What would these men do?
Posted on 11/14/2008 6:21:09 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
Four years ago, in the week after the 2004 presidential election, we were working furiously to put the finishing touches on the book we co-authored, "It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America."
Our central thesis was simple: The Republican Party had been taken hostage by "social fundamentalists," the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. Unless the GOP freed itself from their grip, we argued, it would so alienate itself from the broad center of the American electorate that it would become increasingly marginalized and find itself out of power.
At the time, this idea was roundly attacked by many who were convinced that holding on to the "base" at all costs was the way to go. A former speechwriter for President Bush, Matthew Scully, who went on to work for the McCain campaign this year, called the book "airy blather" and said its argument fell somewhere between "insufferable snobbery" and "complete cluelessness." Gary Bauer suggested that the book sounded as if it came from a "Michael Moore radical." National Review said its warnings were, "at best, counterintuitive," and Ann Coulter said the book was "based on conventional wisdom that is now known to be false."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Christine Todd Whitman is free to join the Rat party any time she chooses. She effectively governed as a Rat, anyway.
Hey Christy, Social Conservative did not give us GWB with 30% approval ratings....
Christine Todd Whitman is a Vichy Republican.....
Chsty...go join the democRATS. We don’t want you here anymore.
What would these men do?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2132000/posts
“The Republican Party can either stand for smaller government, lower taxes and freer people, or it can rot in hell.”
John McCain was the "social moderate" candidate.
Christine is making the woefully mistaken assumption that without social conservatives (and Palin) McCain would actually have won.
Au contraire. Without anti-abortion and traditional family voters, McCain would have barely registered a blip on the electoral screen.
She may think we’re an embarrassment to the GOP, but in fact without us there is very little difference between her wing of the party and the Democrats—just a question of degree.
If the GOP has been “taken over” by “social fundamentalists”, then chances are its because they vastly outnumber the hedonists, making it their party, not yours Christine.
Yes, Christine. That's the problem, in a nutshell.
Such an “I Told You So” piece.
Maybe we should just change the name of the GOP to Democrat. We can be the “stealth” party. That will fool them.
How'd that end up working out, anyway? Anybody know...? ;)
RE : “alienate itself from the broad center of the American electorate”
Thats great. The media got us to drive out anyone that believes in capitalism, so now they need us to drive out the remaining Christians.
The media picked McCain, NOT ME! I never could stand the guy. Now we get these lectures.
Sigh........I can see now that the only way to show these doltish muddle-brained village idiots that without social conservatives they would literally be like the Whigs......is to just let them sink on their own. If we stopped voting for the "lesser of two evils" & let them try to win with their moderates - they will lose so big that they will be vanquished in the wilderness forever. We have got to stop "enabling" these fools.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Correct, in fact to take it a bit further, she could argue he may have been elected had he change his party affiliation to D instead of R. She may consider herself a Republican I do not but, she is far from a Conservative and that suits me just fine.
Yeah, I saw this POS in a print copy of the Post this morning.
Don’t waste your time. It’s not worth reading.
DO remember the names Whitman and Bostock, though. No more votes or support for EITHER of them. EVER.
We did that. TWICE, now ('06 and '08).
And they still haven't learned!
The Republican Party had been taken hostage by "social fundamentalists," the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research.
There is one issue that binds people who tend to be Republican - restrain of government power. Everything else is a distraction. Todd and these guys are BIG GOVERNMENT enablers. THEY are killing the party.
Hmmm ... as I recall, it was Reagan, running on a platform that appealed to social conservatives, that pulled the GOP OUT of the wilderness and made it into a majority party. Prior to Reagan, East Coast pubbies in the mold of Whitman were perfectly content for the GOP to be a perpetual minority party. This hag has her history all wrong (surprise).
Clearly the problem was that we were TOO conservative.
CTW couldn’t run suppertime at Sarah Palin’s house.
She came thru on the 30% tax cuts here but other than that she is the poster child for Northeast Liberal Republicans.
How did those “Social Conservative” initiatives do on the ballot in CA and FL. Seems to me, even in the Blue States the majority of people don’t share Whitman’s opinion.
Did hey not get that the reason McCain got anywhere near the 57,000,000 votes was because of Palin? If McCain had put someone like Lieberman or Todd-Whitman on the ticket we would have been lucky to get 30 million vote.
Are they that stupid?
I'm looking into the American Conservative Party (http://americanconservativeparty.org/)
If it comes to it, I will likely be able to say, “I did not leave the Republican party the Republican party left me.”
PING
She, along with McCain, are part of the Republican Main Street Partnership. They are running a shadow party within the party.
Prior to the 2006 elections they had 5 governors and a lot more House members. Although, it looks like they had some gains in the House in 2008 as their number was in the 30's the past two years.
If the Dems had run a candidate that was pro-life, for smaller government, supported our right to bear arms, understood our nation was founded by godly men that were Christians, and accept, we are a Christian nation, I would have voted for a Democrat.
“Blessed is the nation, whose God is the Lord,....” (Psalm 33:12)
As opposed to “fiscal fundamentalists” who have given us a national debt of $10,625,198,211,000.00, with a falling GDP and increasing unemployment!
Way to go, RINOs!
Members list from their webpage:
Elected Officials
U.S. Senate
Sen. Norm Coleman, Minnesota
Sen. Susan Collins, Maine
Sen. John McCain, Arizona
Sen. Gordon Smith, Oregon
Sen. Olympia Snowe, Maine
Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania
U.S. House
Rep. Judy Biggert, Illinois
Rep. Brian Bilbray, California
Rep. Mary Bono, California
Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, Florida
Rep. Ken Calvert, California
Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia
Rep. Michael Castle, Delaware
Rep. Thomas Davis, III, Virginia
Rep. Charlie Dent, Pennsylvania
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Florida
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Florida
Rep. David Dreier, California
Rep. Vernon Ehlers, Michigan
Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, Missouri
Rep. Phil English, Pennsylvania
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, New Jersey
Rep. Jim Gerlach, Pennsylvania
Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, Maryland
Rep. David Hobson, Ohio
Rep. Timothy Johnson, Illinois
Rep. Mark Kirk, Illinois
Rep. Joe Knollenberg, Michigan
Rep. John R. Kuhl, New York
Rep. Ray LaHood, Illinois
Rep. Steven LaTourette, Ohio
Rep. Jerry Lewis, California
Rep. Frank LoBiondo, New Jersey
Rep. Jim McCrery, Louisiana
Rep. Thomas Petri, Wisconsin
Rep. Todd Platts, Pennsylvania
Rep. Jon Porter, Nevada
Rep. Deborah Pryce, Ohio
Rep. Jim Ramstad, Minnesota
Rep. Ralph Regula, Ohio
Rep. Dave Reichert, Washington
Rep. Jim Saxton, New Jersey
Rep. Christopher Shays, Connecticut
Rep. Michael Turner, Ohio
Rep. Fred Upton, Michigan
Rep. Greg Walden, Oregon
Rep. James Walsh, New York
Rep. Jerry Weller, Illinois
Rep. Heather Wilson, New Mexico
Governors
Gov. Linda Lingle, Hawaii
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California
Member Spotlight
Susan Collins Senator, Maine
Find out who the poobahs are in your State.
As far as I'm concerned, she can camp with the rotting corpse of the GOP as an alternative. Either way, she's never going to get support from me. Same goes for the rest of that odious "Republican Main Street" gang - not a dime of support, not a minute of time, never a vote from me. If I knew how to put them in the unemployment line, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Yes, Whitman’s going the wrong direction.
But for my own sanity, can someone refute her numbers for me? She says McCain lost 6.4 million moderate votes. OK, but didn’t McCain also lose because conservatives didn’t vote? Anyone have a link to that analysis?
He lost, I heard. Pretty decidedly. Not embarrassingly, like Bob Dole, but a pretty resounding "flop".
Whitman and the Neocons want to go running after the Dems and the MSM crying pitifully, "Me too! Me too!"
They've accepted a liberal "ground rule": "We own the press, and so we make the rules."
That will never, ever be a winning formula. The alternative is to step up, do the right thing, and take the heat from the MSM hatemongers.
Conservatives ought to be in confab right now with Brent Bozell and his MRC, and Topic A ought to be, "How can we disarticulate the liberal media cartel?" After all, Nancy Pelosi and her commissariat are losing sleep trying study up ways to do in Rush and Hannity. Why shouldn't we examine similar possibilities for seeing to it that the Dinosaur Media accelerate their exit from the American political stage?
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Thomas Jefferson
What the Public Education ‘system’ teaches
Young and Ignorant — and Voting
At least, you may think to yourself, we are not getting any dumber. But by some measures we are. Young people by many measures know less today than young people forty years ago. And their news habits are worse. Newspaper reading went out in the sixties along with the Hula Hoop. Just 20% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 read a daily paper. And that isn’t saying much. There’s no way of knowing what part of the paper they’re reading. It is likelier to encompass the comics and a quick glance at the front page.
Young people today find the news irrelevant. Bored by politics, students shun the rituals of civic life, voting in lower numbers than other Americans (though a small up-tick in civic participation showed up in recent surveys). U.S. Census data indicate that voters aged 18 to 24 turn out in low numbers. In 1972, when 18 year olds got the vote, 52% cast a ballot. In subsequent years, far fewer voted: in 1988, 40%; in 1992, 50%; in 1996, 35%; in 2000, 36%. In 2004, despite the most intense get-out-the-vote effort ever focused on young people, just 47% took the time to cast a ballot.
Rick Shenkman
I would argue that the upper class members like Whitman (which create the “party of the rich” stereotype) are far more of a problem for the Republican Party than social conservatives. Remember that Hispanics and blacks in California supported the anti-gay marriage ballot measure even more than white people did.
If the current brand of social conservatism turns off too many moderates, the answer to calls that the GOP wants to 'legislate morality' is to perform a subtle shift in methods (not a shift in conviction) - we direct our efforts more to stopping the government from legislating immorality, and couch the argument in terms of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on. The same end folks - depravity only exists in such quantities by our sponsoring of it and its fruit. Failure is self-limiting when not subsidized. This is the core reason why the fusion makes sense - that we all agree that bad behavior (exists and) should not be rewarded or condoned, and that good behavior should be at least met with its natural rewards. Differences exist with the details, but we all agree on those grounds. The Democrats do not, the left does not.
This shift would not turn off moderates, and would help consolidate the other legs of the conservative movement (by highlighting policies at the confluence of our shared goals). A turn to federalism would further consolidate the party on all fronts, and be abstract enough not to cause mushy moderates to flee to the Democrats.
The main problem was (and is) that the GOP drifted on a host of issues, and self-proclamations of fiscal responsibility (for example) rang hollow - people hate hypocrisy, and the Republicans delivered it in spades on several fronts with trillions in DEFICITS (not even debts!!!). The media was handed trillions of rounds of ammunition, and bought from us miles of rope.
Smaller federal government, less federal spending, lower federal taxes, ample latitude left available to state governments, responsible and transparent monetary policy, and a renewed push toward personal responsibility. Opt-outs for entitlement programs, resetting federal policies on a host of morality issues to the null position (knowing full well that states occupied by moral people will adopt moral policies, while other states will wallow in filth and depravity without dragging the rest of us down).
If Obama follows a Clintonian style of not rocking the boat too much, the major problem the GOP will face is convincing the electorate that it can deliver on these fronts - and not instead deliver what it did when it recently controlled all branches of federal government - don't give me that BS about not having a filibuster-proof majority; those years were squandered, that political capital was wasted, that mandate was spent on bread and circuses. Two SC judges and a tax cut aside, it was 6 years of waste and 2 years of insanity.
That new style of "big-government" Wilsonian Republican party was a total failure, a throw-back to the Democrats of the 1960's. Back to basics, back to Reagan and Goldwater.
I always check the list when an alleged "R" is promoting something stupid. Generally speaking, I find them on that member list.
Absolutely. Take a look at the congress that sits right now. the Majority are big government statists. They wish themselves trillions of dollars, and deny all accountability. Freedom and Self Rule are strange ideas to them. They are at an all time low in public approval, yet they are rewarded with an even larger majority, and the executive to boot. Without real opposition, I might add, since the Republican party is factionalized enough to no longer be a stong opponent to those who wish to cut up this country and sell it at scrap value. The author of this article represents one of those factions, the 'democrat' faction. If we are this confused, I can't expect the electorate to be any better. But 'permanent minority', to me, is a grotesque term. I don't want anything to do with it. Time to get to work.
Thanks for sharing - I think I will check the list as well. Luckily Kentucky has not been invaded by these yellow Republicans.
I don’t get the moderates, at all. You cannot be a “moderate” on every issue; and if you are then you really have no core beliefs, imho. I realize the world is not “black and white”; but for the most part, it is impossible to be middle of the road of most political issues. If you are, you are just too weak to make up your mind.
Christine Todd Whitman can go any time she wants.
These are the people who we want to finance.
Riiight!
Rev 3:14 “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. 15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.