Tweaking the message doesn’t mean caving. Just means getting more articulate leaders with more intelligent solutions.
Conservatives need to start their own party cause the Republican party will NEVER agree to conservatism.
They will forever back mamby pamby crap like Dole, McLame, Romney instead of a real conservative.
Let’s go along to get along cause we all be making money off this seems the mantra.
I don’t care what this party does anymore. I left it when Romney was thrust on us. The Republican Party is dead to me. I’m ready for a separate, truly conservative party.
Since the recent defeat, it seems there are two competing explanations:
1. The GOP needs to become more moderate, therefore less conservative, so as to not frighten away the mushy middle.
2. The GOP needs to become more conservative to provide an actual alternative, not just be low-grade liberals.
I must admit I’ve seen a lot of pontificating and opinionizing, but little data that show why one alternative or the other would have altered the results.
Obviously I prefer option 2, but then Romney got my vote anyway. That doesn’t mean a hard right candidate, who would also probably have gotten my vote, would have done any better with the general electorate.
I wonder if there is any actual data available on this issue.
The GOP-e are dead wrong about pandering to Hispanics, heard on the Laura Ingrham show a couple of days ago that immigration reform was the fourth thing on the list that was most important to Hispanics. Even if we gave them amnesty, there’s several other things on the list that they value more, they’re firing at the wrong target to begin with.
It “has to be tweaked” because, to many people, it’s unappealing. It’s unappealing because, although its history is one of sound principles, many who espouse it neglect those principles.
It’s unappealing for the same reason Ayn Rand’s philisophy is: No matter how it’s rationalized, self-centeredness is just plain ugly.
We might say that Leftism is a philosophy directed at chopping down the tree of liberty and thereby robbing us of its fruit (prosperity). Conservatism, then, has a two-fold response: First, don’t chop down the tree, which was planted by previous generations. And second, let us pick the fruit.
All well and good. Except that we’re driven not by the same principles which inspired our forebears. We’re not interested in tending and nurturing the liberty from which our prosperity springs, learning that public and private virtue are the source of its vitality.
No, we just want the fruit, and beyond that will go no further than to defend the decaying tree from the axe. Our motives are transparent, and “tweaking” can’t hide our Randian ugliness.
I rejected the republican party forever yesterday. Just an independent unaffiliated conservative now, and proud of it.
It’s interesting to see the self flagellation currently taking place in the Republican establishment over Romney. The WSJ editorial page this morning is beating up on Romney because he failed to make the case for the virtue of free market economics to Hispanics. Did they seriously believe that a rich guy talking about low capital gains taxes was going to register with an illegal blowing leaves for $5/hr? So the smart people blew themselves up again. Whatever. Life isn’t only about money. Maybe some day they’ll get it.