The Biggest Lesson the GOP Should Learn from the Election

So what lessons should Republicans learn from the 2012 election? I don’t think anyone other than me has thought to ask this question, as Republicans tend not to be very analytical. But I think the answer is pretty obvious when you look at the failure of their presidential candidate this year and the one in 2008: Republicans need to stop nominating right-wing extremists like John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Obviously, the two most recent Republican presidential candidates were far too extreme to the right to be elected by the American public. They were constantly seen in the company of numerous Republicans and conservatives (one was even seen hanging around Sarah Palin) and often praised them instead of denouncing them. Also, they reveled in the racism of the Republican Party (especially in their racist stance on taxes) and sometimes said positive things about Republicans’ stances on social issues. And worst of all, they were actually opposed to the election and reelection of the first black president and occasionally even criticized him.

So it’s no wonder that so much of the country was absolutely repulsed by these people. By reading any news source like the New York Times, you could see how terrified the average person was of having those extremists elected. If the Republican Party doesn’t want to continue being hated, it needs to finally give up on its right-wing radicalism exemplified by McCain and Romney and plan to have in 2016 a perfect candidate who will not be so offensive to Democrats.

I speak, of course, of the legendary Super Squish. The one the Republican elite speak of in hushed whispers as the prophesied one to lead the party away from extremism. This is the ultimate candidate the Republicans need for 2016.

So what is he like? First off, the Super Squish will not spend a lot of time criticizing Democrats, as he should be far too busy disparaging his own party. I mean, lately, the party has been filled with white people critical of a black man, and this ultimate candidate needs to take on that racism in his own party to show he’s not a part of it. His first campaign speech should be something like, “Shame! Shame on all of you! I am disgusted to be a Republican because radicals have taken over the party and constantly attack the president! Can’t we get over race?” Some tears would be nice, too. And in the rest of his speech he should studiously avoid all the codewords Republicans use for “I hate black people”, such as “cut taxes”, “reduce spending”, and “USA! USA!”

And the Super Squish is someone who doesn’t just automatically reject every idea because it comes from a Democrat. In fact, to show he’s open-minded, he might even embrace some of his opponents’ proposals. Better yet, he might even be a vocal advocate for some of their ideas… or even like them more than Democrats do. If he could get Democrats to say things like, “I do like raising taxes on the rich, but that Republican candidate wants to go too far with it,” that would be perfect.

Furthermore, the Super Squish is someone who won’t lose votes on social issues. He’ll never bring them up, and if Democrats bring them up, he’ll immediately capitulate to what they want to keep those issues from being problems. And maybe he can support them on some things to show he doesn’t agree with those scary religious Republicans. Ideally, he himself will be an abortionist. This would certainly keep women voters from being frightened of the Republican candidate; they love abortions.

Also, the Super Squish will not be another one of those Republicans who mindlessly invoke Ronald Reagan and instead will really chastise the Republican Party’s love for him. He’ll tell Republicans, “Reagan would be ashamed of the Party as it is today. Also, I’m ashamed of Reagan, because he’s not as great as everyone pretends and was actually quite divisive. Yes, everyone likes him now, but they shouldn’t. So let’s never mention him again except to say how ashamed he would be of today’s GOP.”

Similarly, the Super Squish will take on the religious wing of the party that pushes it to extremism. “The only things I believe without question are things that people in white lab coats say,” he’ll lecture the religious nuts. “If Jesus didn’t warn us about climate change, then maybe He wasn’t that great a messiah. So let’s never mention Him again except to say how ashamed He would be of today’s GOP.”

And I guess the Super Squish can support some conservative idea to shore up the base a little… like what’s a really harmless right-wing idea? Balance the budget? No… that implies some severe spending cuts. Anyway, this perfect candidate will have some sort of conservative idea he’ll favor… but he’ll only mention it if a reporter really presses him on why exactly he is a Republican at all. And he’ll be profusely apologetic about it, knowing that mentioning it might hurt the feelings of people who disagree with him.

Finally, this Super Squish will not be a minority or a woman, as it’s highly offensive to them to imply that one of them would actually be a Republican.

So who is this Super Squish? We don’t know yet, but we’d better start looking now. Start with any Republican allowed to speak on MSNBC. And we must have him ready for 2016 before the wingnuts start to rally around another far-right disaster like McCain or Romney. If the Republicans have finally learned their lesson, they’ll embrace the Super Squish, and the Super Squish will in turn keep them at arm’s length so as not to appear too Republicany. And while the Super Squish won’t win the presidency (beating a Democrat is racially insensitive to their numerous coalitions), he’ll run a campaign so inoffensive to the left that they’ll pat us on the back and say, “You ran an honorable campaign, predominantly white people.”

I can't recall any major gaffes by Santorum. All I'm saying is look at the dynamics of that race. Santorum was running against an opponent who carried the name of his very popular late father, who died too young. That means a sympathy vote and an advantage in name recognition. If he were a relatively unknown candidate he would not have that factor in his favor. But because he was Robert Casey Jr., it blunted any advantage in name recognition Santorum may have had from being the incumbent. 2006 was a brutal year for Republicans nationally. It was a ‘Rat tsunami on a national scale that wiped out many ‘Pubs. Finally, PA has been trending ‘Rat for a generation. It had not voted for a ‘Pub presidential candidate since 1988. Frankly I'm surprised Santorum survived as long as he did in that state, which has been (and will be) conquered territory for a long time. Too much union influence, too much fraud.

You already said that and it explained nothing, after 12 years in the senate, Senator Santorum was wiped out, destroyed, humiliated, tarred and feathered, he made it into the books, he wasn’t part of a wave, he was hit by a personal tsunami aimed at him.

Twelve year incumbents don’t get wiped out like that without having blown it badly.

So what did he say exactly to blow it? Did he talk about witches or witchcraft? Did he say anything about "legitimate rape" or some kind of magic uterus that would prevent pregnancy in the event of rape? Did he say anything that would allow a dishonest media to conflate rape and "God's Will"? Did he call anyone a macaca? Did he go overseas and talk about how a friendly nation was unprepared to host an Olympic Games, or about half the country being dependent on government aid?

Actually, what I said explained a lot. It outlined the historical context of the Senate race in PA that year and the kinds of factors that were in play in the overall dynamic. You can blow those off if you want, but you do so at your political peril. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in politics is to ignore the larger picture. Santorum was not running that race in isolation. There were many a good 'Pub candidate that got wiped out in the wave of anti-Republican sentiment whipped up by the media and the 'Rats that year.

“We were 4.5M votes short this year. How do we get the 5M+ we’re going to need in 2016??

Maybe talk about “legitimate rape” some more? That is a big winner with women. Not.

The truth is the opponent nationalized the election, using some remarkably stupid phrases to define the entire party’s slate.

It’s not enough to merely earn more votes than previous. You have to hit a moving target. Population growth has increased in the last four years.

But evangelicals are not increasing as fast as other voting groups. They may actually be declining in absolute numbers due to attrition. For them to vote in record numbers for Mitt Romney is remarkable. Ralph Reed called it 'astonishing'.

Romney’s 78 percent showing among white evangelicals was 10 points higher than Arizona Sen. John McCain’s in 2008. “Evangelicals turned out in record numbers and voted as heavily for Mitt Romney yesterday as they did for George W. Bush in 2004,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of TK-based Faith and Freedom Coalition. “That is an astonishing outcome that few would have predicted even a few months ago.

http://www.newsmax.com/US/romney-evangelical-vote-obama/2012/11/07/id/463268

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Romney turned out the base - big time. Analyses of this election that do not recognize this fact are flawed.

Geez, he was disgraced, he didn’t just lose, he was humiliated, the man was a disaster.

Nobody voted for him, not whites, not men, he had burned everyone, he had burned conservatives, everyone, the people came to despise him, distrust him, dislike him, and they showed it by not voting for him.

You can’t explain away a massive defeat like that without admitting that the candidate had destroyed himself during his 12 years in the office.

The only person that Santorum has never betrayed, or never been disloyal to is Arlen Specter, who he supported in 2004, and AGAIN in 2010, until Specter finally joined the democrats. Santorum was dead set against ever allowing Toomey into the Senate.

“The Biggest Lesson the GOP Should Learn from the Election”

There may be not be any useful “lessons” the GOP can or should learn from the last election.

The country is changing, has changed. It’s not the same as it was even ten years ago. We won’t be going back — at least not any time soon, if ever.

The country is also “dividing” into at least two separate “camps” — the red and the blue. Reconciliation and reunification are all-but impossible, as the two sides are diametrically opposed and either side sees little or nothing in common with the other.

Just as there was an “Era of Good Feeling” in the early nineteenth century, we are now in an “Era of Uncertainty”, where we face a future in which past “solutions” can no longer be applied to new situations. The old, tried-and-true don’t work no’ mo’.

Rough road ahead...

Who, and specifically how, did Santorum "burn" anyone? What exactly does "burn" mean, anyway? How specifically did he "destroy" himself in office? Did he sponsor any unpopular or harmful legislation? Did he support any President who caused harm to the country? Did he fail to support a President in time of national emergency or during wartime, as perhaps during the Iraq war, or after 9/11? Where specifically were the major gaffes in the 2006 campaign? What specifically did he say to get off-message or insult any protected or minority group? Did he make statements about his pro-life position that allowed his words to be twisted into a caricature of their actual meaning, and then spend the rest of the campaign fending off attacks based on that?

The truth is that he got wiped out in a national tidal wave of discontent with almost anyone with an "R" after their name. Look at the history. Santorum won office in '94 in a close race against Harris Wofford, who was basically a dull and vapid candidate. He won in 2000 by a better margin against Ron Klink, but Klink turned a lot of voters off with his abrasive personality. PA was trending 'Rat during this time so it is actually a mild surprise that Santorum was able to shake out these wins. When he came up against a very popular opponent in a tough year in a state whose political leanings had gone against him, he was facing a perfect storm of an election. I'm pretty surprised it wasn't a wider margin. There were many races in 2006 that showed a lot worse blowout than Santorum. One was right here in my state, which is not trending 'Rat as strongly as PA, and in '06 our candidate for Governor got blown out by almost 24 percentage points. Our candidate for Senate got clobbered by 13 points, not as bad as Santorum, but the 'Rat candidate who won was extremely liberal and definitely far to the left of mainstream political opinion in the state. They didn't "burn" anybody, they didn't "betray" anybody, they just got wiped out by the hate-Bush, hate-Republicans, hate-conservatives sentiment whipped up that year.

hey, you are the one trying to defend the indefensible, a 17.5% wipeout of a 12 Senator, don’t put it on me.

Reality is on mine side, you are the one trying to explain why he is such a loser, and why EVERYONE rejected him so overwhelmingly, he was a disaster, that is why is is one of the because losers in history in the Senate, not because he lost by 2 or 3 points.

Maybe his backing the radical Specter so determinedly, so single mindedly, reminded everyone that Santorum had endorsed and supported Specter’s presidential run, calling to remove life from the GOP.

“But evangelicals are not increasing as fast as other voting groups. They may actually be declining in absolute numbers due to attrition. For them to vote in record numbers for Mitt Romney is remarkable. Ralph Reed called it ‘astonishing’.”

Yep, guaranteed Mitt shill.

Look, Mitt failed to take as large a percentage of Evangelicals as McCain. Ergo, he did not draw the base that he needed to win.

I'm just asking for specifics. You said he “burned” people. OK, if so, who exactly and how did he “burn” them? You said he “destroyed” himself in office. I was just asking for examples of how precisely he did that. Generally for some kind of destructive outcome you can point to specific actions that caused the destruction. In the political realm that means either a personal failing such as a scandal or moral turpitude, or some kind of legislative record that is viewed by ones constituency as being at odds with their interests. You said he must have said something wrong to lose by the margin he did. OK, what was that? Can you point to specific gaffes that cost him the race, as we can with the case of George Allen against James Webb, or the Akin disaster in MO, or the Mourdock bumble in IN? I simply provided an alternate explanation of the outcome using political analysis and the history of the national elections that year. I provided parallel examples in other races, wherein there was no “burning” or “destroying”, simply a paroxysmal reaction against any candidate who had been tarred with the dreaded “R” label by the media and the ‘Rats. That isn't “defending the indefensible”, it is trying to see things in their true light, in the context of a wider national picture, and a trend that we ignore at our peril.

Good Lord, with all this waste of time and long posts, you don’t know anything about Santorum?

Do your own research on why after 12 years everyone despised him and dumped him with a massive 17.4% loss.

The first thing you need to do, is quit comparing him with non-incumbents, and get it through your head that he didn’t just “lose”, or get caught up in a bad year, the man was an absolute disaster, who suffered a total, wipeout, a total, massive, universal rejection of him, NOT A MERE LOSS.

Ah, okay, no specifics. Fine. Think what you want. I know the history, and I know the national context of the election that year. The 17% loss in that particular race is perfectly understandable in the overall context of that election year. You can pin some of it on Santorum in the sense that the electorate shifted massively against 'Pubs and the 'Rats presented an attractive, well-known candidate, a dynamic that Santorum had not faced before and was unprepared to deal with effectively. Combine that with the national trend and you have precisely the wipe out that occurred there, and elsewhere, against incumbents and non-incumbents alike (our candidate for Senate here that year was an incumbent, the race for Governor was for an open seat). You need to get it through your head that it was an across-the-board sweep that was difficult to buck.

Anyway, I'm done with this. Think what you want. You can have the last word if that is important to you, I don't care.

Free Trade Communist Globalism does not work.

Well, no, not if the Chinese are buying every job they can find with the sweat and blood of their political prisoners. They use them to benchmark wages, then sweat everybody else mercilessly. PBS, ironically, documented the crap that goes on in Chinese garment factories. Some Sikh guy from India walks in with an order in his pocket from Dickies or Benetton, wanting the Chinese factory owner to deliver in two weeks (!), and all of a sudden Chinese girls are working 60-hour weeks at straight pay (well, they say they pay them, if you can find the pennies in the bottoms of the girls' purses after the boss gets through docking the crap out of them for "work rule violations") and trying to bring in traditional Chinese energy drinks and teas to keep their strength up -- and these are 20-y.o. girls.

The 17% loss in that particular race is perfectly understandable in the overall context of that election year.

You don't understand.

Incumbent senators do not lost by 17.4% in any race, unless they are terribly, terribly, flawed, those numbers get you on the list of historical losses, historical disgraces.

Nobody came close to that in 2006, Santorum stood alone, in a mess of his own creation.

They didn't "burn" anybody, they didn't "betray" anybody, they just got wiped out by the hate-Bush, hate-Republicans, hate-conservatives sentiment whipped up that year.

Something that has bothered me, when I've had time to think about it and made the right dot-connections, is the parallel between the hate-propaganda of today's MSM, which is clearly united in partisanship and clearly managing its message (through the JournoList and conscious parallelism), with the moral propaganda (moral invective can never be countered, because the propagandist can just go on and invent more issues, if he is countered on one point) of the 1830's through the election of 1860 that flowed from Congregationalist and other fundie-Low Church Protestant ("low" in the English ecclesiastical sense) seminaries and churches and the Abolition movement.

The Abolition movement's red-hot, deliberately inflammatory (Uncle Tom's Cabin) propaganda is now being studied by cool minds whose academic specialty is marketing and propaganda in U.S. history. (Some of these scholars are women, which surprised me a bit, since I have tended to think of women as being the special victims of modern hate-America propaganda in its feminist subdivision.)

We all know how things ended the last time the propagandists kept turning up the heat without check, under encouragement (and subvention) by other interests in society, esp. "up East" business interests like John Forbes and Lewis Tappan (yes, that Forbes and that Tappan).

Now it appears the MSM and their Prog/Stalinist political cadres are doing the same thing, possibly with the same end in view, of imposing a mass slaughter on the People of the United States.

Look, Mitt failed to take as large a percentage of Evangelicals as McCain. Ergo, he did not draw the base that he needed to win.

Where are you getting that? McCain got 74% of the evangelical vote, Romney got 78%. They were 26% of the electorate in 2008 and 2012. There were 131.4M total votes in 2008 vs 128M in 2012. That gives McCain 25.3M evangelical votes vs 26.0M for Mcain.

Do you have some numbers that back your claim. If not, then you should concede the point that Romney turned out the base big time.

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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2008-exit-poll
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html

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