Ohio that something would materialize to arrest Ohio’s slide to President Obama. He didn’t say so, but it was there in his body language: a rich man who had cost the nation trillions through the Bush term failures and had now cost his patrons, billions. It was all there on live TV.
The pitchfork politics of the Republican Party hit the ceiling with the American electorate last night. There were no more voters yesterday and will be no more voters in the next presidential cycle to bring to the fold. Charles Krauthammer, on Fox, instantly offered hope that the Republican Party would fall to the new generation of leaders, like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio. A pipe dream, but a revealing one.
The younger generation has been propelled by the same extremists – including Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich – that only generate support among a dwindling demographic drawn to the polls by fear and loathing.
In 1964 Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination to be president, articulating the the principle that has animated the GOP for nearly fifty years: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Then, Goldwater's message appealed mainly to John Birchers. Today the John Birchers, reformatted as the Tea Party and supported by special interest billions, control the Republican Party. Senate losses in Indiana and Missouri—Mourdock and Aiken – despite the infusion of untold millions by the radical right, tell the story. (click, 'read more')
What is interesting is that the radicals – including the young lions like Marco Rubio – reverentially point to Ronald Reagan and not Goldwater. But times have changed. Not even Reagan could have made it through the freak show of the Republican primary which Mitt Romney eventually won by repudiating every one of his moderate positions when he was governor of Massachusetts. “I’m a severe conservative”, Romney assured his base and lost.
Mitt Romney, pushed and pulled by right wing radicals, defaulted to his nature: a careful businessman who treated the campaign as a marketing project. American voters really did make an extraordinary decision: despite the worst economy since the Great Depression, they preferred to stick with President Obama who says what he means and means what he says, even if circumstances ought to have denied him a second term.
The GOP faces two choices: either put distance between officials and candidates who represent the extremist wing of the party, thereby gaining new traction with American voters, or allow the party to splinter. Doing the same in 2016 – following the Fox News gang and its mean spirited billionaires -- and expecting a different result is the definition of madness. Republicans, in other words, can’t spend more billions to change the outcome.
Last night, in those opening minutes of incredulity, this is what we heard from Fox: Sixty percent of the electorate believe the economy is the top issue, and yet Mitt Romney – the putative leader of corporate America – could not muster enough votes to win. Republicans did a dismal job with blacks and Latinos. How do you explain the president is holding on? Latino vote. “Republicans are looking all the way backwards to another century.”
In his concession speech, GOP Florida Senate candidate Connie Mack was at loss for words until he grabbed this one from the stupefied air, “We may have lost the battle but we haven’t lost the war.” That’s exactly the talk that dooms the Republican Party. If the party leadership wants to wage perpetual war -- the Mitch McConnell way -- they will continue to lose national elections.
Sheldon Adelson—who spent at least $50 million on Newt Gingrich and then Romney – may have bottomless pockets. The Koch Brothers, at the center of the Republican debacle last night, are wealthy beyond imagination. Corporate America may have a bottomless capacity to “tax” consumers by directing profits through political campaigns to the radical right. Perhaps paralysis and gridlock is their end game. It could be. It could be the aim of America’s wealthiest to foment partisanship beyond credulity in order to pillage and plunder the national economy until the middle class is vanquished and the whole lot plunges into a depression.
But if that is the Republican plan -- guided by the same "experts" and elected Republicans who have cost the nation so dearly, the outcome in 2014 or 2016 will not be different. Opportunity knocks for the GOP, but not through the same door, elected officials and candidates, that closed last night.
8 comments:
Gov Scott, we will not forget what you tried to do, suppressing our vote. See you in 2014.
Romney was right. It's impossible to win when 47% of the electorate are takers who pay no taxes. Things will only get worse.
Sour grapes last anonymous comment? When you get on medicare after paying in for 30 or 40 years, I hope you remember what you said today.
nice written
nice written
If the leading politicians continue in the partisan attitude that they exhibited the last two years, we as a nation will suffer. It's one thing to say "work with the other side" and takes a different philosophy to actually extend your hand with good intentions. I just hope that the country's leadership saw during this election that the days of "wars" and "fights" must be extinct for our country to truly prosper.
Never ceases to amaze me of the outlook of folks of a single event. Of course I think it was said that FDR was a communist trying to sell the Country to the Internationale and heaven forbid Lincoln was positively anti-democratic according to the Slave owners.
What republicans fail, my dear friend, to see is that Republicans are directly attacking the people and principles they allege to cherish and are breaking the very thing they care about, our country. This is being done out of dedication to an ideology which is out of touch with the modern world. These actions demonstrate someone terrified of the future. Unable to handle the world before them the party invents its own reality, one where there are people lurking in dark corners attempting to steal the election from "them" who have friends using tactics right out of the 1950's were evenlGeorge C Marshall was a traitor if not a dupe for communism. The thought that, perhaps, the country will do fine and even better or that women don’t want their decisions made for them, or minorities are not stealing American jobs, has never popped in to some of their minds nor into the extreme tea party nativist crowd that are more akin to the Klan of the 20's and 30's or the "know nothing" party of the 1850's.
The current Republicans have lost their way. Greed and an avarice for power and the crushing of opposing points of view have poisoned men’s hearts and twisted their minds with hate. Money has made them cynical, cleverness hard and Cruel. They and their contributors hoard material objects and falsely argue christian values when in fact they have turned selfish, hypocrites & cnarcissistic. More than cleverness, what is needed is compromise and collaboration. Without these qualities, life will be violent and everything our forefathers and those brave sentinels of democracy who have given their lives for would have been in vain.
Given in the spirit of brotherly live and affection to all Americans
Sometimes your posts are inciteful, but here you are just stupid. Maybe the euphoria of the big win is not letting you think clearly. You are about to lose a loyal reader. If I want to read crap analysis of the GOP, I can go to Daily Kos. Seriously.
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