A GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY COMPETITORS--RIGHT OR (WRONG), MODERATE OR (WHAT?)
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HERE ARE A FEW LEADING THINKERS TAKE ON WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT "NEXT?"
I am posting these since each of them contains parts of the right direction for "next" means. Political campaigns are, at their core, marketing campaigns. The candidate and his/her party are "the products and the brands". The problems arise when the candidates (campaigns) are not good marketers first…and then good sales people next. The primary job of marketing is to "have what will sell." Romney had only half a bag of that. He was missing the part of his marketing package that addressed all of the softer issues--and Obama's ads painted him into a corner on nearly every one of them.
Then there was the "sales." Romney's earnest approach was good, but not great. His approach in the first debate was much better. He looked like the guy who knew the answers and cared about them--but it was in the part of the campaign where he was strongest--economic policy. When the other two debates saw the return of as alert and aggressive Barack Obama, Romney was far too reserve, perhaps too polite and overall, under-prepared from a marketing standpoint. His balance was out of balance. He played to win on the economy and ignored those sticky touch feely issues where he was set up by voracious attacks of his own party members during the primaries. They provided all the video footage the Obama campaign needed for ads (in Romney's hard tack to the right to win the nomination). Mind you, there was no better candidate, but the lack of pragmatic and sensitive leadership in the strategy and tactics of the GOP sent Romney out to make the sale with half of the marketing plan missing. Then Obama's attack ads filled in the missing parts as negatively as possible.
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SO THE ANSWER TO "WHAT NOW, AND WHAT "NEXT," IS THE SAME AS AFTER A LOSS IN ANY ARENA, BUSINESS, SPORTS OR POLITICS: REGROUP, REFLECT ON THE REASONS FOR THE LOSS (Truly reflect, not in some denial filled delusion, like the Dick Morris's of the world did.) and REVITALIZE (based on what was learned).
Make no mistake. Barack Obama is a tough campaigner and as an incumbent president with millions in support and the vast majority support of the mainstream media--anyone, with any kind of marketing and sales, would have struggled to beat him. But Romney came close--which is reason to hope that, as the pundits below cite, that some "course correction" and some "policy adjustment," combined with some good old "figure out who the voters are and TALK TO THEM IN TERMS THEY WANT TO HEAR!"
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READ THESE, THINK ABOUT THEM. FIND YOUR MORAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL COMPASSES.
Then figure out which people either currently holding office or potentially willing to run, and meet with them. Talk to them. They are, after all, just citizens like you. Help them shape their positions so you can support them, and also that many of the voters who narrowly decided to vote Obama instead of Romney, would support them to. Encourage them to talk to voters in plain, down home language and terms. Keep the "speech writers" at bay and talk to the constituents.
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SIDEBAR: RUNNING FOR OFFICE IS TERRIBLY HARD, DEMANDING, DRAINING AND A BIG SACRIFICE--WE MUST FIND STRONG, SAVVY CANDIDATES…
That's why some of the best people won't do it. At other times, the party leaders grab a young, brave fellow like Josh Mandel here in OH, take him out of a State Treasurer job he's just getting the hang of, and pit him against a tough, old liberal politician like Sherrod Brown. First of all, Josh is a former Marine, in his mid-30's but he looks like he's just out of college. He campaigned hard, but he was hindered by a lack of age, experience, "Gravitas" (I know, I hate that word, but that's the right word), and just didn't have the record and savvy to beat Brown, no matter how hard he ran. We must stop supporting candidates who aren't ready for prime time, or those who are "loose cannons" like Akins and Mourdoch…putting their foot in their mouth on one of the most sensitive issues of all--rape! STUPID!
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I PASTED EXCERPTS BELOW—I ENCOURAGE YOU TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLES (links are below the excerpts):
[ED. NOTE: I ADDED THE BOLD EMPHASIS TO THE PIECES]
--GEORGE WILL: (Excerpts)
… America’s
57th presidential election revealed that a second important national institution is on an unsustainable trajectory. The first, the entitlement state, is endangered by improvident promises to an aging population. It has been joined by the political party, whose crucial current function is to stress the need to reform this state. And now the Republican Party, like today’s transfer-payment state, is endangered by tardiness in recognizing demography is destiny. …
… As it has every four years since 1992,
the white portion of the turnout declined in 2012. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first person
elected president while losing the white vote by double digits. In 2012 — the year after the first year in which a majority of babies born in America were
minorities — Hispanics were for the first time a double-digit (10 percent) portion of the turnout. Republicans have four years to figure out how to leaven their contracting base with millions more members of America’s largest and fastest-growing minority.
… A nation vocally disgusted with the status quo has reinforced it by ratifying existing control of the executive branch and both halves of the legislative branch. After three consecutive “wave” elections in which a party gained at least 20 House seats, and at a moment when approval of Congress has risen — yes, risen — to
21 percent, voters ratified Republican control of the House, keeping in place those excoriated as obstructionists by the president the voters retained. Come January, Washington will be much as it has been, only more so
…. Republicans can take some solace from the popular vote. But unless they respond to accelerating demographic changes — and Obama, by pressing immigration reform, can give Republicans a reef on which they can wreck themselves — the 58th presidential election may be like the 57th, only more so. This election was fought over two issues as old as the Republic, the proper scope and actual competence of government. The president persuaded — here the popular vote is the decisive datum — almost exactly half the voters. The argument continues.
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--CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: (most of his column)
They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority.The only part of this that is even partially true regards Hispanics. They should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example). The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back.
For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty. Use the word. Shock and awe — full legal normalization (just short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement. I’ve always been of the “enforcement first” school, with the subsequent promise of legalization. I still think it’s the better policy. But many Hispanics fear that there will be nothing beyond enforcement. So, promise amnesty right up front. Secure the border with guaranteed legalization to follow on the day the four border-state governors affirm that illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle.
…Imagine Marco Rubio advancing such a policy on the road to 2016. It would transform the landscape. He’d win the Hispanic vote. Yes, win it. A problem fixable with a single policy initiative is not structural. It is solvable. The other part of the current lament is that the Republican Party consistently trails among blacks, young people and (unmarried) women. (Republicans are plus-7 among married women.) But this is not for reasons of culture, identity or even affinity. It is because these constituencies tend to be more politically liberal — and Republicans are the conservative party.
…. the party has an extraordinarily strong bench. In Congress — Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Kelly Ayotte, (the incoming) Ted Cruz and others. And the governors — Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, plus former governor Jeb Bush and the soon-retiring Mitch Daniels. (Chris Christie is currently in rehab.) They were all either a little too young or just not personally prepared to run in 2012. No longer. There may not be a Reagan among them, but this generation of rising leaders is philosophically rooted and politically fluent in the new constitutional conservatism.
Romney is a good man who made the best argument he could, and nearly won. He would have made a superb chief executive, but he (like the Clinton machine) could not match Barack Obama in the darker arts of public persuasion. The answer to Romney’s failure is not retreat, not aping the Democrats’ patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism. Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that.
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--MICHAEL GERSON
The 2012 election was a substantial victory not only for President Obama but also for liberalism. Obama built his campaign on abortion rights and higher taxes for the wealthy. He was rewarded by an electorate that was younger, more pro-choice and more racially diverse than in 2008. The Obama coalition is not a fluke; it is a force. Some conservatives have reacted in the tradition of Cicero: “Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”
Rush Limbaugh concluded, “We’ve lost the country,” which he described as a “country of children.” “There is no hope,”
Ann Coulter said. And
Bill O’Reilly: “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”
As a matter of strategy, it is generally not a good idea to express disdain for an electorate one hopes to eventually influence. In this case, despair is also an overreaction. Conservatives have not witnessed the sacking of Rome. They have seen the disappointment of their expectation that the 2010 Republican wave election was an inexorable trend. They have seen politically unfavorable demographic changes — which everyone knew were coming sooner or later — come sooner. They have seen younger voters grow more libertarian on some social issues.
….This is the conservative task over the next few years: not to preserve a rigid ideology but to reconstruct a political appeal along improved but principled lines.
…Some of the most important intellectual groundwork is needed on the role of government. Mitt Romney had a five-part plan to encourage job creation. He lacked a public philosophy that explained government’s valid role in meeting human needs. Suburban women heard little about improved public education. Single women, particularly single mothers, heard little about their struggles, apart from an off-putting Republican critique of food stamps. Blue-collar workers in, say, Ohio heard little about the unique challenges that face declining industrial communities. Latinos heard little from Republicans about promoting equal opportunity and economic mobility.
….Conservatives also face challenges on issues of national identity. The right will always stand for nationalism and patriotism. But during the Republican primaries, those commitments were expressed as the exclusion of outsiders — in self-deportation and the building of walls. The tone was nasty and small. Apart from moral objections, this approach is no longer politically sustainable. Romney won the largest percentage of white voters of any Republican since 1988. He carried both independents and senior citizens. Yet that wasn’t nearly enough. Republicans won’t win future elections with 27 percent support from Latinos, Romney’s dismal achievement. And Republicans won’t increase that support if they favor self-deportation.
The alternative is a vision of American identity preserved by the assimilating power of American ideals. And that would lead Republicans to endorse the Dream Act and to support a rigorous path to citizenship for undocumented workers already in the country.
Republican adjustments to cultural trends, particularly among millennials, will be difficult — although candidates could start by being unambiguous in their condemnations of rape. In fact, the tone taken by most Republicans on cultural issues has shifted considerably over the past several years. The pro-life movement has become more realistic and incremental. Republican opposition to gay marriage is increasingly falling back to the defense of institutional religious freedom. With nearly 50 percent of Romney’s support coming from religious conservatives, there is no rational strategy that employs them as a political foil. But it is more advisable than ever to make public arguments about morality in aspirational rather than judgmental ways.
The Romney campaign was a vast machine with one moving part, its economic critique. The next Republican campaign will need to be capable of complex adjustments of ideology, policy and rhetoric. And it will need one more thing: a candidate with a genuine, creative passion for inclusion.
—REGROUP, REFLECT and REVITALIZE--THERE ARE SOME BIG CAMPAIGNS COMING JUST TWO SHORT YEARS AWAY.
SO WHAT'S NEXT? GET OVER THE LOSS--IT'S DONE. PLAN AND WORK FOR THE FUTURE!
HERE'S THE BEST PIECE I HAVE SEEN ON HOW TO DO THAT.
—LET'S THINK ABOUT HOW TO PUT AMERICA AND AMERICANS FIRST AND PARTISAN POLITICS SECOND…(OR LAST).
Stay tuned for much more…. On
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-----New Book: COMING SOON: ROADMAP TO PROFITABLE GROWTH…
Author of the
Award Winner: THE COMPLEXITY CRISIS, the exciting novel:
THE CHINESE CONSPIRACY, and co-author of HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY: Leadership Lessons from the Obama Presidency
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