Who could have seen that coming?
Posted on 03/14/2014 1:15:19 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Via WaPo, compare and contrast. Here’s Mitch Daniels four years ago:
Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”
And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state.
Lots of righties took that as a sign that social conservatism would be a conspicuously low priority for President Daniels. Now here’s Rand Paul last week:
[Q:] Right. But it seems what they’re saying is that the Republican Party should stay out of issues like gay marriage.
[A:] I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues. The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues.
Daniels wasn’t calling a truce for electoral reasons, and he wasn’t calling it on behalf of the GOP specifically. Both parties would have no choice but to place social issues on the policy backburner, he argued, because dealing with the national debt before it reached critical mass would consume political energies. (In a sane world, perhaps, but alas, not in this one.) Paul really is making an explicit electoral argument, though. If you want to win, you’d better make room for people who support gay marriage. That’s more radical than Daniels’s position because Daniels’s truce in theory would lift once the country had been set on a more sustainable fiscal course. Paul’s truce wouldn’t. In order to steer the party back towards social conservatism, you’d need to show him that doing so would grow the GOP faster than a more pluralistic approach to social policy would. Good luck convincing a libertarian of that.
True blue social cons like Huckabee and Santorum will have field day with this next year. Social conservatives like Rubio or Ted Cruz, whose political brand is broader-spectrum conservatism and who themselves take a federalist approach to gay marriage, will tread more lightly. Paul’s got some cover on it from the fact that he’s personally pro-life and supports traditional marriage, but then again so was Daniels and that didn’t help him much. I think it all depends on which issues, specifically, he thinks there’s room for disagreement on and how much room there is. Gay marriage isn’t abortion; marijuana legalization isn’t gun rights. As long as Paul holds the line on the party’s truest cultural litmus tests, he’ll probably get some slack on the rest. But that’s what I mean in asking how much room there is: What would it mean to “hold the line”? Would Paul be willing to choose a vice president who supports legalizing gay marriage and marijuana? What about one who’s pro-choice and supports an assault weapons ban? The problem with “truce” statements, especially in the context of making the tent bigger, is that it’s never clear how much bigger the pol in question would be willing to make it. We’ll find out next year.
Amnesty will bankrupt the country
Promoting the most evil to lead the U.S. is an act of tyranny.
Some do it by claiming to be superior beings. What a shame.
His ideas will lose more votes than it gains
What does that mean?
Is that affirmation that you want conservatives and conservatism out of politics?
By the way, I have missed that. Right now Cruz and Palin are up and we are looking to do as well in 2014 as our historical gains in 2010.
On January 22, thousands gathered on the National Mall in Washington for the annual March for Life that takes place on the date that Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court.
The same week, the Republican National Committee decided that it was time for the national party to wade back into the pro-life waters after a perceived hiatus from using it as a platform issue. A “Resolution on Republican Pro-Life Strategy” formally re-established abortion as a 2014 election issue for the party and seeks to push back on the “war on women” rhetoric that Democrats have made synonymous with the pro-life movement.
The RNC clearly believes once again that a prominent pro-life position plays well with voters. Perhaps the national party has taken note of what’s happening at the state level. Twenty-four states enacted 53 anti-abortion measures in 2013 alone.
Research from the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute shows that in the last three years, states have enacted an unprecedented 205 different abortion restrictions. This was made possible by the fact that over half of the states in the union have pro-life governors and pro-life majorities in their legislatures.
Who could have seen that coming?
Even easier, just change your registration to democratic party.
Paul is right on most domestic issues, wrong on most foreign ones. Cruz is a better choice, but anybody is better than Hillary.
Hush your mouf! There's still a truckload of FReepers who would call such observance of reality heresy. I'm not sure if they're really as foolish as they sound to me or if they have terminal tunnel-vision. Either way, their "principles" are likely to give us Hillary to continue Obama's work with her own special twist-it-in-our-backs agenda.
I wish I was wrong--but you show me where social conservatism sells.
Maybe in the largely and predominately Mormon area where I actually do live--you know cause I am a closet liberal for pointing out the terminal condition of our society.
Every where it is tried, which hasn't been done in so long I can't remember anyone that tried other than Reagan and he was not uninfluenced by his Hollywood roots. No Fault Divorce comes to mind.
Where? I see families all around me with kids from a myriad of different parents (blended families are ALL the rage), drug use is off the charts, marijuana is being legalized all across the country, if you are even remotely a traditional marriage supporter you are instantly labelled a hater and bigot, the frikking Pope is now a cultural Marxist, roving bands of feral youth terrorize the cities, Sandra Fluke tells us we need to pay for her 5k a year in birth control and no one bats an eye—in fact, to argue any other point you are considered at “War with Women”, we actually have moonbats on the left arguing for after birth infanticide (far fetched for now —but then gay marriage was far fetched just 15 years ago)-But, no, yeah I completely see this populace as open to the ideas of social conservatism. This country is NOT the country of the 80s and Reagan. Hell, it isn’t even near the country of the 90’s and Clinton.
I agree, this country is hardly recognizable anymore.
I will remind you that Paul has been quite vocal about his pro-life beliefs. And you evidently missed my point which was that Cruz is shying away from social issues.
FReepers are assuming he will advocate socially conservative policies -- but they don't know that. He may well in the end, but it's foolish to criticize Rand all the while praising Cruz without knowing Cruz's position.
People here tend to jump on one candidate after the other making judgements with incomplete information.
Rand Paul, like his dad Ron Paul, and the other libertarian eggheads need to understand that many of us Christian Conservatives are no longer going to be their plantation slaves to lead around by our collective noses. Those days are long gone, at least for this CC.
This article is no surprise about the turn coat Randy Paul. He has been sending this signal for a very long time now. There is no way I'd consider him for President, maybe as a VP to help secure the moderate R's, but not for POTUS. He is deceitful and untrustworthy, IMHO. Oh, and he supports Amnesty.
Agree with the gist of your message.
When Rand Paul said he wants the government out of marriage that told me where he was going with marriage.
I think you meant to say 'is already'
You don’t seem to understand, Paul just formally came out against social conservatism, he clearly has started his argument that the GOP move left.
He is firm here, we are to yield.
“”I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues. The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues.””
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