Fast-forward four years. In Mitt Romney, the GOP also felt it had the most electable candidate in the land backed by even bigger mounds of money than backed McCain and the one candidate they thought had the best ideas and ideology for the America of 2012.
Both McCain and Romney were defeated by a man they accused of being a socialist, an apologist for America, a man who may not even have been born in the country, a Muslim, a man who they claim wants bigger government and more people depending on government, a leader who wants more taxes on the rich, bigger government spending, a man who is driving the country to hell in a hand basket and on top of all that is a leader that is soft on terrorism even though Osama Bin Laden was hunted down and killed on his watch.
So what does all of that mean for the Republican Party?
Does it mean, since Barack Obama has now been elected twice, that Americans are telling the Republican Party they just love having as the leader of the free world a Muslim socialist who was not even born in America and who has presided over four years of a rough economy and high unemployment because he is inept, an apologist for America, a man who wants bigger government and more people dependent upon government, a leader who’ll tax the hell out of us and on top of all that a leader that is soft on terrorism?
Is that what they are saying by electing Barack Obama twice?
Or is the message really that the Republican Party, at least as a national party, has become woefully out of touch with mainstream Americans?
OF MUSLIMS, FRIGHT NIGHT LINES AND BOOGEYMEN
Meaning Americans who are no longer buying the tired old fright-night lines about socialists and Muslims and big government lovers any more than they buy lines about the boogeyman coming into their bedrooms at night when the lights are out.
What would happen today if the GOP brought back to use with a Senate or House candidate the old line about “death panels” in health care reform? And exactly where are the death panels today since the Affordable Care Act passed?
Has anyone lost a Grandpa Lou or Grandma Emma to a death panel recently? Does anyone know where the office of the government death panel is located?
Is the GOP of 2012 simply talking to itself, engaging in latherous foamy layers of feel good self-stroking psycho babble targeted to the hard right conservative choir and disconnecting more and more with what the vast majority of Americans are thinking?
Has the party gone overboard to appease the Tea Party crowd and well off older white males?
“Mitt Romney’s loss to a Democratic president wounded by a weak economy is certain to spur an internecine struggle over the future of the Republican Party, but the strength of the party’s conservatives in Congress and the rightward tilt of the next generation of party leaders could limit any course correction,” says a new Op-Ed piece in the New York Times which notes that having now lost the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, “Republicans across the political spectrum anticipate a prolonged and probably divisive period of self-examination.”
OF HIGH PRIESTS AND ANTI GOVERNMENT WARRIORS
The piece predicts the coming internal GOP debate will be centered on whether the party should keep pursuing the “antigovernment focus” that grew out of resistance to the health care law and won them the House in 2010, or whether it should focus on a strategy that recognizes the demographic tide is running strong against the party.
The piece here quotes Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican Party consultant, as suggesting the internal duke fest would pit “mathematicians” like him, who argue that the party cannot keep surrendering the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger voters and college-educated women, against the party purists, or “priests,” as he puts it, who believe that basic conservative principles can ultimately triumph without much deviation.
So far, it appears the high priests are on the losing end of that equation because the GOP continues to depend heavily on “older working-class white voters in rural and suburban America — a shrinking percentage of the overall electorate — while Democrats rack up huge majorities among urban voters including blacks, Hispanics and other minorities.”
