Conservatives Declare War on Karl Rove http://www.businessinsider.com/karl-rove-gop-money-civil-war-republicans-2012-11 Republicans we spoke to this week voiced a near-universal disgust with the national Republican Party leaders and Washington political class, who are seen as having put personal financial interest above winning the election. As this internecine struggle gathers steam, the first target appears to be Karl Rove, the former Bush campaign mastermind who has dictated much of the GOP's strategy over the past decade. In the wake of the party's 2012 losses, Rove and his well-funded American Crossroads super PAC have become a symbol of misguided Establishment strategy, party cronyism, and Beltway bloat. Rove's fall from grace is perhaps unsurprising, given his group's disastrous performance this cycle. According to a new report, American Crossroads got a mere 1% return on its $104 million investment in 2012 races. For social conservatives, the treason began long before election day, when Rove led the party's tar-and-feathering of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, after Akin's now infamous "legitimate rape" comments. The GOP's perceived betrayal of Akin confirmed what many grassroots conservative activists had long suspected: That the Republican Establishment was willing to throw the base under the bus to serve the interests of deep-pocketed donors. I thought it might be interesting to have a thread to keep up with how the GOP is reshaping itself over the next election cycle, post articles and thoughts, etc. It really amazes me how wholly the Republican Party has acknowledged its failure in this latest election. Sure there are always people who blame someone for a loss every election, but by-and-large they all agree that the party itself has severely fractured: the Grand Old Party constituency vs. the Tea Party vs. the libertarian wing. What caused it? My simplistic guess is twofold: the policies towards war and security post-9/11, and the extremism surrounding social values. Over the last 50+ years, Republicans have generally been the hawkish party: Soviet containment, expanding the military, large-scale war efforts, etc.; but the large increase in this over the last decade, so that now we're invading our own citizens' privacy and engaging in wars-without-end based on false pretenses, wink-and-nudge citizen militias "patrolling" our borders, and comparing upcoming internet legislation to China has even begun to concern a formerly loyal Republican base. On the social side, Republicans have always been the party of rules: anti-drug, anti-rap music, pro-life, anti-gay, and so on. But now to start calling rape-babies a blessing from God, having funerals for miscarriages, condemning gays as second-class citizens, policemen beating protesters in the streets... it's become so repugnant that again even nominal conservatives notably those of the small-L libertarian (fiscally-conservative socially-liberal) bent turn out for other parties including the Democrats as the only way to balance how far to the right these leaders seem to have gone. And now, for the party leadership (as discussed in that article), it all finally comes clear: the people running the show don't actually give any of the fucks concerning policy. It's about bringing in dollars and self-aggrandizment. I mean OK, everyone "knew that" before, but now even party leadership is acknowledging that about other leaders. Even their lock-step voting in the legislature is coming under fire as people remember they have constituencies besides just staying on the same side of the aisle. Where will this drive the party? Will it fracture into separate parties or will it reinvent itself with a new message? If the GOP moves back towards smaller government fiscal issues and centrist social issues, will that bring back votes? Are they just done?
What's your basis for this? I haven't seen anything on the right on this other than "we need more of that to stop Terrorists!"
Ehhh, I don't know if I'd call it "acknowledging its failure" as such, given the extent to which scapegoating and bromide-proscribing have been the main intra-GOP "reform topics" thus far. See for example the disability treaty non-ratification that just happened in the Senate - a treaty negotiated under G.H.W. Bush to bring international standards up to the level of the US disabilities act? Nope, the actual, non-soul-searching, totally-fine-with-itself GOP knows it's really a UN world domination conspiracy. Charles Pierce brings the goodies as usual.
Bah, I was just about to start a separate thread on this, but I think you're right insofar as it aptly demonstrates the up is down "lesson" that the Republicans seem convinced explains their electoral defeat: " we needed MOAR AKINS!"
Yeah, double down on Akins. That's gonna work out for the GOP. It's just not possible that there's something distasteful about their reverse Robin Hood policies.
They know they legitimiately lost, unlike 2008, which they could wave away as a one off. It's pretty clear the same old just can't produce even Bush 2004 squeaker victories for them anymore. As to any fracturing, I don't think there is one. As long as you're winning, almost any division can be papered over; as soon as you start losing, the knives come out. The right-of-center party in most industrial democracies is a combination of rural, traditional values types, the dominant ethnic group, small businessmen, and the very rich. Think of it as the "likes traditional authority and hierarchy" party on top of whatever the median voter is. Their chief problem is the decline of "majority ethnic group"; there just aren't enough rich people and social conservatives to win elections without white ethnocentrism on top. The party is so top-to-bottom defined by that, however, with a regional base in the deep South and substantial control of leadership positions, that they're going to have a hard time adjusting there. As a secondary problem, I think the rich people dictate terms to the GOP in a way really without parallel in the developed world, which weakens their coalition due to how extreme it is. Libertarians basically don't exist outside of the US; the ones in the US wouldn't exist without the firehose of money that Koch and the like have unleashed over the years. So there's this huge bubble in fuedal-anarchist economics that looks unsustainable without the white thing to win elections.
Wait, what? Seriously, we know the last part (they're willing to throw the base under the bus for the rich. See every fiscal or regulatory policy in the last 20 years or so), but AKIN? Akin was thrown under the bus because he said something offensively stupid when the party was already fighting off the completely valid feeling from Women that the GOP thinks they aren't actually people. His rape comments weren't defensible from a Social Conservative standpoint, because they were fundamentally based on biological bullshit. He could say "no abortion, EVER, it's a child!" and be defended by Social Conservatives. What he said was that the human body can't give birth in the case of rape, which is not a social conservative position or even a thinking human position. Anywho, in order to become a new more acceptable GOP that wins frequent elections, they'd need to have a very visible shift and actively purge anyone not going along with it. And since they've based their party on faith in ideals, I don't know how they can make a sudden shift without collapsing. All their current plans are trying to shift everyone else to their way of thinking, but you can't appeal to a minority's social conservative views if your party's open secret is that you'd really like it if they'd fuck right off due to their ethnicity.
You'd be surprised how many of the fringe social conservative types believe something very close to Akin.
History tells us that many politicians are really just political opportunists. Mussolini was practically a declared communist before he realized fascism was the train to ride in post-WW1 Italy. So much of what we are seeing is the opportunists realizing what they have to jettison to win again. And as Geraldo Rivera, of all people, pointed out right after the election, the Republican's will not likely win another presidential election unless they identifiy a major minority group and redefine themselves in a way that appeals to that group. And US history reinforces this, because our political parties are more then willing to redefine themselves when they see things changing. The Democrats had to redefine themselves after the Civil War, for example. It will be the latino's the Republicans appeal to, in the end, because that is the best fit for their conservative values and because Republican's in southern states (other then California) have managed to make it work. All they have to give up is the anti-immigrant rhetoric.
shift6: As far as there is a reinvention of the GOP happening, it's mostly just the typical circular firing squad you see after losing an election. Tellingly, it's taken for granted that conservatism as an ideology doesn't need any changing, it's either the salespitch (appeal more to minorities) or the personalities (get rid of Karl Rove) that have to change. See, e.g., a month ago Bobby Jindal in Politico said we should "end dumbed-down conservatism." That's all well and good as a phrase, but when it comes time for him to propose specifics, it's the same as usual: balanced budget, 18% GDP spending cap, 2/3 majority for tax hikes, and term limits. As Dave Weigel points out, not only are these ancient conservative ideas (most date back to the seventies), they are bad, dumbed-down ideas. So basically I reject the idea that any kind of GOP reinvention is happening, at least not a substantive reinvention. The Democrats pulled such a reinvention in the 1980s and 1990s (and arguably during the early part of the 20th century). The Republican party right now is showing no signs of any such change.
They can't show signs of change because the entire basis for their political structure relies on static truths regardless of the situation on the ground. Tax Cuts = ALWAYS good. Social Spending = ALWAYS bad. Balanced Budget = ALWAYS important. You cannot redefine if you've previously defined your stances as static pillars of belief. Someone's going to have to proverbially nail a new conservative manifesto to some doors here to get anything to change.
Meh, they'll change eventually. Getting your ass whipped for a few cycles tends to do that. We're just not at that point yet, courtesy of the 2010 midterms.
Yeah I think those will be a big determinant of where the GOP goes from here. If they can pick up seats they'll continue with what they've been doing. If they lose seats (and then lose in 2016) I can see a world where sanity reasserts itself. The CW is that the 2014 midterms favor the GOP because they're midterms, but I don't know how much that will hold. The 2010 House election was rather strange (Democrats actually won more votes for House candidates than the GOP did; only districting saved the GOP). I don't know if that situation is stable. I do know that Democrats need to not fuck off and skip the midterms like we did last time, though. :(
I suppose, then, the OP largely reflects me making a prediction based on my view of current events. For example, I truly feel that the three big groups*: Tea Party, small-L libertarians, old school GOP, are not going to come back together into a single cohesive unit but will stay fractured. Sure, they might agree on a few things, but my guess is they're done with. *which I have arbitrarily created based on my own observations One for instance on this would be this article I found today on CNN: GOP senator backs tax rate hike on wealthy In a significant development in the fiscal cliff standoff, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a leading deficit hawk, said Wednesday he would support higher tax rates on wealthier Americans as part of a broader deal with President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats to avoid the crisis.Another would be this brief statement/prediction by George Stephanopolous Stephanopoulos Predicts Possible Civil War Among Republicans DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: So give me your bottom line on the Republicans now. We talked about the soul-searching, what do they do next?GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Soul-searching, perhaps a civil war. You've got to look at this party right now. They have won the popular vote only once since 1988, in the presidential race. And it was probably best summed up by Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union (ACU). He said the party is too old, too white and too male. They lost young women, single women by almost 40 points, Hispanics by almost 40 points, blacks by more than 80 points. This is a party that has to create a much bigger tent. So naturally, I could be way off the mark. There just seems to be alot more talk than normal though; like Jason mentioned this is way beyond the regular finger pointing because the recent defeat was so clear in terms of the popular vote. I assume your question was addressed to my final statement that formerly loyal Repubs are beginning to question the hawkishness. Once again this is just an impression based on what I've come across, but coupled with high profile "betrayals" of right-wing ideals by military leaders in the last few years such as Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, and David Petraeus (notwithstanding month-old sex scandals), the big news to me on this front has been Republican leaders' willingness to cut the DoD's budget, which is practically unheard of by the right wing in the last few decades. They had also made big statements against SOPA/PIPA though those were later "erased" and we're still trying to figure out by whom and why; the main point being that fractures and changes in thinking are seriously growing. Then there is the general trend of GOP leaders distancing themselves from the invasion of Iraq and other Bush 2 policies (these stories are coming up now that people are asking: what about Jeb?) Anyway, that's not to say the highly visible wingers aren't still beating their various drums. See numerous "think tanks" or Fox News recently getting called out on continuing to go on and on about Benghazi when everyone else is being reasonable. Further, with the chairing of the House Subcommitee on Science now going to gasbag Lamar Smith, I believe the wedge still has further to be driven in to solidify this fracturing; so I don't think it's over yet. I'm just kind of thinking out loud I guess.
Akins wasn't thrown under the bus. He got on his fucking motorcycle, gunned the engine, accelerated for a full mile before slamming into the front of the bus.
I can see the current Republican coalition fracturing, but I can't see any serious reform in the near-term because the people who vote like the positions currently held by the party. No one who deviates from current conservative orthodoxy is going to make it out of a primary for at least another two election cycles. 1. How is California a southern state? 2. Please tell me you are making a joke when you say all they have to give up is the anti-immigration rhetoric. Because, there's little evidence they really want to, there's no evidence that they can, and even if they do, changing the rhetoric isn't enough -- they have to change positions on issues important to latinos and they can't do that without losing most of the voters they currently have. 3. Apostrophes used with plurals really get under my skin.
They also don't just have a latino problem. They have an *every minority* problem, a women problem, and an age problem. It's also not helping when you run around post election and yell about how it's okay, because you won White Males!
Yeah this is a really frustrating and dismissive attitude. Guess what: latinos care about things other than anti-immigration, because white males aren't the only group who don't vote solely on one issue that affects the group. Also, latinos aren't a cohesive group, for reasons that are obvious if you think about it.
Well, Perry won 40% of the Hispanic vote running for re-election. They don't need to win outright, just not get slaughtered.
Naw, they just need to find a Latina candidate who otherwise has all the regular conservative Republican talking points - but can say them in Spanish while looking good. In Republican-land people vote based on tribe rather than policy, after all.
That's exactly why the Republican Party has some hope of peeling off a larger slice of Latinos. If the party can just stop shitting their pants with racist angst long enough not to drive off the whole lot, there are plenty of Latinos who will happily vote against their own interests in solidarity with their white brethren. Immigration has been their biggest challenge in this regard because whether or not any particular Joe Blow Latino cares about it as an issue, the GOP responds to it time and again with enough blatant racism as to become a deterrent to increasing their non-white membership. Sure, if the GOP were going to make a deep and heartfelt attempt to rectify their ingrained racism they would need a betterapproach. However, I've not seen that GOP around here. If they want to scrape off just enough Latinos to keep their white majority relevant for another election cycle or two, they may do so by just lowering the volume on certain issues and making a sustained PR effort toward Latinos.
Geographically speaking, it is southern. It's also a state with a large latino community. You make it sound like Republican candidates have never had success with the latino community. I'm not saying they are some monolithic block, but as recently as 2004 bad old Bush II got something like 44% of the latino vote (up from 35% in 2000). Romney got 27%, by comparison. Jeb Bush got 61% of the latino vote in Florida in 1998. And so on. I don't see any other major issues with these guys that account for the difference other then that they didn't support the national Republican party line on immigration. If you have some better explanation for their success, then I'd like to hear it. Otherwise it seems to support my contention (and a lot of others have made this argument since the re-election of Obama) that simply changing their position on this one issue would significantly help Republicans improve the "demographics problem." I've referenced it before, but this Geraldo Rivera commentary published by Fox right after the election nicely encapsulates the issue.
All the GOP has to do to become competitive again is stop pissing on woman and minorities. Some Republicanr politicians (plenty of them?) are racist enough to have trouble making such a switch, but overall the GOP's core focus is on money for rich people and they're nothing if not pragmatic. I bet they'll quickly shed such baggage now that it seems to be hurting them politically, as most of them were only on board with it for reasons of "ends justify the means" political expediency in the first place. Perhaps I'm too cynical in believing that mere lip service to women and minorities will be enough to put them back in the running and they'd also have to actually change their economic policy to match... We'll see. At the very least I suspect that's a harder change for them to make.
I still don't agree that changing their position would be simple. First, it won't be easy for them to do since there will be a lot of resistance from a significant portion of the party. Second, at this point I think changing thier postion isn't going to be enough. Maybe it would have worked in 2008. But what had happened in the intervening years will require a lot of effort to undo and have arguably lost Republicans the latino vote for a generation.
It doesn't seem to be hurting the Republican's in states with significant latino populations like Florida and Texas. So it all depends on the candidate. Latino voters are smart enough to realize that there are Republican's who have not embraced the extreme positions.
I don't think you understand what defines The South as The South. California is not a "southern state."
I think Republicans could actually last on social issues (namely anti-gay, anti-abortion) if they were able to appeal to Latinos, since that bloc tends to be socially conservative (in other words, devout Catholic). And that is a scary thought. Also I'm having a really hard time finding any meaningful population data on Hispanics and Latinos beyond generic census crap (age, median income, nation of origin) and which candidates they voted for. I'd like to see which issues, other than immigration, they actually care about and which policies they support or oppose, rather than candidates.
That's the thing, though - that's the mindset a lot of folks clearly have in the ranks of the party, or at least the ones who make statements to the press. As far as they're concerned, white males are the only "rational, issues voters" and every other demographic votes solely on one single issue that personally affects them, so all the republicans have to do is figure out the proper way to pander to that issue, and they'll win the day. That's really the mindset. And they have absolutely no concept of how fucking offensive and patronizing that attitude is - which is why they don't even make a token effort at hiding it. They don't get why it's a problem! It's amazing.
I'd be interested in a proper exmaination of differences in latino voting patterns in different races, with Florida being the most interesting case. My guess is that turnout plays a big role. Democrats won statewide races in 2008 (Obama) and 2012 (Obama and Nelson) while Republicans won in 2010 (Scott and Rubio). And I can't discount the possiblity that Rubio had latino coattails that helped Scott. In any event, I just think there is a lot of inertia at work here and it's all going in the wrong direction for Republicans. Young latinos are forming voting habits that will last them their entire lives in many cases. And at the other end, rural white Republicans who make up most of the primary voters have been convinced that "illegals" are the reason they can't find work at a decent pay (or at all). Neither of these can be reversed easily, and I see no evidence that the party is doing more than trying to paper over the cracks by finding the right lip service to use to pander to latinos.
If you look at my original post, you'll see that I didn't refer to California as "The South" but merely as a "southern state" which it geographically is. Like all "southern" states it has a large latino population, by virtue of its proximity to the Mexican border. It's not my fault you can't distinguish between the "south" and the "South."
It seems to me that the real mindset in the GOP is that white males, and republican voters in general, are a bunch of bigoted idiots who'll vote for any retarded platform as long as it will damage women and minorities slightly more than it will damage them directly. See for example Obamacare, the fiscal cliff, military spending, right to work laws... If republicans had any semblance of respect for their electorate, and trusted them to vote in their rational self interest, those wouldn't even be controversies.
What the tea party cost the GOP http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/18/opinion/zelizer-tea-party/index.html?hpt=hp_t3 Back in 2010, the conservative columnist and CNN contributor David Frum was worried about what he saw in his own party. Frum, who had worked as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, feared that Republicans would be tempted by tea party Republicans to shift far to the right to achieve short-term electoral gains that would cost the party in the long run."A party must champion the values of the voters it already has," Frum wrote, then warning, "But it must also speak to the votes it still needs to win."For several years, the tea party helped energize a moribund Republican Party. After the 2008 election, with conservatives reeling from the dismal approval ratings of Bush and the defeat of John McCain, tea party activists injected some life into the Republican grass roots, bringing out voters in the primaries who were frustrated with the political status quo.They pushed the GOP to focus more on the issue of deficit reduction and government spending, while creating immense pressure on the congressional leadership to avoid compromises. The midterm elections of 2010 put President Barack Obama on the defensive and constrained him for much of his first term.But Frum was right about the long run. The tea party has extracted some very high costs from the party from which it will be difficult to recover. The most immediate cost was control of the Senate. In 2010 and 2012, tea party activists knocked out some powerful Republican candidates who probably would have been victorious and improved the chances for the party to win a majority in the Senate. [...]Finally, the tea party is making it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win over hugely important voting blocs that can play a major role in 2016 and 2020.In 2012, the Republicans paid dearly among Latino voters for the rising power of hard-line anti-immigration advocates. The tea party helped to drown out voices such as those of Bush who believed the party needed to broaden its appeal and reach out to new constituencies, not shrink its electoral map. They have also turned off many younger millennial voters, another key constituency finding less to like about the Republican Party.All of these point to the ways in which the embrace of the tea party has taken its toll on the Republicans. Recently, observing the losses that resulted from tea party candidates, Frum asked: "Have we learned our lesson yet?"
That's a pretty irritating article, shift. The author is kind of an idiot. We don't know yet if Frum was right about the long run; we haven't entered it. It's only 2 fucking years since that comment. That's not "the long run". Throughout the article, the author indicates that he agrees with Frum, and he approvingly quotes Frum here. And the lesson that Frum is talking about is that embracing the tea party extremism is electoral poison. That may or may not be the case, only the (true) long term will tell. But that shouldn't be the primary thought about the past couple Republican defeats. The idea shouldn't be "how can we triangulate to win back power". It should be "Holy shit we are monsters, what we are advocating is evil." You adopt positions because they're the right thing to do, not because you win elections with them. If the tea party is electoral poison, but they're morally right, stick with it. It doesn't matter if the country kicks you out of power; if the country chooses to go insane, that's its problem. That's what I said during the bush years when this country regularly embraced some horrible things, and I got angry at the Democrats' waffling and triangulating. Such tactics are no better when "sane" Republican voices are arguing the same thing. It doesn't matter that their triangulating leads, in this case, to more palatable positions.
That's fantastic advice for getting nowhere in the political process and handing the reins to the folks who do adopt positions that win elections and then proceed to shit the bed repeatedly. On the other hand... RONPAULRONPAULRONPAULRONPAULRONPAUL!
