First, I am not sure if this is allowed here, if not, just delete it
As one of few Republicans here, I wanted to take the opportunity to outline some of the things I fell are currently wrong with my party, and see what the other side thinks. Anyway, lets begin-
1. Get back to Reagan. People liked him. People don’t like current conservative leaders too much. Why? They can sometimes come off as offensive and mean. They are too critical of Obama, just because he’s a liberal. Even though the other side didn’t always respect our President, that doesn’t mean we can’t respect him.
2. Obama’s school speech. I think it was a great idea. Whats wrong with the President telling kids to stay and school and focus? Nothing. No one had a problem when Reagan and Bush did it, so whats the problem when Obama does it?
3. Infighting. It’s gotten alot better, but when Rush says something critical of you, ignore it. Don’t acknowledge it. Michael Steele, I’m looking at you. Also, when Rush calls your new plan to give the party a new image a Republican party re-branding and calls you out for it, you don’t cancel it. That just makes people think he is the Republican Party’s leader.
And most importantly, when you do get back in power, don’t screw up like you did last time. During the Bush years, you couldn’t tell the difference between a Democrat and Republican. Now that were out of power, suddenly were conservative? No, it don’t work that way. Liberals have always been liberal, when in power, and out. Conservatives don’t just get to be conservative when their out of power. We need to be conservative at all times.
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I’m from California (Orange County, ugh.). But where i’m from, people here really keep to themselves and we know everyone here. The GOP needs to make its conservative message something more appealing, talk about less government INCLUDING social issues, talk about the need for less taxes, reduced spending and letting the states/people, not DOMA decide on Abortion and LGBT issues. Just my $0.002
the current members of the gop AREN’T Conservatives.
They talk a good game about being conservative and they’ll cut taxes because they know its a conservative principal but they still aren’t conservatives.
The current group of gop leaders is socially conservative and thats about it. Ironically, social conservatism is everything it claims to be against.
They’ll cry about states rights but throw states rights out the door when it comes to banning abortion or gay marriage or the environment.
They’ll cry privacy issues yet scream about contraceptives, sodomy (saw a post today on some blog actually about how the anti-sodomy laws in Virginia are good laws that should stay on the books and be enforced), and gays living together.
They’ll go all constitutional on you when it comes to guns, but apparently Freedom of religion don’t count if your athiest or muslim(cause their bad), Freedom of the press only applies to Fox (ironic that the conservative news channel is called fox….fox guarding the henhouse anyone?) or other conservative media applications, Freedom of expression/speech somehow doesn’t cover the act of burning a flag (which this veteran frowns upon), and the act of calling out Rush or Beck as racist isn’t nearly as bad as them calling Obama or Sotomayor racists.
On top of all that, find me one person who would demanding a birth certificate from Obama if he was white.
I’d say the problems with your party, is hypocrisy at its very core and dishonorable, untrustworthy snakes at its leadership. The party of Reagan is only interested in what the power can get them….8 years of Bush proved that. The Bush years are exactly what the Republicans will bring us back to until you get rid of the current crop and find actual conservatives.
Jeff Flake of Arizone for example.
To me, the biggest problem with the Republican Party today is that it’s strayed so far from being the party of liberation, anti-racism, and integration. Barry Goldwater recognized later in life that he had been wrong to oppose civil rights legislation, and moreover, at the time he opposed those landmark laws, Senate Minority Leader – and fellow Republican – C. Everett Dirksen was instrumental in pushing the legislation through Congress. It’s ironic, then, that today’s Republicans are associating themselves with the lowest, most unreconstructed forms of bigotry.
The Republican Party has got to throw off the racist extremists from Limbaugh and Beck on down, and rediscover its roots as a party that stands for liberty. Until it does, I expect it to remain unpopular. But a rump, racist Republican Party is very bad for our country, so I do hope that the Republican Party gets itself out of the gutter as soon as possible.
Far be it from me to give advice to conservatives/Republicans. Lord knows I want you guys to lose. But it’s late, and I have nothing better to do, so what the hell.
It comes down to demographics. America is no longer the white guy’s nation that Reagan conservatism and backlash against civil rights appealed to. We are now a pluralistic society and a majority-minority nation. We will continue to be such, and as time goes on we’re going to become even more diverse. This guy Obama? He’s just the beginning. Thing’s have changed and there’s no going back.
So if the GOP ever wants to come back to power, you’ve got to get comfortable having honest, friendly conversations with people of different races, religions, etc. And yes, that included sexual orientation and gender identity, because these young pups coming of age are more gay friendly than any previous generation and that’s not a trend that will slow down. But being able to talk with them isn’t enough-you also have to get results and that means crafting solutions that work for those diverse communities so they can be integrated into the coalition.
Until you guys can come up with a message that resonates in a pluralistic society-a society that even the good ol’ sunny message of Reagan doesn’t really fit into-you’re not coming back.
Even when being criticized, that’s why he got elected twice. He was the happy warrior conservative type.
To answer question 2 regarding the school speech, it’s because Obama’s black. This is nothing more than another front for racism against the president, similar to this ridiculous birther movement.
I love your point in the last paragraph. Liberals are liberals, conservatives should be conservatives. You can’t expect the Democrats to do anything the Republicans would like, because it’s not in their nature. What you see is what you get, so I don’t see why so many people are going nuts about health care, taxing insurance companies, or massive economic stimulus packages.
Obama’s a liberal, plain and simple. He has to govern in a consensus style because, well, he’s the President.
Everyone wants their taxes cut but nobody wants their services cut. You actually start cutting stuff people use and depend on, you start pissing a lot of people off. I think when it comes down to it, the electorate will always favor taxing the rich vs cutting taxes and services.
Actual conservatism can’t thrive and actually be an ideology. See you basically have the infighting, the Bush conservatives who want to cut taxes yet keep spending, which only fucks a lot of things up (like not being able to pay for a war one causes!)
Or, you become an actual conservative. And if we had one of those instead of Bush and didnt bail anything out, yikes. I dont want to get into the policy of having the stimulus and TARP but quite frankly, sometimes you need to throw money at the problem because money is what will fix it. It seems rare but sometimes, shit just needs to get paid off, and a true conservative who will cut everything, fuck my life, that’d be the death knell of your party because the only people who will be truly happy with the outcome are the ones at the top and if you want to motivate non-whites too to become Democrats, then cut everything. That in the long run will kill your party further.
I really do kind of think the modern GOP is f’d. The religious right and anti-intellectuals are out in full force and they are just bringing your party down. Who the hell would identify with the “crazies we see on tv”, Im sure which has been utter many a time across America. And Michael Steele…. All I ever see of him are youtube videos and quotes on Dkos, he needs to be fired.
Trigger-happy Obama probably still would’ve beaten cool McCain.
Look at the fundamentals. We have a broad welfare state for people over 65, and seniors love it. SS and Medicare are so beloved, they are the strongest institutions in American politics (financing aside). Republicans know that, but they call a pale shadow of that welfare state for younger people “communism.” The people clearly don’t agree. If a successful health care bill is passed, they would be even less inclined to agree.
The Republicans were able to ride the backlash against integration and crime to a bizarre kind of libertarianism with virtually no natural constituency. But the demographics have radically shifted, and the crime rates have dropped. The GOP will have to accept the welfare state like every other center-right party in the developed world has. The actual constituency for people who don’t want health care reform (and make no mistake, that is in effect the GOP’s policy) is pretty small. Start there. Come up with a serious policy (Wyden-Bennett would be a good example, but I’m unconvinced that Republican support is in good faith), and then get back to us.
I believe it was Lindsey Graham that stated “we can’t be anti-immigrant, anti-women, and anti-young people and be surprised when they vote against us.” Some trends to keep in mind about the GOP:
– John McCain won the exact same percentage of the white vote as Reagan did in 1980, only to a much different result than Reagan.
– After sweeping the suburban vote in 1988, the GOP’s share of this demographic has slowly declined since then. The blueing of the suburbs, which started in the Northeast, has now taken hold in almost every region and is one of the reasons why Obama did so well in states like Virginia and North Carolina. Now that most suburbanites weren’t part of the original “White Flight” of the 1960’s, the law and order issue no longer gets them to vote GOP like it used to for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 (remember Willie Horton?).
– Byron York of the National Review astutely noted that Bush 43 may be the only two-term President in US history to have never won the independent vote. In fact, the GOP hasn’t decisively won the indie vote in a Presidential since the 1988 blowout.
Why do I bring these up? Because it shows that the GOP has had long-standing problems that require a re-calibration. This does not mean they need to completely abandon conservative principles, but they do need updating and need to be re-applied to a modern American demographic. God, guns, and gays won’t cut it anymore. Neither will simply offering tax cuts to everyone for every economic problem. Conservatives need to come up with smart, free-market solutions to pressing issues like the environmment, healthcare, education, transportation and urban sprawl.
There is also immense opportunity with younger voters raised in the Internet Generation, who are sensitive to issues like the national debt and solvency for entitlement programs (most of my friends joke about how Medicare and Social Security won’t exist when we’re old but we’ll still be paying for it). We tend to have much more libertarian sensibilities – hence why so many support gay marriage, immigration naturalization, and legalization of marijuana – that could be easily translated into the economic sphere. But all of this requires serious internal discussion and not simple chest-thumping. Too many GOPers think there’s nothing wrong with their party and that they still have a conservative mandate like they did 30 years ago. They blame the media, or think their candidates aren’t “conservative enough,” or that Democrats don’t play fair when they lose. Such dead-ender mentality will only further keep your party in a rut. Even if the Democrats mess up and you regain a majority, it won’t last.
Yes most of us progressives hated the DLC but the fact is that they helped the Democrats free themselves from the myths that the GOP created about us in the 1970s and 1980s, i.e. that we were “soft on crime”, favored “big government”, that we “cared too much about minorities”, that we didn’t “care about traditional values”, etc.
What the GOP probably needs is to take on their deficiencies and free themselves from their crazy right-wing base. That doesn’t mean they have to stop being pro-life or against affirmative action, but it does mean that they need to stop calling their opponents “baby killers” and “reverse racists”.
is what got them into trouble in the first place. I can’t remember a single Republican presidential candidate since 1988 that was not compared to Reagan numerous times in his election. Reagan’s politics are washed up (not to mention idiotic for the country) and aren’t going to win any more. If the GOP ever reverts back to becoming the party of Eisenhower, on the other hand, I would seriously consider supporting them.
I appreciate your candor and willingness to look inside your party sans the rhetoric. Great job.
The biggest thing the Republicans need is a LEADER. There is no one that has come out of the woodwork to lead the GOP. Palin is a trainwreck. Romney comes off as a person who will say anything to incite the base. I think that this leader needs to come from outside the South. The GOP has been identified as mostly a regional party, with its strongest area being the South and the Great Plains states.
Sums up a lot of what’s wrong with the GOP today