Posted on 11/11/2013 4:09:37 AM PST by Kaslin
Politics is in the eye of the beholder.
Post-mortems now gushing forth about why Ken Cuccinelli, conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd, tell us more about who produces this punditry than what reality actually might be.
We’re hearing that the Tea Party killed Cuccinelli (according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page they “stabbed him in the back”) with the government shutdown and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can’t win the votes of women.
What I see is very different. What I see is a Republican Party that still has not learned the necessary lessons to reverse setbacks of recent years.
It was not the Tea Party that stabbed Ken Cuccinelli in the back but the establishment of his own party. Once a real conservative candidate gets nominated, the party loses interest. And because they lose interest, they hold back funds, thus assuring their own prediction that this candidate can’t win.
Cuccinelli lagged in total funding by $14 million. In the early months of the campaign, because of lack of funding, he was brutally attacked in ads that went unanswered.
Regarding the shutdown – supposedly of disproportionate impact because so many Northern Virginians work for the federal government – Cuccinelli was well behind in the polls for months before the shutdown even occurred. Again, largely because of unanswered attack ads.
The Republican establishment can’t seem to grasp that they would have helped their cause by embracing the de-fund ObamaCare efforts of Tea Partiers Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
Every day Americans see more clearly what a disaster ObamaCare – the Affordable Care Act – is. If Republican leadership would have unified clearly around the efforts of Cruz and Lee, and the American people got a clear picture of Republican unity and commitment to slay the ObamaCare monster, it would have helped the party and Cuccinelli.
It is also clear that Republicans still haven’t gotten the message about race and the changing demographics of the country.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2012 while winning just 38 percent of the white vote, Republicans supposedly learned something.
Those lessons appear to have been lost in Virginia.
Virginia has a large black population, 50 percent higher than the national average. Terry McAuliffe got 90% of the black vote, as did Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia in 2009.
The difference is that in this election blacks constituted 20 percent of the overall vote, up four points from 16 percent in 2009. So the impact of the black vote grew in 2013.
That increase of four points of the black vote as a percentage of the total vote could have made the difference alone, given that Cuccinelli lost by 2.5 points.
The Republican candidate for Lt. Governor was a no-nonsense black pastor, graduate of Harvard Law School, E.W. Jackson.
This would have been a classic opportunity for the Republican Party to aggressively visit black churches, talk about the conservative religious values that these black Americans care so dearly about, and explain the deep damage that welfare state policies and secular humanism embraced by Democrats has done in black communities. Where were they?
Then there is the claim that conservative candidates can’t attract women.
Not true. It’s not about gender but about marriage.
Cuccinelli captured the votes of both married men (50 percent) and married women (51 percent). It was the unmarried vote that McAuliffe captured (51 percent single men, 67 percent single women).
Republicans have not failed in recent years as result of being too bold or too conservative.
They have failed due to lack of clarity, conviction and courage.
The defeat of Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia is not an encouraging sign that Republicans have learned their lessons.
For most African Americans, the TEA party is the same as the KKK. That is what people see on TV, and hear from their leaders.
Until the TEA party can lose that perception, it will be a hard path to win over many minorities.
The GOP is THE party of Romney, RomneyCARE, gay marriage,
conservative-backstabbing, supporting al Qaeda,
and utterly ignoring its constituents.
They exist only to steal money from true conservatives.
Unfortunately for us, I think the Republican Party has no intention of ever supporting conservative candidates and that's the lesson for us.
um... Cuccinelli lost because there was a strong libertarian on the ballot taking votes from him.
Nearly every vote for the libertarian would of gone to Cuccinelli
Of course the Clinton candidate got the Slut Vote.
Time for Americans to take America back.
This crap has been going on for years in NJ which is why Lonegan lost also.
The solution is not a third party. We outnumber them which is why we keep nominating conservatives. We need to take over the GOP and kick out McCain, Graham, Cantor, Cornyn, McConnell, Boehner, and every OTHER RINO
bastard. Its OUR party and OUR country.
All you need to know right there.
The black vote isn’t worth it. The amount of time and money spent to educate and deprogram to get small percentage of the black vote would be foolish. Spend millions to get the black vote fro 95% -> 92% fools errand.
Mcauliffe won with the racist Black vote and the Ignorant Slut vote. VA must be very proud that these voters are so influential in their state.
George Washington is rolling in his grave.
Shutting down the government is always a bad idea. It was a set up by Obama/Jarrett. The public hates them. It did probably cost Cuccineli a couple of points and even Mike Lee is trying to back say from it.
Did Chris Christie campaign for Cuccinelli in VA?
Did Chris Christie campaign for Lonergan in NJ?
Did Chris Christie’s reelection change the composition of the NJ legislature?
Did Chris Christie appoint Judge Napolatano (for example) to fill the unexpired term for U.S. Senate to the end of 2014?
Did Chris Christie schedule the special election for the day of the General Election where his coat tails should have helped the remainder of the Republican line?
THE ANSWER IS THE SAME FOR ALL THE QUESTIONS = NO!
He appears to be very comfortable with another, no record of consequence Democrap, representing NJ in the U.S. Senate and possibly the Democrap candidate for Hillary!
Star Parker.
She goes on the list of “People Who Get It.”
You got that right
And where did the money not spent on him go? It goes to support “moderate” Republicans that are just Democrat look-alikes. And where does this money come from? From people who still send checks to the GOPe. (Shame on you if you do).
She sure does
That's all true, and it forecasts a split.
But there's more, and that has to do with the very definition of "conservative".
A brief detour:
About seven years ago, I became chairman of a Christian school that had, unlike a lot of area Christian schools, been able to stay open and to even increase enrollment. My own background is, shall we say, eclectic, but I confess the trinitarian God, the virgin birth, the sufficiency of the sacrifice of the Lamb, the authority of scripture, etc, etc.
Well.
I soon learned that the world that was sufficiently self-identified as "Christian" to shell out $$ for their children's education held no common meaning of the adjective, and that, furthermore, there were many factions, sometimes consisting of only 20-30 people, who held that THEY were the only "Christians" and that everyone else, whose support, encouragement, money, and time were vitally needed to make the enterprise function would have to be put outside the camp, "or else". In all my years of attending many different kinds of churches, I had honestly never come across this before.
It became almost a parody of the famous "Who is a Jew" question. There are lots of opinions, but a workable definition seems to be "if they make you get in the boxcar going to Auschwitz, then, you are a Jew".
Apologies for the detour.
"Who is a conservative?" There are lots of us, about 40% of the voting population, if surveys are right.
Is there a definition? Not if you listen to our various factions. They are very good at narrowing the circle. They are excellent at figuring out that this one, or that one, is NOT a conservative. And, we do have our differences, about many things.
Here's a definition, and a prediction: You are a conservative if, when in your state or locality you have a chance of winning a GOPe figure describes you as an "extremist". You are a conservative if Karl Rove and the Bush family would prefer that a communist win rather than you. If you want to stay with the GOP, THAT'S your future..
Oh, the end of the Christian school story? I figured it out, make the splitters unwelcome, and it turned out that they were expendable, while the vast majority were happy to stay once the splitters were gone. A lesson, maybe, for the movement.
Tea Party in VA did bolo. They used party rules to hold a convention to select a candidate vs a primary. That pissed off the establishment because the convention shut them out. Caused bad feelings. Ironically Rove and company want to propose similar rules to shut out the Tea Party in future primaries. IMHO this internal GOP civil war may cost their ability to win POTUS in 2016 and 2020.
The majority of minorities will always vote demorat regardless. Wise up.
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