Isn’t it remarkable how the party that defends the right of individual self-defense consistently fails to defend itself? As things stand, Republicans in Washington are being maneuvered into supporting tax hikes that will kill their brand while also threatening the economy and our national defense. They don’t appear to recognize the danger or have any idea how to deal with it.
Isn’t it remarkable how the Democrats, who tend to cede US interests to the whims of “international tests” and the UN, advance their own interests at home with ruthlessness? At the same time, the Republicans tend to favor advancing US interests abroad, but fail to mount anything like a successful offense at home.
Also, while the Republicans had political consultants build a get-out-the-vote machine called ORCA that made its consultants rich but failed to actually get out the vote on November 6, the Democrats exploited government spoils and a tech-savvy private enterprise ally to bring a commercial product to the center of their winning strategy.
To organize millions of emails and messages through its website, the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama utilized cloud based software commonly used by businesses to manage their sales contacts. With turnout for the presidential election expected to be far lower than the historic highs of 2008, Obama for America needed to make sure its core supporters stayed engaged with the campaign.
That technology, from Salesforce.com, tracked the 5.7 million messages– as many as 80,000 per day—received by email, phone and through the campaign’s website. To sort through the messages and get questions routed to the right staffer in the campaign’s sprawling organization, the system automatically created tags from words in the inquiries—like “polling” or “contribution,” said Vivek Kundra, executive vice president for emerging markets at Saleforce.com. Kundra previously served as the first CIO of the federal government, from 2009 to 2011.
Read the rest of that piece. It turns out that Salesforce.com became the DNC’s outsourced sales force.
Republican “leaders,” to use the term very loosely, met with President Barack Obama over the weekend to discuss the fiscal cliff. There has been little reporting of the actual content of the meeting, but it may as well have resembled a typical mafia movie scene in which one side makes offers that the other cannot refuse. The Republicans, thanks largely to the debt ceiling deal they struck with Obama that opened the possibility of automatic cuts to defense and to the president’s wide interpretation of his narrow victory over moderate Mitt Romney in November, are now in the position where they are cast as defenders of tax cuts for the “rich” at the expense of tax cuts for everyone else. The Democrats under Obama decried those same broad-based tax cuts as irresponsible for years, but have done a silent switch to posture themselves for the coming economic crash and rise in unemployment in 2013, and to capture the House in the mid-term elections in 2014.
The Republicans are operating from very defensible positions on the facts. America faces a debt crisis brought on by irresponsible spending. While both parties have been guilty of over spending, the Obama Democrats have taken irresponsibility to an entirely new level. Democrats have not passed a budget at all in more than three years. The budgets that President Obama has submitted have been so ridiculous that they have attracted zero votes even in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Zero.
Republicans are on the same side that the majority of Americans claim to be on, favoring across the board spending cuts (59%, plus another 17% who somewhat favor those spending cuts) while a small minority (29%) favor the sort of tax hikes on the “rich” that President Obama supports. Right now, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, is taking a position on federal control of online gaming that just 34% of Americans support. He is promoting online gaming for the sake of Nevada special interests, at the expense of jobs and liberty outside his state. Surely there’s something for Republicans to work with in these numbers? Surely there’s something in there they can use as a basis to go on offense and force Reid and the Democrats to defend themselves?
It’s striking, really. Republicans in Washington were just returned to power in the US House and have made such inroads at the state level that three blue states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — have all flipped red at the governor and legislature level. Real, conservative reforms are happening in those states, the most recent being Michigan’s passage of a right-to-work law in the state that has been a Big Labor stronghold. We have successful states like Texas to point to as the red state model, and can point to failure in the blue state model in California, Illinois and New York. But the Republicans in Washington are already caving on tax hikes on the “rich” and are on the defensive more broadly.The House Democrats are already softening Republicans up for defeat in key races in 2014, in concert with the apparently permanent creature known as the Obama campaign. Where is the Republicans’ answer? It doesn’t exist.
Obama was not re-elected in a blowout. He barely won, when traditionally incumbents increase their margins over their first victory. The evidence of his 100% showing in certain precincts strongly suggests that his win is tainted. One of the many reasons he did win was that his opponent failed to take the fight to him, define him, and force him to defend the details of his record. This left him free to create distractions and manipulate voters into believing all kinds of stupid things, from Mitt Romney being a felon and murderer to Republicans being a threat to access to birth control pills.
Rather than learn from this failure to mount a convincing defense and go on offense, Washington Republicans appear determined to repeat it.
Frankly, I’m disgusted with our “leaders.” Never mind getting them to play hardball, at this point they just need to get in the game. How about taking a swing at a tee ball, huh? Is it too much to ask that the party of self-defense and free enterprise defend itself and engage in a little free enterprise as it goes on offense?
Republicans “leaders,” for the sake of the republic and our future: It’s time to on offense, or go home.
All the Rs in Washington care about are getting that elusive Mainstream Media Praise.
All they want is one little nice word about them in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Every if they have to sell us all out to get it.
And then they’re STILL never get it.
Suckers.
Please excuse the typo-mania in my previous post.
I guess it all depends on what brand means? If by brand you mean the Fortune 500′s material interests, I suspect there has been no body changers. If you’re referring to those old fashion, cloth coat, main street, small business republicans, including Reagan democrats, then that’s a different set of bodies. For the Fortune 500 Obamacare is great, since the costs are going to get passed along to main street. Sometimes I think the republican elite purposely threw the election; it’s rather difficult to discern the difference between that intent (going through the motions) and incompetence, and that intrinsic conservative liability of living by the rule of law on main street while for the opposition rules of law are just living organisms with date stamps ruled by lawyers.
Bob Corker is such a cowardly hack.
DrewM. over at AceofspadesHQ is already over it. It’s no longer about the GOP, RIP. Get on board the “Let It Burn” bandwagon, become a LIB today!
Maybe Jim DeMint joining Heritage is an early sign of an insurgent takeover of the Republican Party. What Goldwater started, Reagan finished and it was not a pretty process. Reagan gave up too easily on his domestic, small government agenda, in order to win the war on Soviet communism. Kudos to him, and thank God for us.
The fact of the matter is quite simply that for the Republican leaders in Congress and many at the State level – politics is their business: hard to reconcile given the supposed small government, free market principals espoused by the GOP. Of course, the Republicans can never out do the Democrats – where politics is their livelihood.
I once had the chance to ask Speaker Boehner some interview questions. His answers were enlightening and depressing. I asked the former Speaker (and soon – Speaker to be) what he hoped his legacy might be when historians looked back and evaluated his leadership. His answer, “I hope people will look at me and say that I was a reasonable man.” Seriously! Arguably the second most politically important person in our democracy, definitely the most important elected Republican in Washington and this is his ambition?!
Let’s start a campaign referring to Speaker Boehner as Neville Chamberlin. It will drive the Left mad.
I work in the private sector, start-ups, hard money and hard decisions. This sort of ambition will not get you far, probably will not get you the job and when the chips are down certainly would not allow you to keep your job.
Oh well. You get what you pay for as Mr. Preston points out.
GOP, RIP
good riddance
bring on the Tea Party
I’m studying my rear off for a final right now. Two of them, in fact, tomorrow. I don’t overly enjoy the material, but it’s stuff that as to be learned. I have had basically three days off this semester. The rest of the time has been working my tail off, at an age where I’d rather be doing something else.
I’m also basically making no money right now, and it may be years before I finally enjoy the “good life”. This doesn’t even count the risk factor involved. But I keep doing it, because the world of to tomorrow has to be built, and I’m the guy who can do it, and it doesn’t appear to be building itself. So I sacrifice.
If luck goes my way, I’ll make some coin in years to come. IF luck comes my way, that is. And if that luck happens, as I think of all the years–a decade and more, really–of sacrifice, including leaving my childhood dream job, that it will have taken to become “successful” (whatever that may end being)–well, I look forward to Barack Obama-types telling me that in return for helping build a world we all can profit from and find enjoyment in, I must now contribute more than others to somehow show I should not be run out of town on a rail, since obviously, “I didn’t build it”, and am a leech.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama can jet up to New York to take his wife to a Broadway play, at public expense. And let’s not even talk about her vacations.
Nuts to all that. I’m for getting the deficit under control. I am not for higher taxes as a general principle. “Fifty-four forty or fight.”
In fact, in the spirit of compromise–and because certain kinds of maths are going through my head right now–here is my offering for a compromise.
The GOP passes the middle-class cuts. No expration date.
The GOP passes the 39.6 rate desired by the President–*but*, they have a four year expiration date, and the full percentage raise is only if the number of dollars in cuts per dollar in increased revenue candidate Obama campaigned on is enacted. For every dollar less in cuts, a proportional decrease in rate for that year, down to zero. If he campaigned on 4:1 curs to raised taxes, and cuts nothing, no increase. If a budget is signed with cuts 2:1, a 2.3% increase for that year.
If the percentage in dollars cut/dollars revenue raised is above that which candidate Obama campaigned on, then the higher tax deal will be extended for a proportional period of time. Example–if the campaign rate was four dollars cut per dollar taxes raised, and actually, for the next four years, it ends up five dollars are cut for the same one dollar taxes raised, the deal is extended, automatically, for another year. If eight dollars end up being cut, then the deal goes on four eight years. And so on.
This is a real compromise, and is real leadership. Barack Obama seriously kids himself if he thinks this can’t be campaigned on, because it can.
Neither the cuts nor raised taxes are going to fix anything, but since President Obama is into symbolism games on the issue, I figure our side should be too.
– as Decline to State, blend into the populace, brace to strike in 2014.
In other words, the Republicans in Washington are utterly, gobsmackingly incompetent.
Sad, but not exactly news.
I’m pretty sure the point of this post is that BOTH parties are utterly, gobsmackingly incompetent. I don’t agree on the “utterly, gobsmackingly” part, they’ve each managed to hold their ground long enough, but I still agree mostly.
On an unrelated note, why is it that the article writer judged Obama’s victory by the popular vote when he knows that’s not even what counts. Obama won by a landslide.