Posted on 11/11/2012 10:00:15 AM PST by dirtboy
President Obama may have scored a narrow victory Tuesday night ... Yet his squeaker of a triumph not only represents a bigger loss for the Party of Lincoln, but also offers a critically important lesson.
[snip]
In contrast, 21st-century Republicans have traded a devotion to "average Americans" for a love affair with free-market and limited-government abstractions. Consequently, the Romney-Ryan ticket invested heavily in the notion that naked market forces, especially fiscal austerity and tax cuts for investors, would magically lift all boats.
The anxious electorate didn't buy this pitch, especially in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, where free-trade and outsourcing policies have drained away millions of manufacturing jobs. Appealing primarily to educated small-business owners - so-called "job creators" - the GOP lost the votes of the vastly more numerous but less educated "job holders" worried about not holding a job. Exit polls revealed that the electorate trusted Obama - running on the highest unemployment rate of any incumbent since FDR - to create more jobs than the heralded entrepreneur Romney.
If that weren't enough, the top of the ticket showed no awareness of how laissez-faire economics has dovetailed with the sexual-liberation agenda of the left in undermining prospects for millions of Americans, especially those without college degrees. It is no coincidence that globalization has undermined the economic security of Middle America at the very time that Democratic policies have destabilized the family through legalized abortion, distortions of marriage through no-fault divorce and same-sex union laws, federal birth-control mandates, subsidized day care, and gender-based affirmative action.
This may explain why Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, remained mum on social issues, as a robust defense of natural marriage, motherhood, and family life would have forced them to rethink their economic platform...
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
This from The Special Assistant to The Secretary of Public Welfare. Man. They have absolutely no shame. Another grifter.
The reason why Americans are skeptical of “free trade” is that they have seen no beneficial results in their pockets as a result of “free trade.”
They’ve seen hundreds of thousands of jobs leave. We were told in Silicon Valley (because CEO’s sent out emails to entire companies telling us to help them campaign for “free trade” during NAFTA and GATT) that it would result in more jobs, more exports, etc.
We were told that the “dirty” jobs would move off shore. We were never told that, oh, by the way, the engineering jobs would move off-shore, the electronics assembly jobs would move off-shore, that entire product development and manufacturing shops would move off-shore. Nope, we weren’t told any of that.
Then the the majority of US citizens saw their household incomes decline, after peaking in the late 90’s. For most everyone but the very top income earners, there has been no benefit of “free trade” visible in their paycheck at the end of the week. None. The median US household income has been declining for over 10 years now.
And still, the wankers and propagandists who peddle “free trade” with a straight face won’t address this issue. We’re told that cheaper prices offset lower wages. But that doesn’t do anything about increasing food, medical and retirement costs, now does it. Being able to buy cheap consumer crap at Walmart doesn’t offset the fact that you’re not making enough to send your kids to college, because colleges costs (like medical costs) have been increasing in excess of the rate of inflation for decades now. So a flat-lining household income doesn’t cut it.
Conservatives need to get their heads out of their rumps and start going through the Census, BLS, Fed and BEA datasets (as I have) and you will change your mind on free trade (as I have). It’s been more than 10 years, it’s time to declare it to be a a farce and a sham. The data is there for everyone to see, if they’ll just quit chanting this “free trade” pablum long enough to actually *read* and analyze the data.
A picture is worth thousands of words and reams of data:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/US_real_median_household_income_1967_-_2011.PNG
Americans, by their voting record, show their approval.
All of that is true, and let’s start with some really basic stuff:
It’s real difficult to peddle someone who has two degrees from Haaaahhhhvaaaaddd as “one of the common folk.” It’s even more difficult to make that sale when he made his money on Wall Street, using clever “financial engineering” and leverage that he’s “one of the common folk.”
The last person who ran for POTUS on the GOP ticket who could convince the common man that he was “one of them” was Reagan. Want to know why?
He was the last guy who went to a non-Ivy college or (in McCain’s case) not a military academy.
The political strategy didn't.
A lot of it had to do with timing and maybe somebody could work out an equation.
"Are you sick of those 8 years of Bush?" trumped "Are you sick of those 4 years of Obama?" for many voters.
There are ways that Republicans could have turned the equation to their advantage -- "Are you sick of 4 years of Carter?" included "Are you sick of 15 years of liberalism, 30 years of Democratic control of the Congress, 50 years of Democrats as the top party?" -- but I guess 2012 was too soon to get voters giving answers we would have liked to hear to questions like that.
“There is an entire school of conservatism (Russell Kirk, etc.) that is as distrustful of laissez faire as they are of socialism. Some even describing these two theories as two sides of the same materialist coin.”
Good call, fardels. Russell Kirk, the economist Wilhelm Roepke, and maybe Robert Nisbet represent a branch of conservatism pushed aside by the GOP at their own peril. Pat Buchanan is maybe the only current conservative writer who sounds anything like them.
People with limited means have a funny habit of not voting for ideologically pure policies that threaten their own survival. Kirk and Roepke would not have been surprised at how the voting turned out in sections of the country affected by outsourcing and globalism.
I was sick of the last 2 years of Bush, with TARP and the bailouts, set the GOP back 20 years at least.
“The best analysis so far.”
Except that it left out the impact of Third World immigration, legal as well as illegal, on those same non-college degree Americans. They face unnecessary competition for their jobs and downward pressure on their wages.
The 1965 Immigration bill has been a disaster for blue collar America, their wages have remained essentially flat since 1970. And it has given us the army of Obama voters who see white America as “other” and Obama as one of their own.
Thank you. We NEED to see “Made in USA” MUCH more often!!!!
Excellent post.
How do you explain Bush 2, Clinton and Obama?
All of them were promising “free stuff,” which appeals to the low classes. They’ve got jack, their household incomes have been stagnant even longer, and they’ll pull the lever for whomever promises them free crap. Bush 2 was peddling the “compassionate conservative” trope - eg, Medicare Part D, which we couldn’t afford and just made our economic situation worse.
Romney was the first guy to come along in a while and say “You know, we can’t afford free crap forever.” That’s true. But he suffers from the problem of his background while saying that.
Want to win the middle class while preaching a story of self-reliance? Then run a guy who made his money honestly, with real sweat, and who didn’t attend the colleges of the inbred political class.
Got any suggestions? Look at what some so called conservatives did to Palin, Cain and Bachmann.
If you haven’t read it, you might like Ian Fletcher’s analysis:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2958289/posts?page=34#34
“No, the party simply needs to recover the Eisenhower-Reagan vision and stand with the broad middle class, the trump card of the electorate, against the collusion of the libertarian right and the social-liberation left.”
Nominate for post of the year.
“How to emphasize social issues without appearing radical? Mrs Gingrich, Santorum, Ryan are all political animals, not your typical neighbor you identify with.”
There is a blog called Heartiste. It covers using psychology to pick up women, but it covers all aspects of human interactions.
One of the aspects of interaction he talks bout is frame. Frame is how you subconsciously broadcast your interpretation of the relationship between you and others. It affects how those around you approach what you say. ie, if I argue with you like I need your approal, and like I am desperate to make my case, becasue it might not be beleivable, you will get suspicious, and cautious. I want something from you (approval), and you will be careful in giving it out.
But if I subconsciously give off the vibe that I’m not invested in what you think, and my case is so airtight I don’t care if you grasp it completely, you view our interaction differently. Done right, you will at least think I beleive what I am saying, and you may even view me as an expert, and file away what I am saying as authoritative.
On socially Conservative issues, you need a frame where social Conservatism is a normal, considerate psychology, and a mark of the loyalty and decency needed to be a part of the group. The truth is, it is. Promiscuous girls are untrustworthy, and only an idiot would marry one. SIngle moms are screwing over their kids with low-investment single-parenting - the only people they should be loyal to, and they raise them in an inferior manner. Gay parents? Really?
Bringing up religion is actually counter productive to reaching the non-religious, and it just gives a Lib the ability to out-group you, by making your religion into a social wedge between you and the non-religious.
But we all value social Conservatism, deep down, because it is necessary to a functioning, decent society, and becasue it arises for the deeper K-selected nature of our species’ psychology. You just have to make the Liberal’s opposition to it a mark of their abberance, and a measure of how they don’t belong to our group (America).
It’s all the frame you approach it with.
I agree wholeheartedly, especially about Breitbart. The thing is, our ideology is based on the psychology of our species. I’m spending a huge chunk of my free time now trying to explain this in simple terms (see my profile).
If a candidate understands r/K theory, he has, right in front of him, a simple means to guide him in pointing out the aberrance of the Liberal position, as well as to see the exact reason it is aberrant. Moreover, humans, as overall K-selected psychologies are programmed to respond to this by turning on the aberrant and selfish.
And the thing with Liberal psychologies is, they are all dedicated to social maneuvering. So if you have an easy way to make embracing Liberalism socially demoting (as r/K Theory does innately), then Liberals will retreat from the discourse. It’s how they are programmed.
It’s easy to program the masses to reject Liberalism, if you just understand the reason Conservatism and Liberalism exist in the first place. Liberalism is unnatural for us.
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