“Social issues” are a luxury we enjoyed during the “good times”; they have little impact when many people are borrowing for groceries.
When income tax forms have a place to fill in credit card info to make your tax payment, and gas stations switch to digital signs to facilitate frequent price fluctuations (usually upward), nobody cares about “social issues”.
My gauge of the economy is simple & reliable (and still portends trouble): the number of wheat pennies and bicentennial quarters I receive in my change. It leads me to believe Obama will lose by a wide margin in November; libs may not admit voting for the Republican candidate, but I’m sure some of these coins were in libs’ pockets a week ago.
Wit, you mean that the GOP could nominate an actual conservative instead of a RINO, and still be in good shape?????
NOW they tell us!
I’m an Independent BECAUSE the Republican Party has sold out on social issues.
East Coast sophisticates, liberal arts-college grads (who have perhaps been deliberately and maliciously maleducated for the last 80 years), neocons and Yacht Club brokers-grown-great all go nuts when social issues come up, and they revile people in Flyover Country, in the South especially, and anywhere Not Megalopolis in general. This produces a major cleavage and political lameness in the GOP. Check this screed:
http://tinyurl.com/6w37svfIt's as if the Eastern half of the GOP is working with half a brain, because they're bigoted against the other half.
Even if the platitude that social issues drive away independent voters were true, we still abandon them at our own risk. First, because abandoning them will drive away Conservative voters, who are a larger and more reliable voting bloc for the GOP than independents, and second, because if both parties abandon social issues, then we become Europe, and we already know how that story ends.
An open sewer is still a sewer, even if it is within its budget and fiscally sound.
Hey Rush, it’s not just abortion, it’s homosexuality, too.
“Republican” libertarians join liberals in the drama of “freedom from hearing morals.” It is gay/feminazi drama with a megaphone in power and in the press. Most Americans are not in the moral corruption community.
Social issues are never a loser. That is a myth. Reagan had no problem at all discussing them. He had a knack for knowing how to frame those issues and appeal to people without coming off harsh.
Communicating them seems to be an art that very few can do without coming off as overzealous. It can be done. Go back and listen to some of the times Reagan talked about them.