njlauren
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Joined: 10/1/2011
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All you had to do was look at Romney's campaign headquarters the night of the election and it tells a big story, the only younger people there were Romney's kids, and it was basically the GOP campaign headquarters circa 1956, they could have been holding up signs that said "I like Ike" and it would fit (except for the fact that despite perceptions, Eisenhower in many ways was 20 times the person Romney could ever hope to be).
The national GOP has turned into the reactionary right party, the type people like William F Buckley and Goldwater called the looney right. It is the anti intellectual/anti education branch (Sarah Palin, anyone), who trumpet the idea that 'us ordinary people' have all the wisdom (put it this way, when I vote for a president, I want someone smarter then I am, with more experience, not Joe the Plumber); It is those crying the government is the enemy, when living off of it (take a look sometime at how much farmers are subsidized, take a look sometime how Mitch Mconnel's district in Kentucky benefits from TVA generated power and federal tax subsidies, ask someone from Alabama why they get back 2 bucks for every dollar they send in, while someone living in NY or NJ sees about 65c on the dollar..and so forth). Then we have the tea party types, who have a real point about the federal budget, deficits, but basically have this crackpot idea that all we need to do is get rid of welfare to 'those people' (i.e inner city black and hispanic 'welfare queens') and the budget will be balanced, without , of course, looking in the mirror at what they get (like the old buzzard at a tea party rally with "no socialized medicine" on one side of a card she was holding, and "government, hands off MY Medicare".....). It also is a party that is telling people that the reason for all our problems is the government, that if we didn't have the EPA, if we didn't have regulations, if we didn't have taxes, why, all these jobs would come back from China (leaving out, of course, just how cheap labor is in China and similar places....and that the rest is a smoke screen). I am reading a wonderful series of fantasy kind of books by Ilona Andrews , and in the last book there is a group similar to the GOP these days, who have recruited fanatics who blame their ills on magic and not being magical (one character says, "you know, not like in the days before magic, where someone would get ahead by hard work and talent....")..and it is the same today, they are telling their base, the mostly rural and farm belt types, blue collar workers, that the problem, rather then a changed world, is that it is because of them....
Problem is, it stops working, you can only ride a wave so far, and the extremism, the saying no to everything, not compromising, is hurting them, other then their core base, they are losing ground on a national scale. The country is not the white male dominated place it once was, yet the GOP is basically riding on enflaming the passions of those who miss it, so for example, instead of coming up with an alternative immigration system to fix the brokenness, we have the GOP represented by people saying "Take back our country"....what the hell does that mean? As a result, they have turned off hispanic and Asian voters, and I don't care if they try a candidate like Rubio, it isn't going to help. In a country where fewer and fewer people are that religious, and where more and more people are educated and exposed to the realities of things like sexuality, the GOP's right wing Christian take on things is turning people off (younger people, those in their 30's and below, are repulsed by the religious right in huge numbers). Independent voters, who respond to messages of fiscal responsibility, are turned off by the dog and pony show and also are turned off by the ignorance and stupidity of the GOP message. The problem is, they have tried being the anti everything, but then when asked for their ideas, don't come up with anything new. For example, the GOP in the last election proposed cutting government spending by massive amounts, but guess what....they didn't even mention things like agricultural price supports (sort of dubious with commodities near record levels), they didn't mention slashing block grants to states, they didn't mention cutting the military (much of which's spending, surprise, surprise, is in red states), they didn't mention cutting back the reason why states down south tend to collect a lot more in government spending then they pay in (Alaska is the queen; about 3 to 1 ratio).
Basically,they are a party that seems to stand against, rather then for, and they have gone so far they don't know how to come back. I saw Rubio's response to Obama's state of the Union, and it is a classic example, he basically spouted the GOP's party line for the past 30 years, that if we cut taxes and government regulation, if we let companies do what they want, anyone can achieve....which flies in the face of what people have seen, even the tea party idiots know that the banks and such screwed up in the lax regulatory environment under Bush . More importantly, they want someone who has a message, not of hate, not of "I want to go back to 1950", they want a message that says "I know you are hurting, here is what we are going to do". In a sense, the GOP kind of went over to the dark side big time, it started about 40 years ago with their 'southern strategy', to get the south to vote GOP by badmouthing the civil rights laws passed in the 60's as "violating individual rights", and continued on, with the anti black 'welfare queen' strategy, and of course with the 'government is the problem' (though as has been said many times, it is funny how a party that wants to get government off our backs wants government to decide whom we can be on our backs to in the bedroom), and they used it as a winning formula for a while, but it has failed, they haven't delivered results to many voters, and despite all the smokescreens, people see through it, they know that the GOP is still the party of the very rich, they see the concentration of wealth in the 1% and the decline in most other people, and for the first time since the Great Depression,less then half the people think their kids will have it better then them, what they see is a reversion to the old days, meaning the 19th century, where the very well off control most of the wealth and income and everyone else is pretty much slaves to them...
The irony is the GOP has a model, but they basically forced it from existence. People like Susan Collins and Olympia Snow from Maine were classic examples, the old northeastern GOP model was the basis for the party, it was fiscally conservative, moderate to libertarian socially, and there were ideas there, whether I agreed or disagreed with them, there was a looking to the future. Wasn't consistent, there were always the crazies, but they weren't in charge. Boehner found that out when he tried to negotiate a fiscal cliff package and the crazies vetoed him, that is unprecedented, even when the GOP wants to act rationally the crazies won't let them, and it is hurting them. Put it this way, where I live in Northern NJ is fairly well off, and the towns and such are almost all run by GOP politicians and it is the traditional GOP type of thing, my town for example is run incredibly well fiscally, we have great services and low taxes, and there is actually thought in what they do, yet we also don't have a town government trying, as one piece of shit evangelical church tried to get them to do, declaring the town 'a bastion of traditional marriage', they did the opposite, and made the town officially welcome to all people, including based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Yet in my county, where the GOP could count on margins as high as 80%, they barely polled half to Romney (and polls indicate if it had been any of the other dwarves, it would have been 30%). 35 years ago NJ was in play, Reagan ran here, but since then, we have elected democratic senators and as a state gone to the Democrats and the same is true in other states in the area. California used to be in play for the GOP, but not any more, and primarily it is because their message has grown so far from what people in these states want, they don't even bother to try.
The problem the GOP has is they are afraid to try and grow a new base, to shift the party, so they cater to the know nothings, they cater to the farm country types (the pseudo populists who at the turn of the 20th century were party of William Jennings Bryan's coalition), the religious right/fundamentalists, and what Mencken used to call the KKK Branch of the Democratic party.
The GOP actually had a candidate who might have beaten Obama, Huntsman at least had some ideas, but fizzled in the primaries...the GOP went through one loser after another, Bachman, Santorum, Gingrich (I loved him saying he was the family values candidate, what a laugh)....I suspect they are going to have a hard time in national elections, until they get rid of the rural power base that represents older, angry whites, and actually comes up with a real message. It doesn't say much when your party head comes from Mississippi as it did for a number of years, and it doesn't say much when your majority leaders all are from one party of the country.
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What is wrong with the GOP from the inside - 
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